Customer Service For Dummies

If you're hoping to enhance your creativity as an entrepreneur, you might want to listen to a stack of John Coltrane records. Follow that up with an earful of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Once you get into the groove, you'll be all the more prepared to delve into Jamming: The Art andDiscipline of Business Creativity (HarperBusiness, $23 cloth).

Author John Kao cleverly likens the creativity in jazz music to the creativity in business. Think it's a stretch? Not really, considering that both encourage freedom within a set of established guidelines. "Like jazz, creativity has its vocabulary and conventions," writes Kao, himself a jazz pianist. "As in jazz, too, its paradoxes create tensions. It demands free expressiveness and disciplined self-control, solitude in a crowded room, acceptance and defiance, serendipity and direction."

The title of Kao's book springs, of course, from that magical moment in music whereby inspiration gives way to innovation. You can jam in business, too-what else are brainstorming sessions for?-which makes Kao's metaphor such a good one.

This article was originally published in the July 1996 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Customer Service For Dummies.