Over lunch today, I read ad man James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas, from the office’s bookshelf. It’s not really a book; it is literally a technique, spread across forty widely-spaced pages. It boils down to this: do your research, think hard about lots of combinations of possibilities, then distract yourself for a while until you have your eureka moment. That this glorified pamphlet has sold millions of copies certainly tells you a lot about advertising, but not in a good way.