There always seems to be some magic elixir that 'guarantees' to transform your business. Whether it's total quality management or business process re-engineering, whatever fad it is flourishes for a few years, destroys the odd rain forest with a slew of instantly forgettable books with suspiciously catchy titles, spawns innumerable conferences and seminars and creates a guru de jour who enjoys the requisite 15 minutes of fame in the world's business press.

Then, like a Connemara summer, it's all over; a distant memory and you wonder what all the fuss was about. Today's business imperative is 'creativity', a slippery enough concept to define, notoriously difficult to manage and up to recently assumed to be something that was a given, you either had it, or you hadn't; it wasn't something that could be force-fed. A number of factors have combined to move creativity up the business agenda. The most important is that almost everyone has some creative capacity which can be encouraged and developed. The reason it has not been up to now is that our educational system is biased to developing the left side of our brains, the rational side, and neglects the right, creative side.

The second, equally important reason is that once businesses have mastered quality and re-engineered themselves to whippet like proportions, innovation and creativity are the only remaining competitive advantages. Creativity is no longer a luxury for business; it is increasingly essential for survival today.

Needless to say there are numerous books on the subject all purporting to revolutionise your business overnight into a creative hot shop, all full of worthy platitudes which are impossible to disagree with, but are equally impossible to implement in any meaningful way. However, it is heartening to record here that a new book on the subject, The Hothouse Effect (Amazon), is an exception, an exceedingly good book which the blurb describes as “how to intensify creativity in your organisation using secrets from the world's most innovative communities”.

The first part of that sentence; the 'how to' bit follows the conventional path of listing out a series of precepts, 36 in all, which should, if implemented, make your business more creative. To be fair to the author, he never mentions the word 'guaranteed', so avoiding the shrill tone of so many similar books.

But it is the second part of the blurb that sets this book apart from the rest of the genre because 'the world's most innovative communities' are not the usual case histories from other successful yet impossible to emulate businesses, but genuinely innovative communities that have had a profound and lasting influence on the world from Athens in the fifth century BC.

Florence during the Renaissance and into the 20th century with the Bauhaus movement in 1920's Germany and the 1950's jazz scene in New York. Chapters on these communities are interspersed with the more conventional stuff about how to create the conditions for more innovative businesses.

The precepts are divided into four categories; values/mission, ideas/exchange, perception/learning and social/play. Each category has between eight to ten precepts making 36 in all which are discussed in detail.

For instance, the first category is based on the principle that creative communities must have a clear sense of direction whose leaders have a clear unequivocal commitment to achieving outstanding levels of creativity.

A fairly obvious point but the chapter on Florence brings it to life by showing how a relatively small unimportant city at the time made a conscious choice to achieve creative excellence which effectively resulted in the 'invention' of the Renaissance and therefore of the modern world.

Under the 'ideas/exchange' section the importance of mastery of one's core discipline is discussed. Again, this is brought to life by New York jazz example of the 1950's. The inspired improvisations in the iconic 'Kind of Blue' and 'A Love Supreme' recordings could only have been produced by technically professional musicians of the highest order.

To quote Kunstler's actual words in the book, it is the “confidence that reaches beyond mastery of craft and aims at profound social change and even spiritual awakening can only be based on rare levels of achievement”.

An interesting point which emerges from a number of categories is the importance of regular contact between different groups of creative people working in broadly similar disciplines and organisations.

In the examples offered, this was facilitated by the meeting areas of Athens, the workshops of Florence and the bars and clubs of New York. So if there are any perceived deficiencies in Irish advertising, perhaps we should blame Smyth's and O'Brien's pubs for not doing their job properly.

John Fanning is executive chairman of McConnells Advertising