Thank you to Scotty Iseri and his office antics! I got a huge traffic spike yesterday as you can see here:
We have been told by Scotty to stay tuned, he may have been fired (this was caught on video) but he says he’s not down for the count. We’ll have to wait and see what that means.
His firing may not have been a big surprise, what with him singing songs about how he can’t get fired in spite of a laundry list of general office misbehavior, most of which was captured on video.
In the episode below he gets chewed out for his inappropriate attire:
In the video below he receives the email that must be the precursor to his boss screaming repeatedly, “fired, fired, fired”, like a maniac.
Good luck, Scotty. If I had been your employer, I hope I would have found a way to harness your creative energy because apparently there is a lot of it!
Scotty’s boss, who could easily be Mad Money’s James Cramer, discovered his videos on Laughing Squid, and the rest is history.
Pay close attention to the boss’s use of the word “bing” in past tense. Scotty told him to use “bing” in place of “google (verb form)” to sound more cutting edge. Solid gold!
Has anyone else worked with someone like Scotty? The kind of guy who should have been fired twenty times over but always seemed to dodge the bullet…and then actually got a raise. If they weren’t so likable you would probably hate them.
Good luck in your next endeavor, Scotty, and thank you for the laughs.
This is a great exchange between the always entertaining Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week) and Kevin Rose (Digg) courtesy of Glenn McElhose. I have been a fan of Ferriss for quite some time and even benefited from his outsource/delegate your life strategieson this very blog.
The two talk about market testing and website naming. Ferriss discusses how he decided where his book should be placed in book stores for maximum exposure. How did he test for placement? He made a mock-up book cover, before his book was even published, and put it on a book of a similar size. Ferriss then placed his book in various places on book store displays and timed the people browsing the shelves to see how long it took them to pick it up. I’m not sure what he would have done if someone had try to actually buy the book but I love how hands-on his approach was.
If you Twitter you have surely noticed those little hash marks (#). They signify that the post is related to a specific keyword. Some examples: #iPhone or #whyitweet. This is one of those beautiful user-regulated, Web 2.0 ways of categorizing things. Simple and effective and if you have a program like TweetDeck you can subscribe to the keyword you want to follow.
Almost 2 years ago I wrote the Tracksuit Manifesto. It was my attempt to define the vision I had of a more enlightened generation. This vision is what inspired the name Tracksuit CEO: casual and urban with an entrepreneurial spirit. You will notice I didn’t choose the name Starched Shirt CEO or Power Tie CEO. (Though I must admit to having worn each of these on at least one occasion)
Many things have happened since that first post and my world view has also changed and developed, but the essential idea remains. I still refuse to wear polo shirts and yes I do wear a red digital watch with my business suits (on the rare occasion that I wear a business suit). And I certainly will never be caught playing with my kids on the playground wearing a Bluetooth headset. I fully embrace and relish my various roles: husband, father, professional, etc. — all very grown-up roles but in a very peculiar way I still refuse to grow up. An article that seemed to sum up this new generation of people like me is Adam Sternbergh’s Up With Grups in New York Magazine. Sternbergh wrote an article that was informative and entertaining and, at the same time, made me feel uncomfortably transparent. My wife, Leslie, felt the same way when she read this little deconstruction of a generation (or two).
In my grad course on human development I wrote my final research paper on this singular phenomenon: grown-ups wanting all the benefits of growing up without really behaving, dressing or listening to music like grown-ups. I took it one step further and compared this so-called Grup (or male Grup to be more specific) to the increasingly ubiquitous Man-Child. It was fascinating to analyze these two groups of men, both of whom refuse to grow up, yet both are approaching it in very different ways.
If you are interested in reading the full paper, the PDF is available here: Grup vs. Man-Child
