Brainstorming Doesn’t Really Work. In the late nineteen-forties, Alex Osborn, a partner in the advertising agency B.B.D.O., decided to write a book in which he shared his creative secrets. At the time, B.B.D.O. was widely regarded as the most innovative firm on Madison Avenue. Born in 1888, Osborn had spent much of his career in Buffalo, where he started out working in newspapers, and his life at B.B.D.O. began when he teamed up with another young adman he’d met volunteering for the United War Work Campaign.
By the forties, he was one of the industry’s grand old men, ready to pass on the lessons he’d learned.
The Nigerian Harmattan? Jeff Sachs. Adam Davidson, the 1%’s Lord Haw-Haw, Fellates Wall Street. Although I endeavor to treat high dudgeon as an art form, it is difficult to find words adequate to convey the level of ridicule and opprobrium that Adam Davidson’s latest New York Times piece, “What Does Wall Street Do for You?”
Deserves. I had the vast misfortune to come across it late last week, and have gotten an unusually large volume of incredulous reader e-mails about it. National Security Spending, Not Entitlements, "Run Amok" Thomas Friedman.