Jamming - Tapa dura

No corporate asset today is at once so prized, and yet so poorly managed as the imagination and creativity of a company's people, But, at a time when companies have restructured themselves and improved quality, in the new competitive arena, the company that manages creativity most effectively performs best in the market. Ideas are the DNA of everything worthwhile, and companies everywhere are waking up to the power of creativity. This book explains how to engage the minds, stimulate the imagination and ensure the loyalty of people who design, build and deliver products and services. With specific examples, he shows how organizations fail by not making use of creative resources whilst other companies gain enormous advantage, transforming imagination into hard profit and a competitive position.

No corporate asset is at once so prized and yet so poorly managed as the imagination and creativity of a company's people. In today's competitive environment companies who understand how to manage creativity, how to organise for creative results and who willingly implement new ideas will triumph.

John Kao, who teaches creativity at the Harvard Business School, offers an approach that demystifies a topic traditionally confounding to business people everywhere. Drawing an analogy, Kao illustrates that creativity, like the musical discipline of jazz, has a vocabulary and a grammar. He explains how creativity needs a particular environment in which to blossom and grow. Like musicians in a jam session, a group of business people can take an idea, challenge one another's imagination, and produce an entirely new set of possibilities.

Jamming reveals how managers can stimulate creativity in their employees, free them of constraints and preconceptions, and guide them instead to a chosen goal where imagination is transformed into competitive supremacy. Using specific examples from a wide range of companies – including Coca-Cola, DreamWorks SKG and Sony – Jamming is a fascinating study of the shape and relevance of this most valued commodity in the workplace of the future.

‘If Orson Wells and Peter Drucker were somehow to mate, the resulting progeny might be like Mr Kao... An impassioned plea for a managerial revolution, to make creativity every company's main focus. The only way to make companies thrive is to generate creative ideas; and the only way to generate these ideas is to attract creative people and then to give them the right environment to work in.’
ECONOMIST