John Kao Quotes

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.

Jazz is not about getting and playing whatever notes you want. It is about reworking themes in a manner that sounds good, that can be followed by the other musicians and that the audience enjoys. You cannot do that without first acquiring skills.

There's real "right brain" creativity that goes into all of the organizational processes that a company utilizes and must continually reinvent in order to conduct its business. But there are also the "left brain" accounting functions that must continually ask how the company is doing financially and whether the creative processes are working for the bottom line.

Creativity is the crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value

Creativity, my students learn, is as natural a function of the mind as breathing or digestion are natural functions of the body.

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.

You would not let your kids do whatever they want. So the challenge is to create accountability in a non-mechanistic way. You cannot come in with a clipboard and check off boxes and figure out why something has not been done on schedule.

I would argue that the management of creativity requires a skill set that's relatively different from the traditional management skill set that is appropriate to a large, complex, industrial-era organization.

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.

Improvisation in the jazz sense - like the business sense - is not formless. It is built on a skill set. Jazz, for example, involves selecting a tune.

The challenge is to manage creative people so that the output is fruitful. The challenge is not to have an open environment and simply let them do whatever they want.

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.

An organization is really a factory for producing new ideas and for linking those ideas with resources - human resources, financial resources, knowledge resources, infrastructure resources - in an effort to create value. These are processes that you can map, with results that you can measure.

The mark of the developed intellect is that it could accommodate two contradictory ideas at the same time.

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.

A pioneering and invaluable work about what it really takes to build innovation capability in society.

In a corporate context, companies have to try very hard to oppose the enticements of conventional wisdom. They must aim for the leaps, which means that companies have to do more than simply manage their knowledge, which is composed of the insights and understandings they already know. They also have to manage the knowledge-generation process. It's not just about, "Oh, we're going to create a data warehouse and we are going to invent a computerized filing system to get at all the stuff we know."

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.

You are able to monitor and police your standards of quality once you have defined them.

It takes creativity at every stage to make the discontinuous leap from one level of knowledge to the next. These discontinuous leaps of understanding lead to insights that in turn lead to value creation.

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.

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.

If you are at Coca-Cola, the creative challenge is one of maintaining - rather than creating - a tremendous level of consumption for your products.

The capacity to creatively improvise is an important factor that differentiates successful companies - or teams - from those that are not successful.

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.

The imagination is like a muscle: it strengthens through use.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Performers may play in the studio, but they need to go out and tour every once in a while to keep their edge, or a performer who is a stranger may be asked to "sit in" on a set.

Rather than managing by clarifying events, the creative process may require raising the level of uncertainty. Sometimes this can be done by issuing a creative challenge that has resonance in that it inspires the team to activity.

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

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.

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.

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.

When you come into a creativity-driven environment, things are very different and there is the danger that a traditional managerial mind-set could even do damage. That is because managing creative teams and people is very different from managing the factory worker/foreman relationship.

The management of creativity is more intimate. By that I mean that it deals with an individual's personal, psychological landscape. It deals with the way you create relationships. It deals with creating an atmosphere and environment that support the creative process. As a result, it is a management skill set that is inherently psychological and that encourages desired outcomes rather than demands those outcomes.

A large part of the impresario's job has to do with maintaining and communicating standards of performance. Knowing how to set those standards - which are often more subjective than analytical - means knowing how to communicate the difference between something that is great and something that is just O.K.

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.

Ultimately, the impresario must know when to simply get out of the way.

The traditional managerial mind-set is an analytical mind-set. It is about creating accountability and defining responsibilities.

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.

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.

Conducting a creativity audit can be very illuminating because it can tell you how the process is working internally and against the competition.

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.

Jazz has to work. It has to play with the audience and with the marketplace. I think that is relevant to business.

People must get respect for their new ideas.

The traditional model for a company like Coca-Cola is to hire one big advertising agency and essentially outsource all of its creativity in that area. But Coca-Cola does not do it that way. It knows how to manage creative people and creative teams and it has been quite adept at building a network that includes the Creative Artists Agency in Hollywood, which is a talent agency.