In the end it is the musician who actually plays the notes. The impresario - or the project leader - is only there to make sure that happens. That is a very different type of management mind-set.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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 best don’t stick around when you treat them poorly, only the desperate do.

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

...impregnation will be regarded in an entirely different manner, more in the light of a surgical operation, so that it will be thought not ladylike to have it performed in the natural manner.

I don't ever have time for friends or anything like that.

I get my exercise acting as pallbearer to my friends who exercise.

If we can hump dead animals and antelopes, there's no reason that a man and another man can't elope.

Physics isn't a religion. If it were, we'd have a much easier time raising money.

There is no greater punishment than that of being abandoned to one's self.

French laicite is probably aggressive and antagonistic to the religion, but there are other models of secularism in the world where there could be reconciliation between religion and secularism.

There is no future without education.