by Mark O'Brien | Jun 16, 2015
I don’t know Jim Durbin. But I like him already. Anyone who would write this clearly, directly, and truthfully is a man after my own heart: Cut the crap. Learn to be honest and write honestly. Talk about steady work, opportunity for advancement, well-run...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 5, 2015
I saw a post the other day the very title of which froze me in my proverbial tracks. The title was this — “It’s Simple: Giving Back Must Be a Part of Doing Business” — and it’s rubbish. Start here: The more profitable we are as a company, the...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 2, 2015
Thanks to a client, with whom I was working through the terms of a new agreement (amicably, or so I thought), I learned a new word the other day. It presented itself in a sentence of otherwise unremarkable, albeit characteristically tortured (syntactically speaking)...
by Mark O'Brien | May 28, 2015
At risk of having you think I doth protest too much, I’m not prudish, at least as far as language is concerned. Truth be told, my language is, on occasion, salty enough to float rocks. But I, nevertheless, do try to maintain a modicum of linguistic decorum in...
by Mark O'Brien | May 26, 2015
We’ve expressed our concern for the brain trust at HBR in previous posts. That concern is in no way ameliorated by a missive that floated through our consciousness last week. In a tract of some 1,016 words — “Let’s Stop Arguing About Whether...
by Mark O'Brien | May 11, 2015
Because I’m an almost universally recognized, globally renowned, and highly sought expert in my field; because I’m a household name on most continents; and because I’m unfailingly modest, I’m perennially asked: “Dude. What do you consider...