By Christopher Murphy CHAPTER 13a TeChniQue foR PRoDuCing iDeaS
Funnily enough, Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation is also the product of oth-
er ideas. In the true spirit of academia, which stands on the shoulders of gi-
ants more often than you would imagine, Berkun’s 2007 book echoes many
of the themes of a much slimmer volume published some four decades
earlier, James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas from 1965. (A
personal recommendation: if you buy just one book to improve your ability
to generate ideas, make it Young’s.)
Honored as ‘Advertising Man of the Year’ in 1946, Young (1886–1973)
was an award-winning advertising executive who wrote perhaps one of the
most influential books on generating ideas; certainly one of the most con-
cise and no-nonsense in approach. Drawn from his own wealth of experi-
ence and voracious appetite for knowledge, A Technique for Producing Ideas is
a short, sharp and extremely valuable treatise on the process of generating
ideas.
Young’s process is a simple one, centering on “training the mind” by
filling it with an ever-ready supply of raw material. From this fuel, as he
puts it, ideas form, which are, unsurprisingly, “combinations of old ideas.”
Young cites noted sociologist, economist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto
(1848–1923) as an influence in his thinking (you may have heard of him via
the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80–20 rule). In a chapter called “The
Pareto Theory”, Young refers to Pareto’s thinking, writing:
Pareto thought that all the world could be divided into two main types of peo-
ple. These types he called, in the French in which he wrote, the “Speculator” and
the “Rentier”.In this classification speculator is a term used somewhat in the sense of our
word ‘speculative.’ The speculator is the speculative type of person and the
distinguishing characteristic of this type, according to Pareto, is that he is con-
stantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations.