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If you come up with a new product, you can very easily track its contribution to the bottom line. But often the challenge can be both large and subtle.

John Kao

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John Kao
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Author
Writer
Lines
Easily
Often
Track
Come
Challenge
Bottom
Large
Products
Contribution
Line
Subtle
Challenges
Product

More quotes by John Kao

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People must get respect for their new ideas.
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The larger the price tag, the more you have to adopt what I call the postmodern management approach. What I mean by that is that you have to use everything when you make a decision.
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Creativity is not like the weather: You can do something about it. And you can measure it well enough to determine its effect on sales and profits.
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Obviously businesses do not operate like an artists' commune. Business involves deploying finite resources to achieve goals in a competitive environment to make money. That is something creative people understand.
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Companies have to take risks to get new knowledge, in a manner similar to how jazz musicians take risks when they go after a new approach to a tune or a performance.
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Jamming - which follows rules but not individual notes - gives you a different result each time, depending upon the players and the conditions in which they find themselves. It is adaptable to changing conditions.
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Organizations are about putting ideas through one or more types of gating procedures. In this way, ideas go from being a whim to becoming a project, from being a skunk works effort to becoming an official, mainstream effort, from being an unfounded program to a funded process, and so on.
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Communication is the essential medium of a creative culture: the communal sea in which we all swim. A company that can't communicate is like a jazz band without instruments: Music just isn't going to happen.
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You need judgment, you need to utilize conventional resource-allocation analysis, you have to work backward from estimations of the market to the current investments and you have to do some benchmarking of your product and its potential against your competition.
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The head of a record label sets up structures, but he also defines the sound of the label, which is to describe what is desirable, what fits and what is quality for that label and then to create an environment where that sound can thrive.
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The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.
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Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.
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The capacity to creatively improvise is an important factor that differentiates successful companies - or teams - from those that are not successful.
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The conventional asset-allocation method is like sheet music. It is prescribed, it has right answers and wrong answers and it sounds about the same every time. But jamming is different. Jamming is when you make the music. When you improvise and adapt to conditions. When you are creative.
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The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time.
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Managing the creative process means selecting the best people and then letting them do their work. That means nurturing. It also means, from time to time, creating drama - even uncertainty - so that the creative environment has an edge to it, a charge, and does not run out of steam.
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All of these creative ideas and decisions about new ways to reach the consumer can be tracked with regard to how well they are working, whether and how they are building awareness for the product, how well they motivate the consumption of the product, and so on.
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A pioneering and invaluable work about what it really takes to build innovation capability in society.
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In the end it is the musician who actually plays the notes. The impresario - or the project leader - is only there to make sure that happens. That is a very different type of management mind-set.
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The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities.
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