The Ford executive who kept score of colleagues' verbal flubs

Mike O'Brien emailed a few hundred colleagues last month to announce his retirement after 32 years at Ford Motor.

- Mike Colias

The sales executive's note included the obligatory career reflections and thank yous-but came with a twist.

Attached to the email was a spreadsheet detailing a few thousand violations committed by his co-workers over the years.

During a 2019 sales meeting to discuss a new vehicle launch, a colleague blurted out: "Let's not reinvent the ocean." At another meeting, in 2016, someone started a sentence with: "I don't want to sound like a broken drum here, but..." For more than a decade, O'Brien kept a meticulous log of mixed metaphors and malaprops uttered in Ford meetings, from companywide gatherings to side conversations. It documents 2,229 linguistic breaches, including the exact quote, context, name of the perpetrator and color commentary.

After one colleague declared: "It's a huge task, but we're trying to get our arms and legs around it," O'Brien quipped: "Adding 'legs' into the mix makes it sound kinda kinky." There is a leaderboard and a clear GOAT of verbal flubs.

The list became so known and feared-that one executive cursed O'Brien's name in a meeting after tripping up on an expression. Violators could appeal their inclusion but success was rare. And nobody was above a grammatical roasting: Ford CEO Jim Farley twice made the list.

O'Brien scribbled the first of these violations on a whiteboard one day in his office in 2014. The 55-year-old Detroitarea native doesn't recall the first example or why he decided to formally call it out.