 Hi, my name is Chris Washburn, and I'm here speaking about the art of improvisation. How jazz can be relevant in a variety of different fields outside of music. The center of jazz is improvisation. Every time we play, something new has to come about. In fact, jazz musicians never use the word innovation. We don't even use the word creativity, and that's really indicative of something. In the sense that it's about discovery, it's about discovering something new every time we play. When you go see a jazz group perform, everybody gets a solo. Everybody can be a leader, and there's a fluid leadership that happens. I'm a professor at Columbia University. We teach jazz to every single undergraduate that comes through the programs. And the reason we do that is that we feel that jazz actually resonates in a lot of different areas of business, of politics, economics, medicine. And what we want to teach our students is how jazz musicians actually structure their improvisations, how they create and innovate so often and so frequently, and how that might resonate in different boardrooms across the country and in different organizational structures. So the idea is using jazz as a model for alternative organizational structures, flattened structures, where everyone is given a voice, everyone contributes, and as such, they are able to have their voices represented. Let's face it, everybody improvises. If you didn't improvise, you'd be dead. We're adaptable creatures. So the idea is that you take these fundamental survival skills, but then make it into an art form. And that is why jazz is the perfect model for how to innovate in large and small corporations, how to construct teams that collaborate in a way that work together to bring out about something that's new. If you take those concepts into the boardroom and instead of meeting at a rectangular table, you meet at a round table. That's the spirit of jazz, where everyone around that table is given equal voice and equal input. And from that, we can really create something new.