John osborn bbdo biography of abraham james

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This chapter focuses on two important advertising agencies—Batten Barton Durstine & Osborn (BBDO) and Benton & Bowles (B&B).

Sculpture of Thinking Woman , by Louis Fleckenstein, twentieth century. The J. Paul Getty Museum , Los Angeles. Above all, brainstorming was about quantity. As ideas came pouring out a secretary would jot them down and later pass the list, perhaps several pages long, to an executive, who would, in the light of a new day, sort the good from the bad.

The modern workplace, like the modern mind, had overdeveloped the judgmental half to the detriment of the creative, and brainstorming was just one way to compensate. Though his main acolytes and early adopters came from the upper management of some of the largest corporate, government, and military organizations, Osborn aspired to nothing less than a revolution in American society.

He believed that by helping Americans put knowledge about creativity to practical use he could help solve every kind of problem, from marital disputes to the Cold War. Some skeptics in academia and business would see brainstorming as at best another fad, like skateboarding or hula hoops, and at worst a false substitute for true creativity. I n the tradition of self-help writers from Benjamin Franklin to Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, whose aphorisms he was fond of quoting, Osborn was adapting traditional bourgeois values to a modern corporate reality.

Through the decades, self-help authors had helped members of the growing urban white-collar class see themselves as independent smallholders despite feeling increasingly like slaves to a system they could neither control nor understand. Using rags-to-riches anecdotes to demonstrate that everyone is master of his own destiny, the genre is paradoxically democratic yet elitist, naturalizing systemic inequalities and narrowing the scope of critique to the level of individual conduct, casting any failures as personal ones.

Osborn was in many ways perpetuating the republican ideal of the yeoman farmer, but instead of little plots of land people had their minds, and ideas were the crops. There was no room in this post-materialist worldview for factors like resources, time, power, and politics, nor even for things like education, hard work in the traditional sense , tact, foresight, courage, or dumb luck.

By putting brainstorming in the same class as a Shakespearean sonnet, or rather, by implying that whatever Shakespeare was doing when he wrote a sonnet was essentially what one did while brainstorming, Osborn invited his readers to see their workaday problem solving and slogan finding as little steps in the grand march of civilization.

Suggestion systems proliferated during World War II when, racing to fulfill ambitious production goals with shortages of materials and manpower, many companies began tapping the rank-and-file employees for ideas on how to speed up or improve production.