by Mark O'Brien | Jun 13, 2016
The dense streak that necessitated the publishing of “Ten More Signs Your Manager Wants You Out” to let employees know when they’d already hit the skids continues. Only now it extends to the manager who wants you out. That’s right. Apparently,...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 6, 2016
Sometimes, we measure our gains by taking the measure of our losses. In the span of two-and-a-half years, three hugely influential men have passed from my life — my father, B.B. King, and now Muhammad Ali. There was a point at which I couldn’t imagine my life...
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...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 20, 2016
A client told me she’d gone to Madison Square Garden to see David Gilmour on the last night of his recent North American tour. Hearing that gave me gifts of reminiscence both nostalgic and whimsical. Thinking about David Gilmour and Pink Floyd always reminds me...
