Amazon.com What value does your company put on creativity? It's not just media and high-tech companies that have to invest in the creative minds of their employees: every organization must make creativity a top priority in order to last beyond the next reporting period. In Jamming， John Kao shows how high-performance companies have learned the lessons of creativity to leap ahead of obsolete competitors. They have learned to make creativity tangible and actionable， they practice a new managerial mindset， and they have learned to leverage information technology to enhance creative collaboration. From clearing the obstacles to organizational creativity to conducting a "creativity audit" that assesses the current value of your company's creativity， Jamming shows business leaders， managers， and entrepreneurs how to take their companies to an entirely new level of success and growth by fostering an environment that will anticipate tomorrow's needs. From Publishers Weekly It took a Chinese American student listening to jazz and jamming with a group of African Americans at a private boarding school to internalize the polar tensions between musical score and improvisation and come up with a formula for creativity. Kao， now a professor at Harvard Business School， has been using the jamming metaphor to teach creative entrepreneurship for 14 years. In business， the score is not a musical theme but an idea， process or question that takes on new dimensions when bandied about by a group. This business version of jamming， Kao says， is the creative advantage that can give a company a competitive edge. Kao tells how to audit and manage creativity and describes techniques for clearing the mind to render it receptive to the improvisational flow. Never was the need or the opportunity so great， he claims， as now amid the deluge of information descending from cyberspace. Chapters end with a list of "riffs，" or pithy tips for business leaders. Kao offers succinct advice cleverly packaged. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information， Inc. See all Editorial Reviews