Coming Face to Face With Your Idol(s)

To this day I still call him Tommy Boy. His real name was Chris Farley, the fat and funny comedian of Saturday Night Live fame. You can't help but love his character in the movie Tommy Boy. But I feel a kinship with Chris Farley that goes beyond that (and our weight.)

Farley also did a bit on SNL where he interviewed living legends in the music and entertainment industries. One such interview was with Paul McCartney, the Beatle. Farley was so awestruck by the opportunity to sit with McCartney that he fumbled and stumbled all over himself trying to do the interview. It was on purpose and it was hilarious. Seriously, take a look:

I get to do my own version of this next month in Scottsdale, Ariz., where the elite of IT, Operations and BSS/OSS will sit down with me and give me the chance to be a little better than Chris Farley – not in a comedic sense, but a journalistic sense. I get why Farley fumbled. It's not easy trying to sound intelligent asking questions of people who know magnitudes more than you and are the living legends of their field. But that is exactly what I get to do next month. I'm working on my cue cards already.

I won't give it all away, but the B/OSS Executive Summit on Jan. 26 and 27 is shaping up to be quite an event. B/OSS will spend the better part of two days discussing issues such as the Customer Experience, software-as-a-service and the future of BSS and OSS with industry leaders such as Cindy Nash, CIO of Windstream, Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO of Telus, Robert Scott, CIO at Earthlink and Jason Cook, chief architect and chief technical officer, BT Americas and David Flanary, senior vice president at POINTONE – and more!

We will share their thoughts with you in the forms of written and video reports. Rest assured we will edit out any Farley-like moments by me and provide our audience only with the deep insights this summit is bound to produce. Be on the lookout for more details. And wish me luck; I don't want to give anyone reason to start calling me Timmy Boy.  

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.