My remarks today are addressed to the thought leaders in service firms - that is those organizations who make profits from the provision of professional services rather than the manufacture of goods.

I'd include in this category advertising firms (the basis of my commercial experience) law firms, accountancy firms, insurance companies, financial institutions - indeed, any professional practice firm.

By definition, service firms need to recruit and retain the best and brightest if they are to maintain a strategic edge in a highly competitive market - but increasingly, among Generation Y at least, the best and brightest are declining to be either recruited or retained.

Generation X are determined to be better parents than their predecessors, and are unwilling to sacrifice family time on an indefinite basis for the siren lure of partnership or promotion. 

Among women, recruitment is less of a problem, but retention is a major issue.  And despite the Prime Minister's exhortations, older workers are conspicuous by their absence in either recruitment or retention.

And too often, the employee engagement surveys of those we have managed to recruit and retain make pretty dismal reading.

What to do?  Here's my list of 10 issues that are worth interrogating so that you can be confident that your rhetoric is credible, and aligned with your culture.

Leadership and Ambiguity might strike you as on odd theme for a coaching conference. Popular notions of leadership emphasise decisiveness, boldness, a willingness to act - ambiguity sounds such a wussy word, doesn't it - lacking clarity, definition - it's scarcely an aspirational word.

And yet, the coaches in this room have many decades of business leadership behind us (and ahead of us, too, I hope), so we know that managing, sometimes even creating, ambiguity is an important leadership tool.

I’ve been reflecting for some time now on what it means to deliver this address to you today, and in doing so to honour Jessie Street, and the National Women’s Library that bears her name.

And for me, the significance lies in the opportunity to reflect on the shared experiences of the women in my immediate family, and to value the contribution of the wider family of women who have been my friends and familiars for the last 30 years. I’m conscious there are many young women here today, and it was in thinking about them that I arrived at the title of this address “If at first…”.

With another hat on, I’m the Chair of the Sydney Writer’s Festival, and in 2002 our star overseas writer was the Canadian, John Ralston Saul.

A recent book by John is called “On Equilibrium”, and in it he hypotheses that because in recent times we have elevated reason as the pre-imminent human characteristic, we have lost our equilibrium – and that if we were to value all our human characteristics equally – intuition, creativity, imagination, memory, ethics, and common-sense then we might regain our balance, and operate more effectively as individuals, as citizens, and in corporations and governments.

Tonight I want to throw out a number of leadership challenges for us to toss around at the end of this presentation. All of them could be described as “soft” issues, but all of them I would argue have bottom line consequences for organizations. It’s weird, isn’t it, that we’ve come to use the word soft to describe issues that centre around people. In my experience, these issues are anything but soft – they are tough, knotty problems that require long term, strategic thinking, and considerable courage in stepping up to the challenges they represent.

When Jack Welsh, the widely admired CEO of General Electric was in Australia recently, he was repeatedly quoted as saying that ideas are the currency of the future - that the winners in the new economy will be old economy companies who have captured the best and brightest ideas people and used their skills to transform the traditional bricks and mortar blue-chips into highly creative, ideas-driven organisations.

Saatchi & Saatchi’s mission is to be revered as a hothouse of world-changing ideas that transform our client’s businesses, brands, and reputation.

I was invited to speak to you on Business Communication, but as I've reflected on these issues, it seems to me that the key thought is not Business Communication – which is just a meaningless piece of jargon really, but rather, reinventing conversation in a business context.