(no subject)
Jun. 5th, 2020 09:13 pm“...the Special Products Division next called in Foote, Cone & Belding, the advertising agency that had lately been signed up to handle the E-Car account. With characteristic Madison Avenue vigor, Foote, Cone & Belding organized a competition among the employees of its New York, London, and Chicago offices, offering nothing less than one of the brand-new cars as a prize to whoever thought up an acceptable name.
...Suspecting that the bosses of the Special Products Division might regard this list [18K names] as a trifle unwieldy, the agency got to work and cut it down to six thousand names, which it presented to them in executive session. “There you are,” a Foote, Cone man said triumphantly, flopping a sheaf of papers on the table. “Six thousand names, all alphabetized and cross-referenced.”
A gasp escaped Krafve. “But we don’t want six thousand names,” he said. “We only want one.”
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--- John Brooks. “Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street.” Apple Books.
Idea generation is useless when there's no rigorous selection process. I feel that it can be modeled as a topos because the codomain for the names is 1.