by Mark O'Brien | May 31, 2016
Some 20-plus years ago, I was asked by the company for which I worked to fly from Connecticut to Virginia for a meeting on a Friday afternoon. It turned out to be the most amateurish, unprofessional, and bureaucratically typical exercise in passive-aggressive...
by Mark O'Brien | May 23, 2016
After recent revelations about the homogenization and routinization of everything, I suppose it makes a bit of logical sense that we should now be on to trivialization. But this latest revelation seems somehow more dire than its predecessors in that it has the...
by Mark O'Brien | May 16, 2016
Trying to get through a recent post of nearly 4,000 words, which turned out to be an infomercial for an equally windy 124-page report from Deloitte, put me in mind of this passage from Alice’s Restaurant, since the post contains … … twenty seven...
by Mark O'Brien | May 9, 2016
An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. (Kenneth Burke, 1897-1993, from Language as...