Managing Creative People: Lessons in Leadership for the Ideas Economy

Chapter 4. 21st century snake-oil

... ideas and beliefs are the same as hands: instruments for coping. An idea has no greater metaphysical stature than, say a fork. When your fork proves inadequate to the task of eating soup, it makes little sense to argue about whether there is something inherent in the nature of forks or something inherent in the nature of soup that accounts for the failure. You just reach for a spoon.

—Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, describing John Dewey's version of pragmatism

The practise of Americans leads their minds to other habits, to fixing the standard of their judgement in themselves alone. As they perceive that they succeed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends the limits of their understanding. Thus they fall to denying what they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for whatever is extraordinary and an almost insurmountable distaste for whatever is supernatural.

—Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, 1840

I have decided to lay the blame for the worldwide crisis in creativity squarely at the door of Alex Osborn. But I do so with some reluctance; I know he was only trying to help.

Alex Osborn was the 'O' in the acronym of the global advertising agency BBDO, named for Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn Inc. His highly influential book, Applied Imagination, was published ...