We work gigs (the artsy phrase is not a coincidence), and even though a lot of work seems as rote and pointless as ever, we try hard to follow the instructions Steve Jobs bestowed upon the Stanford graduating class of 2005: “do what you love.”

Indeed, as always, the quest for creativity, be it in academia or in applied creativity, is most often implicitly or explicitly oriented around industry.

Despite the political resonance, creativity research clearly wasn’t only about politics. That is to say, although freedom of thought and of expression were bedrock democratic values, for Barron and others who focused on creativity specifically, the benefit of free thought was not primarily a healthy body politic, but rather productivity.

Where the old order, the Fordist order, thought of itself as rooted in the hard stuff of manufacturing and the grit of labor, the new order, or so it tells itself, doesn’t make goods but rather experiences, lifestyles, identities, images. Companies are now routinely referred to as simply “brands”; Even restaurants, apparently, are now merely “conce

But brainstorming, Bass thought, was an ersatz creativity. “The chief danger of brainstorming lies . . . not in the question of whether or not it produces more or less ideas . . . but in fact, that it distorts the creative process by dealing with it piecemeal and putting it on the production line.

The thesis seems to be that each advance, from the Pythagorean Theorem to Marxism to the atom bomb to the Boeing 747, came ultimately from one person’s desire to express their individuality. This claim—more believable in the case of an oil painting than in the invention of TNT—is, as we’ve seen, the kernel of the postwar concept of creativity itsel

One solution was to lean into the immateriality of it all: advertising did not simply get people to buy products, it also imbued those products with meaning. And it was actually this landscape of meaning that made consumer capitalism a force for good, even self-actualization.

What’s most significant is not how well Synectics “worked,” but that in a world of straitlaced engineers, a technique like Synectics, promising the perfect salty-sweet combo of empiricism and romanticism, efficiency and whimsy, and group cohesion and individual liberation sounded like a rational use of R&D funds.

The agent of this transformation would be the “creative man”: somewhere between an artist and a salesman, a liminal figure within if not totally comfortable with the business world, paradoxically committed to his own vision and his clients’ needs simultaneously, a resident gadfly who would be the humane and rebellious face of capitalism and its ult