Last night (Thursday, November 9th) in accepting an award in Tampa, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame managed to publicly demonstrate: 1) his naiveté; 2) his overblown self importance; and 3) his extraordinarily bad manners. Actually it wasn’t so much what he said during the acceptance speech he gave but what he said to a reporter from The St. Petersburg Times who interviewed him for an article about his award.
The occasion was the Tampa Bay Technology Forum’s third annual industry achievement awards gala. [Full disclosure: Consulting Intelligence is a member of TBTF and I was at the function with a number of CI’s employees.]
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the organization, TBTF is a regional professional association of technology and business leaders, investors, government, researchers and educators dedicated to growing and promoting Tampa Bay's technology “eco-system.” As is their custom at these events, TBTF honored the year's most significant achievements of business and technology professionals in the Bay area in a number of categories, including: Technology Professional Leader of the Year; Emerging Technology Company of the Year and Entrepreneurial Leader of the Year.
In addition, this year they decided to present a special, first time award for Visionary Achievement. Yep, it seems that St. Petersburg’s own Jimmy Wales was to be the first honoree. Apparently he was notiified and agreed to attend and accept the award.
Based on what the told the Times, one might think Jimmy believes everything he reads in the paper. Case in point was the article that appeared in The Tampa Tribune earlier in the week. It must be great to be great!
The bottom line is that if you do show up to accept an award you don’t malign the folks who are giving it to you. Perhaps hanging around with Bono and the Hollywood crowd has led Jimmy to believe he can behave as they do with their disingenuous and politically laden acceptance speeches at the Golden Globes and Oscar award ceremonies.
Jimmy, what follows is a bit of advice. If you do agree to accept an award, stand up, smile, be nice, say thank you and then sit down. If you can’t handle that, don’t bother showing up.
And finally, if you need help in buying a tux, give me a call. I’ll post a note to my readers and possibly we can all chip in to help you out.
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