by Mark O'Brien | Mar 24, 2015
For living in a world obsessed with communication, we don’t seem to be paying much attention to language. Think about the language of marketing: First, we speak impersonally. We talk about industries, markets, verticals, and accounts. Those referents...
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 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 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...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 29, 2015
At any time, in any medium, we can find any number of articles, reports, opinion pieces, and more decrying a lack of leadership in everything from politics to industry. Au contraire. We don’t suffer from a lack of leadership: We suffer from an inability or an...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 8, 2014
I recently read an article called, “Just How Sick of Leadership Posts Are We?” It’s unabashed in its disdain for leadership posts that are trite at best, deliberately deceitful at worst. (That’s a paraphrase and an understatement.) I have a...
