John Kao famous 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.
-- John Kao

#Communication #Sea #Creative

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

#Creativity #Variables #Process

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.
-- John Kao

#Creativity #Weather #Enough

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

#Creativity #Thinking #Breathing

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

#Innovation #Capability

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.
-- John Kao

#Organization #Ideas #Effort

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

#People #Creative #Levels

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

#Police #Quality #Able

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.
-- John Kao

#Creativity #Understanding #Levels

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.
-- John Kao

#People #Creative #Challenges

People must get respect for their new ideas.
-- John Kao

#Ideas #People #New Ideas

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.
-- John Kao

#Skills #Want #Firsts

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

#Team #Successful #Important

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

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.
-- John Kao

#Kids #Accountability #Challenges

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

#Player #Giving #Different

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

#Imagination #Use #Muscles

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

#Organization #Ideas #Effort

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.
-- John Kao

#Views #Bridges #People

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.
-- John Kao

#Skills #Tunes #Example

Instead of command and control, managing the creative process is about facilitating and permitting.
-- John Kao

#Command And Control #Creative #Process

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

#Teacher #Jobs #Creativity

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.
-- John Kao

#Creativity #Skills #Organization

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 #Needs #Analysis

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

#Running #Organization #Agreement

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.
-- John Kao

#Creativity #Mean #Skills