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The manager's job - the impresario's job - is to preside over the company's efforts to jam so the business runs really well.
John Kao
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John Kao
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: January 1
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Impresario
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Preside
Business
Jam
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More quotes by John Kao
The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.
John Kao
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.
John Kao
The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear.
John Kao
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
The capacity to creatively improvise is an important factor that differentiates successful companies - or teams - from those that are not successful.
John Kao
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
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.
John Kao
The C.E.O.'s job in a creativity-driven company is to be an impresario, not a manager.
John Kao
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
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
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
The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities.
John Kao
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
People must get respect for their new ideas.
John Kao
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
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.
John Kao
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
Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.
John Kao
The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time.
John Kao
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
