Entries by Mark O'Brien

A Word About Culture: Part Five

This is the fifth and final post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures: Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid Collaboration but with Individual […]

A Word About Culture: Part Four

This is the fourth post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures: Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid Collaboration but with Individual Accountability Flat but […]

A Word About Culture: Part Three

This is the third post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures: Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid Collaboration but with Individual Accountability Flat but […]

A Word About Culture: Part Two

This is the second post in a series inspired by a Harvard Business Review article, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”, that posited these five characteristics of effective corporate cultures: Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Willingness to Experiment but Highly Disciplined Psychologically Safe but Brutally Candid Collaboration but with Individual Accountability Flat but […]

A Word About Culture: Part One

A recent edition of Harvard Business Review carried an article entitled, “The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures”. At first, we thought it was about Greek yogurt. Then we read it and learned it’s about the five characteristics of effective corporate cultures. Here they are: Tolerance for Failure but No Tolerance for Incompetence Willingness to Experiment […]

Technology Emerges … Unless it Doesn’t

We came across an article the other day on a site called, The Frisky (we’re not making that up). The article was called, “11 Emerging Insurance Technology Trends to Watch in 2019”, and it featured, wouldn’t you know it, an infographic. It also made this prognostication: $2 Billion will be invested into emerging insurance technologies […]

The Future of Insurance

With everyone from consultants to analysts, from trade publications to software vendors, from insurtechs to FOMOs writing about the future of insurance, we started thinking we might be conspicuous by our absence. So, in the interest of living on the bleeding edge of insurance prognostication (don’t worry … we have lots of styptic), here are […]

The Hamster In the Black Box

Every once in a while, we like to take a look back at the insurance industry’s technical literature. It reminded us that, at a time in the not-too-distant past, it was impossible to pick up anything — trade publications, marketing collateral from vendors, reports from the analyst community, et al. — without reading about Service […]

Changing the Subject Won’t Help

We firmly believe in the notion that anything is possible. If a person puts his mind to something, or if a group of people commits to working together to accomplish something previously unaccomplished, we’re among the first to believe it can be done. But believing anything is possible isn’t the same as believing everything is possible. […]

Let’s Be Careful Out There

At various points in the year, we like to review some of the things that have been forecasted to take place in or be important to the insurance industry. As a result of such a review, we came across a piece from PropertyCasualty360 called, “Four trends shaping insurance in 2019.” In brief, the four predicted […]