by Mark O'Brien | Dec 9, 2015
Thanks to the volume of correspondence we receive from you, our intrepid and incorrigible readers, we now have more people working in our mailroom than Santa has elves in his workshop. We’re running three shifts, 24/7/365. And we may have to add members to our...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 7, 2015
I happened to hear a Johnny Winter favorite — “Love Song to Me” — from John Dawson Winter III over the weekend. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a client the week before and inspired me to write this verse: To some degree, I disagree; Although,...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 3, 2015
The story you’re about to read is true. The names have been changed to protect the guilty. In my entire working life, only one attempt has been made to stiff me for an invoice. It was the mid-1990s. Having been cut loose from The Travelers Managed Care and...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 24, 2015
Naïveté comes in all shapes and sizes. So does academic detachment. And so it is that we have a match-up of lightweights, who’ve now squared off three times in what’s come to be dubbed, The Rhetorical Rumble. For each bout, they enter the ring with...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 23, 2015
I’m noticing what seems to be a proliferation of a phenomenon called use cases. These seem to constitute vignettes or scenarios in which sellers of products or services illustrate various applications of said products or services — having already elucidated the...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 20, 2015
There’s an old expression in the graphic arts that says this: If you’re not creating an effective presentation of a message, it’s not design. It’s art. So it is with content: If you’re not creating an effectively persuasive message for an...
