by Mark O'Brien | Feb 25, 2015
In a beautiful little book called, The Zen Path Through Depression, Philip Martin offers advice for easing the pain of depression that could just as easily apply to the practice of marketing: When we are lost, frightened, or facing something new or unknown, our first...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 24, 2015
One of the joys of my life is being compelled to conduct Internet searches to determine the ostensible meanings of the latest abbreviations, acronyms, or jargon. Here’s the item that got my attention most recently: At the most basic level — even for companies...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 17, 2015
In business school classrooms they construct beautiful models of a non-world. (Peter Drucker, 1909-2005) It’s easy to dismiss Peter Drucker’s comment about the divide between the hypothetical world of business school and the pragmatic world of actual...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 16, 2015
Why does marketing inspire anxiety? I don’t know. But I have two theories. The first is that we possess a fundamental distrust of brevity and simplicity. The second is that we don’t recognize effective marketing is simple storytelling. Most of us think the...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 12, 2015
A few years ago, Peter Guber wrote this in the Harvard Business Review, “Critical details, data, and analytics are more effectively emotionalized and metabolized by the listener when they’re embedded in a story.” Similarly, Jonathan Gattschall wrote...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 6, 2015
After learning Johnson’s fate at IDS, I called my buddy, Millwood, at The Bugle: “Millie. It’s O’Brien. “What’s up, OB?” “You ever heard of a company called Intergalactic Data Services?” “Yeah. Matter of...
