p.16 How many of us have sense enough to see and do the obvious thing? And how many of
us have the persistency enough in following out our ideas of what is obvious?
p.20 he seems to see the essential points and he puts them down clearly.
p.29 They [ideas for marketing a brand of cake] seemed to him perfectly natural things to do... and every
one of them wondered why he had not thought of them.
p.46 "I get your point," said the president [of the company]. "You are right. I begin to see that advertising
is not white magic, but, like everything else, just plain common sense."
p.47-48 "... I never stopped to think in those days whether a thing was obvious or not. I just did what
occurred to me naturally after I had thought things over..."
p.48-49 "... I have decided that picking out the obvious thing presupposes analysis, and analysis presupposes
thinking, and I guess Professor Zueblin is right when he says that thinking is the hardest work many people have to
do, and they don't like to do any more of it than they can help. They look for the royal road through some short cut in the
form of a clever scheme or stunt, which they call the obvious thing to do; but calling it doesn't make it so. They
don't gather all the facts and then analyze them before deciding what really is the obvious thing, and thereby they overlook
the first and most obvious of all business principles."
p.50 "Some day," he continued, "a lot of businessmen are going to wake up to the
power and sanity of the obvious. Some already have..."
