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It's easy to see why Richard Gerver is a good primary-school teacher. He's relentlessly cheerful. He enunciates every word he says, in a way that involves his whole face and much of his body. The volume of his voice undulates wildly. And he moves all the time, as if he's overdosing on tartrazine, trying to fling his extremities from the orbit of his ex-rugby paunch. To watch him is to be in a state of perpetual excitement. A cartoon character juggling live sticks of dynamite couldn't do more to keep young children in thrall.

But could he offer advice and inspiration to an adult business audience? That was the question on everyone's minds as the London Business Forum (LBF) convened to hear him speak at the British Library conference centre. The short answer is: yes. But Gerver was also here to deliver a warning about the state of the UK's talent pool, based on his experiences teaching four- to eleven-year-olds - the next generation of British workers.

"I don't think we in the West have got what education in the 21st Century is all about," he said. "I hear so often from employers things like: 'My young employees, my graduates, the people coming to us from school - they lack creativity, they don't have the ability to take risks, they lack flexibility. As a result, they're just useless to us, because they just wait to be told what to do."

Such bad habits are actually encouraged by the education systems of the West, he argued. "The bell goes, we stand up, we line up, we're told when to walk... Even in our academic studies in schools, we're told how high to jump the hurdles and when we jump them we get a certificate or a sticky badge or a smiley face. And then, young people come out into the world of work, and they're in a completely alien environment."

However, he added, there are ways to change formal education so that the right kinds of thinking are nurtured. And there are ways to reawaken the creative and risk-taking abilities of those already in work.

To put his advice in context, Gerver told us about his first visit to the school where he is now headmaster. Grange Primary School is situated in Long Eaton, near Nottingham, and has about 500 pupils. At the time Gerver applied to work there, it was in serious decline, in terms of both results and resources. His interview was carried out by an "incredibly battered group of governors," he recalled - unsung volunteers who "had basically been blamed for this school's downfall."

One of the questions they asked him was: "Where will this school be five years from now?" And Gerver said he replied, with a mixture of arrogance and ignorance, that the school would be "globally recognised as a centre of excellence, and... talked about all over the planet as a future model for education." Of course, he admitted to the LBF, "at the time, this was bullshit." But what he lacked in terms of concrete planning he made up for in enthusiasm, and, once in the job, he took the ambition seriously.

Within two years, he said, "I was the only British principal invited to speak at the UNESCO World Education Conference." Grange really had become a model for excellence. Under Gerver's leadership, the pupils had been empowered to build their own "town" within the school gates, including a café where they spoke only in French, a "radio station" that broadcasted over the school's public-address system and a museum that acted as a showcase for local history. Their results had improved dramatically. And the key success factor wasn't his leadership, Gerver said, but the awakening of latent creativity and enthusiasm among both pupils and staff.

In the situation he inherited, "a lot of the people had forgotten why we were there, and the magic had gone," he said. "People were getting up every day to come to this school because either they were paid to or, as children, it was the law." His aim, he decided, should be to reverse this situation so that people were "queuing up at the door to come in," even on days when they woke up with a sore throat. "What we're going to have to create here is Disneyland," he exclaimed in an early meeting with the other teachers. This was a "crass" comparison to make, he admitted to the LBF, but in terms of its radicalism it was spot-on. Such ideas are only "counterintuitive to the way most of us experience education," he said, "because sadly, for most of us, education is a rite of passage."

The West's modern work-ethic insists we will only achieve more by working harder, he pointed out. But, as a result, we often act like flies, bashing ourselves against the glass of a closed window when there could be an open one nearby. "Sometimes we're running so fast that we don't stop to think: 'Hold on a minute, could there be another way?'".

This attitude certainly created a "mess" at Grange. But, crucially, "it wasn't a school where every morning the teachers were waking up and thinking, 'I want to screw up kids' lives today.'" Indeed, Gerver said, "I've yet to meet anyone from any kind of organisation who wakes up every morning feeling that they want to do a bad job."

The thing that stops people from doing a good job, he argued, is generally a lack of self-confidence. "Imagine that everyone who comes into your organisation is a gambler, and that every time you ask them to involve themselves in a new idea or a challenge, [they are] walking into a casino," he said. "Everyone coming in will... have a different [amount of] self-esteem. Some of the high-rollers, the really confident ones, will walk in with 80 chips and, when you ask them to engage in the activity or the new idea or the problem, they'll go: 'Yeah, sure, I'll put 40 on red, because even if it doesn't come up, I've still got 40 more. I can afford to lose these.' And then there will be other people who are equally as talented but who only have two chips, and every time you ask them to engage in a new activity... they're not prepared to do it. They'll say, 'It's all very well for him or her, but I've only got two chips, and therefore I can't engage with you, because if I put those two on red and it comes up black, I've got no self-esteem left.'"

There's no better analogy, Gerver suggested, for today's HR managers to consider when assessing their personnel development needs. "How are you building the poker chips in your people?" he asked the audience. "Some of them might not be disengaged because they're useless, but because they don't have enough chips to play the game."

Ultimately, your job is to help your staff regain the creativity, imagination and enthusiasm they had when they were schoolchildren, Gerver said. Young kids are "remarkable people". Leave them alone with a cardboard box and when you come back 20 minutes later they'll have turned it into something amazing. "There's some very significant research that says 80% of everything we learn in our lifetime, we learn before we're three years of age," he said. "What happens at three? We start formal education. There are people now in education making millions of pounds out of telling us how to teach children to learn. One of the things I always say to those people is: 'Why?' Surely what we should be doing is trying to work out what it is we do to kids that takes away their natural instincts."

Like another recent LBF speaker, Sir Ken Robinson, Gerver used the term "digital natives" to praise young people who had grown up in the era of digital technology. "Our kids' brains now are wired so they can handle multiple layers of information at phenomenal speeds," he said. "They might not be able to do what we can do [i.e. concentrate on one thing for a sustained period of time], but what they can do is extraordinary." These young people are either working in your organisations already or are about to enter them. So you have to ask yourselves, are you fully harnessing their capabilities?

We have a tendency to see only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the talents of our staff, he argued. "We concentrate on the tangible, the easy-to-measure stuff, the stuff that's obvious and everyday. And what we've forgotten about is [the softer skills]. How are we developing the ability to take risk? How are we developing creative processes? How are we developing empathy? How are we developing the emotional literacy of our people?"

Of these, risk-taking is by far the most important, he concluded. Has your organisation agreed "how you're going to develop a culture of risk-taking?" he asked. "And does everyone understand... how incredibly powerful this could be?" Too many people in Western organisations have been persuaded by their education systems, and then by their bureaucratic workplaces, that the risks of innovation are too great. Yet from his teaching experience, Gerver said the most important lesson he ever learned was this: "You learn nothing new from doing something right."