Observing that many geniuses also had eminent relatives, he concluded that genius was hereditary. Strikingly, he did not seriously consider that the family clusters might indicate the importance of connections, wealth, or family culture, nor did he think the absence of women from his list was due to a lack of opportunity.

Creativity was a topic capacious enough to apply to Great Men as well as elementary school children and rank-and-file engineers. Unlike genius, creativity could be said to exist in everyone, and in that sense was both more democratic and (more importantly, perhaps) more useful for managers overseeing scores or hundreds or thousands of employees. It

The notion of creativity would render the creation of consumer desire a humane and high-minded pursuit. It would make capitalism a safe space for individuality and critique, while also transforming anti-consumerist critique into more consumption.

A recent crop of cocktail-party nonfiction about Right-Brainers and Bourgeoise Bohemians and something called the Creative Class said the age of rule-loving “organization men” had passed, leaving the field to those who rebelled against the status quo. As factories left American shores and computers automated more and more white-collar brain work, t

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 concept of creativity, typically defined as a kind of trait or process vaguely associated with artists and geniuses but theoretically possessed by anyone and applicable to any field, emerged as a psychological cure for these structural and political contradictions of the postwar order.

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 t

This narrowing of possibilities was, of course, a structural element of brainstorming. Both the initial framing of the problem and the eventual selection of the solution were typically decided by higher-ups. Brainstorming was not designed to produce truly revolutionary ideas; rather, it exemplifies what the philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail

As a new psychological term of art, “creativity” drew a conceptual space that included the greatest accomplishments but also everyday acts of originality. This new concept served much of the function that genius had in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—that is, the thing imagined to be the engine of the progress of mankind.