by Mark O'Brien | Oct 22, 2014
Here are two direct quotes from real companies, spoken to me in face-to-face conversations: Company #1: We have to suspend marketing because revenues are tight, and we have to cut expenses. Company #2: We’re not going to continue marketing because all of the...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 15, 2014
Necessity is the mother of invention. (variously attributed) Historians are inching closer to consensus on the notion that if necessity is the mother invention, recreation must be the father of invention. While all of history has manifested evidence of males’...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 9, 2014
With all of the emails I receive about funeral insurance quotes, I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. But I was. Call me naïve. After all, if we’re too lazy to get out of our cars for coffee or fast food or banking — things we want, presumably, and...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 6, 2014
What’s the most valuable attribute of successful people? We can find lots of answers to the question from lots of sources: Courage. Vision. Imagination. Persistence. Willingness to fail. Iconoclasm. Lunacy. Every one of those attributes is a factor in the...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 1, 2014
A statement finding its way more frequently and annoyingly into the vernacular of business and politics is this: Hope is not a strategy. Yeah. The statement is true. But enough already. Its corollary statement is this: A tactic is not a strategy. Yeah. That’s...
