We're more successful in the creative industries than we are in major football tournaments. Our cultural output sits at the heart of the UK economy and will be crucial to the UK economy in the future.

We need more cross-fertilisation between high culture and the grubbier, more commercial culture; between high art and the money. There are issues that span both sides, including how you manage creative risks.

Leadership has a multiplier effect. The thinking behind the Cultural Leadership Programme (CLP) is that better leadership in cultural organisations will lead to better organisations and healthier creative industries.

The CLP has touched over 6,000 people since it started [in 2006] and many of these people continue to benefit by establishing online networks with the people they meet.

You can't beat work-based training. [At CLP] we have a scheme called Peach Placements that gets leaders from smaller cultural organisations to work on specific projects in large national institutions. They take this experience and learning back into their own organisations. It can be very lonely in a small, regional museum.

You can't teach leadership if the raw material isn't there. But where people have the drive to do it, you can fill gaps in their knowledge and encourage them to be better at it.

We need leadership skills to protect the creative output and make sure that people have the know-how to manage creative risk. As all cultural organisations face greater fiscal pressures, it's a scary thing to be the leader.

People used to say that advertising was ahead of the general economic cycle and that any downturn was more exaggerated. I don't think that's true any more. The figures for the first half of this year have been very good.

Advertising isn't as badly affected by recessions as it used to be. The drop in confidence has hurt, but I'd rather be in advertising than house building or banking.

Clients may have less to spend in a downturn, but lots of people know the importance of spending on advertising during a recession if you want to come out stronger. It's a question of balancing the investment in the top line with protection of the bottom line.

In a downturn there is always a bigger premium placed on creativity, but also on return on investment. That's part of the appeal of the digital environment. The switch to online activity is something that an agency such as ours can handle more easily than the giant media corporations. We are more nimble than WPP, for example.

David Kershaw is chairman of the Cultural Leadership Programme.