Risking life, limb, and lawyers I'm going to reproduce, verbatim, some of Marty O'Halloran's thoughts on idea generation and the creative process. It kind of blew me away in that I never thought about building ideas within a framework, let alone a vigorous process.

"I bring people together: the sum of people's contributions equals truly great ideas. Some people believe that a creative environment must be loose and free in order to produce groundbreaking ideas, but I think process and discipline drives brilliant thinking. I believe you should have detailed processes in place to really immerse yourself in a problem or opportunity, looking at all the facts, details and data, almost totally drowning in information. If you put highly creative people through a process like this you generally come out with better ideas. The smaller the group the better".

"A creative person is quite worldly and is a great listener. Too many people try to drive the creative process before they listen. A creative needs to have natural talent - whether it is writing or artistic - and must be able to work with a team. There are lots of people who aren't very nice, and lots of nice people who haven't got any talent. I agree with the founder of DDB (Bill Brenbach) who said people must be "both nice and talented".

I agree, and too some extent, love swimming in loads of data, especially when mining for something out of the ordinary. To me though, ideas are wild, they're genies trapped in bottles, not something that can be forced out with a process. It's a tough call either way.

Marty O'Halloran is chairman and chief executive of DDB Australia and New Zealand. Read Where My Ideas Come From over on The Australian Financial Review.