By Bob London
This week another one of my ideas came to life in the form of Wedding Futures (http://www.weddingfutures.com), a site that “enables couples to quickly and easily select and register for stocks and mutual funds as wedding gifts.”
I love the idea and want to state that I’m not claiming that I was the first to have it–or that someone beat me to it. But in the course of pursuing my hobby of humor writing, one of my jokes (in the form of liner notes made over the years that could some day turn into essays) was about couples being able to register for a CD at SunTrust or to have wedding guests make a payment towards the couple’s cable bill.
This is not the first time that one of my humorous, improv-type or ’stranger than fiction’ concepts has turned into reality. I’ve written about black box recording devices for automobile (since announced in NYC taxis) and professional sports franchises allowing sponsors to name the teams (subsequently a soccer team was christened the New York Red Bulls).
The point is that buried amidst the out of the box, mix and match, sometimes obtuse thinking are genuinely valuable ideas. I’m not one for typical brainstorming sessions, but would venture to say that taking a humorous or even exaggerated view of a problem could result in a viable solution.
Bob London is president of London, Ink, a Washington-DC-based marketing and communications consulting firm and writes business-related humor on the side at B0b-servations.com
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