by Mark O'Brien | Mar 14, 2017
I saw a LinkedIn post the other day that had 18,400 likes, 619 comments, and 7,791 shares. Those are big numbers. The post is called, “14 Simple Expectations Great Employees Have of Their Boss”. I’d have been a little less surprised at the numbers if...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 30, 2017
With no fanfare of any sort, the venerable Harvard Business Review (HBR) has published the first in a series of brain teasers, word puzzles designed to look like articles, containing syntactical dead ends, grammatical errors, and logical non sequiturs. The purpose of...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 21, 2016
Sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that, you’ve got it made. (Variously attributed.) As I get older, I continually wonder about reality, about the nature of reality, about our ability to perceive reality, and whether there is any objective reality...
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 | May 31, 2016
Some 20-plus years ago, I was asked by the company for which I worked to fly from Connecticut to Virginia for a meeting on a Friday afternoon. It turned out to be the most amateurish, unprofessional, and bureaucratically typical exercise in passive-aggressive...
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...