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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.

John Kao

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John Kao
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
Author
Writer
People
Goal
Businesses
Understand
Goals
Deploying
Business
Obviously
Commune
Artist
Artists
Communes
Money
Resources
Operate
Something
Achieve
Finite
Make
Environment
Involves
Like
Creative
Competitive

More quotes by John Kao

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The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.
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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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The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.
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The C.E.O.'s job in a creativity-driven company is to be an impresario, not a manager.
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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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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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The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time.
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Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting.
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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.
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The impresario functions as a bridge and a translator. He or she is a bridge between the creative point of view - which is often very focused on the creative task itself - and the resource-allocation process. The impresario has to make certain the funds and people required to get that task completed are available.
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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 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 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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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.
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Coca-Cola can get really fresh output because it is getting people who are outside the traditional model and they are combining ideas in very novel ways.
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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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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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Jazz musicians can be great teachers of business. Their creativity is not dependent on their mood, it does not have to be coaxed out of them, it has nothing to do with the phases of the moon or even how they feel that day. They go on stage and start playing. Being creative is their job.
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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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People must get respect for their new ideas.
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