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 More Quotes by John Kao More Quotes From John Kao The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities. John Kao accountability creating responsibility 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 effort running jobs 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 musician risk tunes In a large pharmaceutical company, where it's a big bet, you're going to need finance people to be involved in the decision-making because the investment can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. You're going to have to run scenarios. You might even need agreement from the C.E.O. to make that type of decision. If it's an incremental, low-cost decision in a marketing-oriented company, it may be a very different set of stakeholders a lot further down in the organization. John Kao organization agreement running 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 price-tag decision mean 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 competition analysis needs 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 different creative sound 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 running drama mean Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting. John Kao command-and-control creative process The creative process is different from the traditional production and work-flow process. It is not so linear. John Kao different flow creative If you are at Coca-Cola, the creative challenge is one of maintaining - rather than creating - a tremendous level of consumption for your products. John Kao creating creative challenges 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 track lines challenges Conducting a creativity audit can be very illuminating because it can tell you how the process is working internally and against the competition. John Kao competition creativity process 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 effort organization ideas There are some pretty obvious ways of benchmarking creativity. One way is to perform what I call a creativity audit, which is to look at your capabilities and look at your performance and examine the percentage of revenue that comes from products that are less than five years old, less than three years old and that are current with the present accounting period. You can then compare those figures to those of your competition along the same axes. John Kao axes creativity years Every day, there are 770 million Cokes consumed, which means that there are 770 million purchasing decisions made each day regarding the product. To support those decisions, the company must constantly reinvest in its marketing links to its customers. As a result, a high level of creativity must go into everything the company does, from cause-related campaigns - Coca-Cola and its sponsorship of the Olympic Village in Atlanta, for example - to new catch phrases, commercials, marketing slogans, advertising campaigns and promotional tie-ins. John Kao creativity atlanta mean Jazz has to work. It has to play with the audience and with the marketplace. I think that is relevant to business. John Kao jazz play thinking Tunes have notes and tempos and rules. If the tune is "All the Things You Are," you have to adhere to its structure and to the tradition behind that structure. John Kao notes tradition tunes Now jamming - which is about collaborative improvisation - has to do with getting people together to be creative musically. But it is a very powerful metaphor for understanding the grammar of the creative process. It applies to business and to other pursuits as well. John Kao powerful creative people 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 creative decision ideas
