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The C.E.O.'s job in a creativity-driven company is to be an impresario, not a manager.

John Kao

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John Kao
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Author
Writer
Driven
Creativity
Company
Jobs
Impresario
Manager
Managers

More quotes by John Kao

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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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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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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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A pioneering and invaluable work about what it really takes to build innovation capability in society.
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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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People must get respect for their new ideas.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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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.
John Kao
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The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.
John Kao
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The impresario's job is to pick the right people who can pick the right people. He picks the people who can pick artists and relate to them. People who know what the market craves.
John Kao
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The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities.
John Kao
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You are able to create an environment so that the creative process can take place and that you can get people to perform at their highest levels.
John Kao