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.

My first challenge to you is this – if, as Jack Welch insists, ideas are the currency of the future, what are you doing to imbed an ideas culture in your organization? At Saatchi & Saatchi we’ve tackled this by challenging ourselves to become the hottest ideas shop on the planet. We want our clients to revere us for ideas that transform their businesses, brands and reputations.

Big call – how do you deliver against a mission statement like that? For us, as for every service firm, it’s critical. Ideas are all we have to sell. All service firms are facing intense cost pressures, and are struggling with the issues of creating differentiated offerings that can deliver competitive advantage for longer than around the three months it takes to copy someone else’s idea.

It’s ironic that globalization, which was meant to enhance consumer choice through increased competition has in fact delivered fewer competitors in virtually every category. In the case of advertising, for instance, 60% of the world’s advertising is now controlled by 4 firms.

So an ideas culture is crucial to sustaining competitive advantage, and identifying and nurturing the ideas leaders within the organization is a key task for business leaders.

And that’s not easy. Too often an organization’s leadership team are drawn from the same talent pool. Their socialization and life experiences tend to be similar, as, alas, are their ideas. So the challenge for organizational leadership is to accept that ideas leadership is probably going to come from further down the food chain. The task is to identify those ideas leaders and to manage them creatively – particularly because they have a very low boredom threshold, and are inclined to wander off if they are not sufficiently challenged or rewarded.

Creating an ideas culture means embracing diversity as the only means of enlarging the ideas gene pool. This has implications for recruitment and training that may require strategic intervention from the leadership team.

At Saatchi & Saatchi, we rate intuition more highly than intelligence, and we test for it. We do this because the research seems to indicate that highly intuitive people are better ideas generators than their more prosaic colleagues.

In our business, every new recruit has to be an ideas person, regardless of their final destination within the firm. A bank, for example, may not need so many ideas people, although given the difficulties associated with product parity within banking, and the poor public image of banks generally, I’d argue that they could probably do with a few more.

Second leadership challenge – I want you to conduct a mental audit of every piece of communication your company produces. Visualize your human resources manual, your marketing guidelines, your call centre scripts, your analysts briefings, your annual general report, and ask yourself, do you know anyone who talks like that?