In 1954, at the age of sixty-six, Osborn retired from BBDO and founded the Creative Education Foundation (CEF), to “enhance public awareness of the importance of creativity” by distributing literature, sending brainstorming trainers across the world, and hosting an annual week-long Creative Problem-Solving Institute (CPSI) in Buffalo.
Though his main acolytes and early adopters came from the upper management of some of the largest corporate, government, and military organizations, Osborn aspired to nothing less than a revolution in American society. He believed that by helping Americans put knowledge about creativity to practical use he could help solve every kind of problem, from marital disputes to the Cold War.
Some skeptics in academia and business would see brainstorming as at best another fad, like skateboarding or hula hoops, and at worst a false substitute for true creativity. But Osborn’s blend of freewheeling, almost hedonistic methods with an unapologetically practical, old-school self-help message resonated in postwar America.
In the tradition of self-help writers from Benjamin Franklin to Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale, whose aphorisms he was fond of quoting, Osborn was adapting traditional bourgeois values to a modern corporate reality. Through the decades, self-help authors had helped members of the growing urban white-collar class see themselves as independent smallholders despite feeling increasingly like slaves to a system they could neither control nor understand. Using rags-to-riches anecdotes to demonstrate that everyone is master of his own destiny, the genre is paradoxically democratic yet elitist, naturalizing systemic inequalities and narrowing the scope of critique to the level of individual conduct, casting any failures as personal ones. Osborn was in many ways perpetuating the republican ideal of the yeoman farmer, but instead of little plots of land people had their minds, and ideas were the crops. There was no room in this post-materialist worldview for factors like resources, time, power, and politics, nor even for things like education, hard work (in the traditional sense), tact, foresight, courage, or dumb luck. “Up the ladder of business, ideas can serve as rungs,” he wrote. “Ideas, more than luck, will land the job you want.”