by Mark O'Brien | Jun 26, 2015
Among many other rewarding things, my working life has enabled me to acquire quite the compendium of handy axioms, many of which have become words to live (and work) by. As a public service, I share three of my favorites here: #1. Never believe anything until...
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 21, 2015
I had a meeting with a prospect last week. He was eager to brand and launch his start-up. And he was excited for the opportunity to discuss its positioning and promotion. He was so enthusiastic when we spoke on the phone that I was as fired up as he was on my way to...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 17, 2015
I know of only one person like Norm Crosby. That would be Norm Crosby, who’s also the only person I know who could make a career out of malaprops. The rest of us typically have to make careers out of avoiding them. In fact, Christina Desmarais recently wrote an...
