What makes a city a world city? One element everyone agrees on is creativity - including creative leadership. This is a hot topic these days and a pet interest of Robert Sternberg, president of the American Psychological Association. He and a few other high-profile researchers at Yale and Harvard universities are considered to be at the forefront of psychological research on creative leadership. They define it in ways that run counter to conventional wisdom. Creativity is as much about choice as anything else, say Dr Rosenberg and co-authors in a paper to be published by Leadership Quarterly. Exceptional skills, and maybe in some cases a certain set of innate abilities, are normally necessary. But this is not sufficient. What is also required is a particular sort of attitude: the inclination to go against the flow of things; the impulse to resolve to do things a given way, even in the face of 'tried and tested' precedents, to stubbornly follow one's instinct, irrespective of the resistance and discomfort that generally ensues. But, again, this is not due to the fact that creativity flows from a person because they have or believe they have superior instincts to those around them. Rather, they simply display an unusual fusion of nerve and motivation to follow whatever instincts they happen to feel on a given occasion, whereas other people would 'see reason'. Creative people may end up being wrong as often as right. But some people are discouraged from deciding to be different by one wrong decision to do so. Others show an incredibly 'illogical' tenacity to tread an alternative path, despite the repeated negative feedback of failure. Creativity and leadership are hard to tease apart. Just as there is a creative element in all successful leadership, there exists a leadership component in creativity. Contrary to their romantic image, famous artists are invariably motivated to promote their work - to lead the public to an understanding or appreciation of what they express. What they do requires an audience, so they have to be fairly hard-headed when it comes to pushing their way into the public eye. This is matched by an unusually low need for approval. Similarly, the most exceptional leaders in history were anything but crowd-pleasers. They raised a population's game, as it were, rather than playing by existing rules. Creative leaders can be split into eight kinds according to the propulsion model developed by Dr Sternberg and his colleagues. Replicators maintain the status quo; redefiners rethink what exists; forward incrementers advance things in the direction they are going; advanced forward incrementers make an uncomfortably large leap in that direction; redirectors advance in a new direction, regressive redirectors reintroduce an old idea; reinitiators initiate a new start; and synthesisers pull together the best ideas of the past. At this point in psychology's history, fixed 'types' - such as these and others like personality or intelligence - are less fashionable than the concept of relativity. For example, a person may be shy in a certain sort of situation and quite outgoing in another; an individual may be 'intelligent' in non-traditional ways but not very good at passing exams. Yet, this model indicates that people are one type or another. This suggests that a creative leader is not an all-purpose answer to a city's, country's or organisation's troubles. It needs to be the right type of creative leader for the time and place. In periods of stability, a replicator is needed - they have the insight to maintain the status quo, when a redefiner would have the urge to fix what was not broken. But a replicator would be disastrous when changes are needed. At such a time, a redirector could work wonders. Maybe this explains why certain famous leaders thrived at very particular times and places in history and flopped in others. Winston Churchill was widely criticised before the second world war, acclaimed as a great leader during the war then, when it was over, regarded as out of tune with the times. Maybe he could be labelled a regressive redirector with his comforting and inspiring rhetoric based on historical precedent and his deep understanding and use of past military campaigns. After the war, Britain needed to look forward, not back. This called for a reinitiator or redirector, rather than a regressive redirector. Given these definitions, it is interesting to consider what sort of leader Hong Kong could use right now and if that corresponds to the sort of leader which it has. Jean Nicol is a psychologist specialising in issues of cultural identity and change in an era of globalisation