the efforts to understand creativity were always about the ability to increase it. And this was, at heart, a managerial concern.

The notion that creative people aren’t motivated by money, are always happy to be working, and prefer odd gigs to a stable career normalized the precarity and overwork of the post-Fordist world. The successful creative life calls to people like a siren song but fails to materialize for so many, who chalk their failure up to deeper personal

While others defined creativity as the ability to produce something new and useful, his rather idiosyncratic definition read, “a process of becoming sensitive to problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions, making guesses, or formulating hypotheses about

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 difference between a moderately inventive corporate engineer and Galileo was not in kind but in degree. The guiding assumption behind creativity research was, as Guilford put it, that “whatever the nature of creative talent may be, those persons who are recognized as creative merely have more of what all of us have.”

As psychoanalysts got to work adjusting returning GIs and newly re-domesticated housewives to the bewildering modern age, many postwar neo-Freudians, including the humanist psychologists, took a more critical approach. Suddenly acutely wary of mass society, they were less interested in adjusting individuals to potentially sick social norms than in

The notion of creativity allowed people to interpret career and lifestyle preferences as expressions of innate personality traits rather than as exercises in class distinction; to imagine a direct link between personal and economic growth. It allows us to see late capitalism as a natural consequence of human beings striving to express themselves as

as fun as the process may be, it must always come back to someone else’s bottom line, the session must always end.

The problem, Bass reiterated, was not the method itself, but the way in which it had become “a substitute and symbol of creativity.”