And here's the thing about ideas - good ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, but they are least likely to come from those who have been socialised into conventional business behaviour. Those of us who have been working in the social justice area have been saying that for decades, of course, as the rationale for creating places at the economic table for women, indigenous Australians, people from non-English speaking backgrounds, people with a disability, people from different cultures, or less common sexual orientations, alas, with a singular lack of impact.

Business tended in the past to think about these things, if they thought about them at all, as compliance issues - not something top management needed to worry about - something for the human resource specialists to look after - to make sure you avoided any unpleasantness such as anti-discrimination suits or sexual harassment cases.

Ideas were never seen as a bottom line issue - if they had been, we would never have allowed a situation to develop where the ideas gene pool has become so small.

If ideas are the currency of the future (and I for one am not going to argue with Jack Welch) then you can bet that the smartest of the old-economy CEO's are trying to figure out how to have more of them than anyone else, and what they are rapidly discovering is that they are having to go outside to find them.

The old army-style command and control model, which has provided business with its management model for so long, depended for its success on everyone agreeing to follow the rules. If you were a private you did certain things and behaved in a very prescribed way.

As you moved further up the food chain, your sphere of influence expanded and you got to do more things - but always by the book.

And companies in the past were very much like that – and lots of people were very comfortable in that format – you knew were you stood - but in an ideas economy, the command and control management style is virtually useless. The reason for that is that people with shared experiences and values will always tend to come up with similar ideas – whether they are a group of mums running the school tuck-shop, or a group of blokes running a company.

So to be a successful ideas company, diversity is not just important, it’s obligatory. At the risk of stating the obvious, if you want the greatest possible number of good ideas you need input from a much wider group than you’re probably used to.

And drawing on my experience in women’s issues, let me respectfully make the point that having one of everything does not constitute diversity.

What women have discovered is that while more companies are appointing women to their boards, they have essentially replicated the male experience – that is they have recruited a very small number of women, almost exclusively from legal and financial backgrounds, and appointed them to four or five boards each. This may have something to do with gender equity, but it has nothing to do with diversity.

At the risk of appearing crude, it’s not what’s between your legs that matters, it’s what’s between your ears. When it comes to gender, there’s an extremely limited range of choices – the great thing about diversity is that its capacity is limitless!

The new economy companies need fewer and fewer people who make things, or manage things, and more and more people who are ideas leaders. Those people are likely to come from outside the system and our task now is to get them inside the tent as quickly as possible.

At Saatchi & Saatchi, we have given a lot of thought to how to recruit ideas people, and we believe the greatest indicator of an ideas person is intuition. We value intuition more highly than intelligence and we test for it.

We look for people who can talk in an abstract way about big ideas. We invite them to speculate about what the future might hold. We look for people who can make leaps in logic - who can spot the gap and imagine what might go there.

And we accept absolutely that for us to be successful recruiters, and more importantly, retainers of ideas people, we have to be prepared to abandon every ingrained prejudice and embrace, as a matter of pure logic, the belief that good ideas can come from anyone - not just people like us.

So we're overflowing with people from many different cultures and countries - half our Australian board is female. I think we have about double the average number of gays. There are two groups where we haven't been successful yet (as far as we know) and that's indigenous Australians, and people with a disability, but we're working on it, because we know they've got a contribution to make too and we want their ideas.