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It's difficult to imagine two more different perspectives on managing change, crisis and leadership than those of Lord Timothy Bell and Greg Dyke.

The first is a baron, a former director of Saatchi & Saatchi, a senior adviser to Margaret Thatcher during the glory years, an enemy of big government and, in some quarters, "the ultimate spin-doctor." The second is a bashful, down-to-earth man from a lower middle-class background, someone with close ties to the Labour party, who as director-general of the BBC spent £2.5bn of taxpayers' money annually, and whose forced resignation in 2004 led to mass protests from his former staff.

Interviewed in front of a large London Business Forum audience, they shared a variety of management tips, but ultimately both agreed on the need to lead with fairness, decency and a totally uncompromising attitude.

Bell is now chairman of Chime Communications, the UK's leading independent public relations, advertising and communications group, so naturally he felt "reputation" was one of the most important issues facing corporate leaders. "There's an old cliché that if people think well of you, it's much easier to do what you want to do. I think this has probably never been more true."

The main contributing factors here, he said, were the rise of information technologies, enabling ordinary people to get hold of unprecedented levels of information, and the "brand parity" of a growing number of industries, in which the quality and reliability of products and services has reached a plateau. "Anybody who has a competitive advantage over one product or another [finds] it lasts for maybe six months, if they're lucky," he said. "And so, rapidly, all the products look the same, behave the same, form the same function. Therefore, the reputation that they carry with them - the brand paraphernalia that surrounds them - becomes more and more important."

Crisis-management methods have also had to change for the Information Age, he added. "Almost every crisis is made worse by the thing that people do next, and usually, the crisis is more about their reaction to the crisis than it is about the crisis itself." He cited the Profumo Affair as a classic example of this, in that what sank Profumo was not the revelation he shared a prostitute with a Russian spy but that he lied to parliament. Such a tangle today, with modern media, would clearly have far worse consequences.

Bell's background in advertising had convinced of the importance of creativity too. "It's important to understand how things work, but it's much more important to have ideas," he said. "That's why I love politics so much, because politics is about ideas. What's wrong with modern politicians is that none of them have got a single idea. They're not doing it for any other reason than they want the job and then they want to manoeuvre everything by minus two percent or plus two percent. What [voters] want is dramatic change."

In decades past, Bell has worked with some of the most important politicians on the international stage (most recently, he was in Iraq advising the new government on how to promote democracy). The three he admired most, he said, were Margaret Thatcher in the UK, FW de Klerk in South Africa and Ronald Reagan in the US. "I think what characterised all three of them is that they were utterly rigid and strong and hard in what they did. They were tough. And what I hate about the world now is that it's run by wet people and I would like to see the return of the dries."

It was clear from this roll-call of great but controversial leaders that Bell felt reputation-management shouldn't be about offending as few people as possible but about remaining true to your principles. Ultimately, he said, the solution to avoiding the front pages of the tabloids is "terribly boring". "By far the most successful communicators are the ones who are transparent, the ones who co-operate, the ones who tell the truth, because they believe that, in the end, the truth will out and that good succeeds over evil."

The evils that Dyke had to overcome at the BBC were those of petty-politics, low morale and widespread incompetence, aggregated into an intransigent mass of waste and misery. Upon taking over he found that: his predecessor used to "book a lift in advance, to make sure he didn't have to speak to anybody"; and that small perceived sleights had transformed into huge personality clashes, for example when one member of staff thought another always "walked on the other side of the photocopier" to avoid her.

His solution was to "cut through the crap". Indeed, he actually issued 4,000 staff with "referees' red cards," printed with the words "cut the crap," to be held up in meetings whenever logic left the room. "I just turned up at places and went in to talk to people," he said. "And I would ask the same two questions: 'What can I do to make your life better?' and 'What can we do to improve our service to the viewer and the listener?'" He acknowledged that some of the resulting requests, such as "double my budget", were unachievable or ridiculous. However, he added, "lots of things were just tiny, and in the first couple of months we did as many of them as we could."

Dyke also scrapped the BBC's long-term planning strategy. "In a 10-year strategic plan, the only certainty is that [you're] wrong," he said, "because the world changes so fast." The best example of this, he said, was the BBC charter, written in 1994-5, which was meant to guide the corporation for the next decade but made no mention of the Internet.

In general, he resisted "change programmes" unless he could be sure they were implemented fully and sincerely. He also brought in extensive leadership training for everyone in the corporation who managed two people or more. However, his most significant triumph in his first year was more symbolic than practical: he opened the beautiful main atrium of the BBC's headquarters to staff.

"Why is nobody allowed in?" he asked upon taking over as director-general. "Health and safety," came the reply. Going into the atrium at this time meant wearing a hard-hat "as if there were going to be people jumping off the top floor," he said. So he made repeated requests to the property department to find out exactly what infringements the area was committing. Eventually, after a long period of grudging silence, he got the following reply: "We don't let anybody in there because it hasn't got a wheelchair ramp and it needs another safety door." Dyke immediately sent back a message saying: "Well, why the fuck have we been wearing hard hats for the last week?"

Installing the new door ended up costing £87,000, but the job paid for itself immediately in terms of morale, when every member of staff was invited to a party to celebrate the reopening. "They all came and I just wandered around. It was a lovely evening," Dyke recalled, "and somebody came up and said, 'Does this mean that we can go on the balconies now?' So I discovered they weren't even allowed on the balcony for 20 years. And somebody else said, 'Does this mean my office doesn't have to be painted grey?'"

Dyke was excited that his positive attitude could be snowballing, but the jobsworths in the property office saw things another way: "Look what you've started, now," one said. "If you can do something like that, it's a symbol," Dyke concluded. It was a key moment in shifting attitudes within the organisation. And soon after, the huge staff agreed almost unanimously on a new mission statement: "We want to be the most creative organisation in the world."