by Mark O'Brien | Jan 30, 2015
I once had a conversation with the founder and CEO of a software company, an affable and unassuming gentleman. He’d inadvertently walked into a marketing meeting I was conducting with his senior leadership team. The conversation transpired like this, verbatim....
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 29, 2015
At any time, in any medium, we can find any number of articles, reports, opinion pieces, and more decrying a lack of leadership in everything from politics to industry. Au contraire. We don’t suffer from a lack of leadership: We suffer from an inability or an...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 28, 2015
Few brands retain their iconic status through takeovers by public companies, buybacks by employees, ownership by investment capitalists, debt, disillusionment, and dilution-unto-absurdity of its product portfolio. But Fender Musical Instruments has survived all that...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 27, 2015
When our clients tell us about their products or services, we invariably ask two questions: (1) Is there a market for it? (2) If we hand you a check right now, can we buy it? The latter is to prevent putting carts before horses. The former is to prevent the...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 26, 2015
Here are five perennially perplexing questions, as intriguing as they are troubling and, as yet, unanswered: Why do so many organizations create the position, VP of Sales and Marketing? Why is the VP of Sales and Marketing typically a sales person? Is the chief...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 23, 2015
At a large corporation for which I once worked, my boss’s boss told one of my internal clients (I love that phrase) — a gentleman who disagreed with my counsel on a matter of communication and went over my head to report his pique — to ignore me because,...
