Part One of this post series talked about my compulsion to write stuff.
And it also touched upon my compulsion to share stuff. Specifically, articles about identity.
I’ve already told how I’ve created or managed five services over the years to share identity industry information, but I’ve never told any of the behind the scenes story regaridng the creation of the fifth identity information service. This one was created for Incode Technologies, which was (and is) very different from Bredemarket, and very different from IDEMIA, Safran, and Motorola.
Behind the scenes on the fifth identity information service
By the time I joined Incode, I had spent much of my life as an employee working for large bureaucratic multinational companies.
- I worked for Motorola when there was only one Motorola.
- MorphoTrak was part of the huge Safran Group (until it wasn’t).
- IDEMIA was, and is, a combination of dozens of previously independent companies that eventually merged into one big firm.
I was used to process. Motorola WAS process, and Safran and IDEMIA weren’t slouches at process either. You can’t build aircraft parts just by, um, winging it.
But now I found myself at Incode, a rapidly growing startup. It used (and uses) newer tools that didn’t even exist when I worked for Motorola. For example, it used Slack as one of its primary methods to communicate with employees.
As I perused the Slack channels offered at my new employer, a new idea popped into my mind. OK, it was actually a pretty old idea from my perspective, but it would be new to my coworkers.
“Why don’t I create a Slack channel devoted to identity industry information?”
But of course one does not simply create a corporate Slack channel.
Before establishing a Slack channel on a corporate platform, I knew (with the same certainty professed by certain generative AI services) that you obviously need to go through a lengthy approval process. You probably have to get signatures from the corporate headquarters, IT, and probably a few other organizations besides. I mean, I knew this, based upon extensive data that I had acquired up to 2021. (Actually mid-2022, but some of you get the reference.)
So I went to my boss Kevin, told him I wanted to create a Slack channel for identity industry information, and asked him what the official Incode approval process was to create the channel.
(And you wonder why my younger marketing coworkers said “OK Boomer” to me at times.)
Kevin was a patient boss. I don’t know what was going through his mind when I asked the question, but he simply smiled and said, “Just create it. And if no one uses it in a couple of weeks, just delete it.”
(They didn’t do that in La Défense or Issy-les-Moulineaux or Schaumburg, or even in Reston or Billerica or Alexandria or Tacoma or Anaheim or Irvine.)
So I did simply create the new corporate Slack channel, posting articles of interest to it, and letting my coworkers know about the channel’s existence.
And soon other people started posting to the channel.
And soon people other than myself were inviting other people to the channel.
I didn’t delete it.
So the fifth identity information service took off, and I settled into a routine. On many mornings, I did the one thing that experts say you shouldn’t do. I started my morning by reading my corporate email.
(Despite being a Sage, I’m still a Revolutionary/Rebel/Maverick.)
And as I read my various alerts and emails I’d find articles of interest, identify a brief excerpt that encapsulated the main point of the article, and share the excerpt (occasionally with an editorial comment) and article to the Slack channel.
Compulsively.
Of course, because I was devoting time to the company-only fifth identity information service, the Bredemarket LinkedIn showcase page (the fourth identity information service) wasn’t receiving that much attention. Bredemarket wasn’t doing any identity consulting anyway, so I was spending my limited Bredemarket time pursuing other markets. And pouring my identity compulsion into Incode’s Slack channel.
‘Til Tuesday
(Couldn’t resist.)
Then on Tuesday my routine was shattered. For purposes of this post, I’ll simply say that I no longer had access to that fifth identity information service, or to any of Incode’s Slack channels.
But I still had my identity information sharing compulsion.
I was still reading articles (albeit from other sources), and I still had the urge to share them on the Slack channel, but then I remembered that I couldn’t.
That’s when I started hearing the plaintive call of the wildebeest.
My old forgotten friend the wildebeest was soothingly telling me that I could go back to the fourth identity information service and share identity stuff there again.
I hadn’t shared anything to that Bredemarket LinkedIn showcase page in over two weeks. But starting that Tuesday, I started sharing several items a day, successfully redirecting my compulsion and sharing to a new target.
So what? I’ll explain why this whole story is important to YOU in Part Three.
Bredemarket 
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