by Mark O'Brien | Feb 23, 2015
I read an article in Inc., “It’s Official: Networking Makes People Feel Sleazy”, over breakfast the other morning. Its psychological premise engaged me fully, especially this: Just the thought of saying “find me on LinkedIn” is enough to...
by Mark O'Brien | Feb 18, 2015
I received a notification from a trade association that reminded me precisely how linguistically bereft, if not spiritually desiccated, we’ve become. With offending identifiers deleted to keep my sorry keister out of the hoosegow, it said this: Submissions can...
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 13, 2015
When my three siblings and I were children, Mom and Dad took us to dinner at the historic Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut. The place was bustling, as always. Young members of the wait staff hustled from table to table, tending to their patrons. After a few minutes,...
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...
