by Mark O'Brien | Jan 9, 2015
If you do a Google search for dreaded words in business, you’ll get millions of hits. That’s a lot of dread. And it’s a reminder that dread is contextual. Edward G. Brown thinks the most dreaded words in business are Got a minute? Shell Haffner...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 8, 2015
For those of us who care about such things, it’s fascinating to note that keyboard design and composition have remained largely unchanged since Enrico Royal brought the first typewriter to the United States aboard Christopher Columbus’ flagship, Santa...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 6, 2015
I left my last corporate job 20 years ago. Even then, I was aware of a phenomenon that continues to become more prevalent: Kleptus vocabularus — the stealing of a lexicon germane to one context for the purpose of deliberately misleading in another context. More...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 31, 2014
In the good old days (when were those?), companies differentiated themselves by purporting to be the best at what they did. One specialization. One concentration. One reliable deliverable or set thereof. That was then. This is now. Can a company that did one thing...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 30, 2014
My friend and partner, Jonathan Spiliotopoulos, shared an article entitled, “What Startups Need to Know About Ad Tech”. As Jonathan suggested to me, the article’s most salient point might be this: Advertising is essentially divided into two worlds:...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 29, 2014
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the claims made by inbound marketing (or marketing automation — the terms are virtually synonymous). Here’s one. Here’s another. And here’s a third: Inbound marketing seems to be adopted by B2B companies that...