Norah's Notebook: Why Innovation does not belong in Corporate America

Since leaving the corporate grind last year (haha! I can say that now!) and restarting my Software Development firm, tekAura, I have come across many articles in the start-up community that keep on selling our secrets upstream.  The only saving grace is that I don't believe the corporate goons are capable of comprehending the underlying message. Anyone that has been a part of a corporate innovation initiative or two, or three hundred... you know what I mean!  It takes a unique kind of person to recognize the fallacy in these efforts.  After all the paper prizes and shiny internal disposable marketing packages, some of start wonder.... where is the change they keep talking about?  And one day, you stop, take a moment to look around and find yourself in a sea of drones, a sea of vacant button pushers.  Then you realize why everyone thinks you are nuts!  You make them look bad, you make them work harder.  Those people don't want to help, they don't believe they matter.  Why?  Because you have proven to them time and again they are worth less than the dirt from the smoking corner out in the parking lot.  So, no wonder you can't innovate.  You don't listen, you don't include, you don't care.  Whether because passion and drive is beaten out of you over the first 5 years of dedicated service or because you have given in to the executive bottom line requirements, management continues to struggle to translate your hidden agenda in actionable results on the cutting floor.  For this and many other reasons I will likely detail for the rest of my life, I was inspired to write the following comment on an article titled, Stop Stifling Entrepreneurs in Your Company:

Corporate environments have never and will never be truly interested in innovation.  While some, like Google and Pixar may carry the intention forward, there will always come a point, due to it's sheer mass, when the demands of production quantity exceeds quality.  If left to their own devices, Executives are much more interested in acquiring Entrepreneurship capital after most of the Research & Development activities have been completed, which is the most expensive part of any project.  They would much rather purchase a product during its maintenance phase and ride it until it retires, maintaining warranty contracts and neatly billable work hours.  Entrepreneurship is innately risky, most do not have the guts for it.  Even those of us that do are constantly seeking a formula for ensuring success.  It is this unique individual, this brave soul, who should and does rightly serve society well by being ahead of the curve and willing to release a project at its peak potential.  Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it...   More and more Entrepreneurs are leaving the Corporate facade for rough waters and choosing not to create a rapid business development portfolio that only adds superfluous layers to the start-up soup, but rather, build a small B2B firm.  These creative houses incorporate social responsibility into every project and drive true innovation within the economy.  The most sustainable ones stay small and flexible.

Automatically Share Blogger posts to Multiple Social Networks

Social Network Management is often costly and time consuming, to say the least.  Using a combination of IFTTT and Buffer, you can automatically share a blogger post to all your social networks for FREE!

Just follow these 5 simple steps:

1. Follow this post to Setup SMS to Google+
2. Login to Buffer and link to your social networks
3. Login to IFTTT
4. Use this IFTTT recipe to send ALL blogger posts to your SMS and/or Buffer emails
5. Use this IFTTT recipe to send LABELED blogger posts to your SMS and/or Buffer emails

I use a combination of the two IFTTT recipes, where all posts get sent to my personal network.  Then I use one labeled version per other network. Specifically, tekAura goes to my company pages, where tekNorah goes to my personal-business/company-employee network.

You might have noticed there is no SMS loop for the tekAura company network.  That is because Buffer now posts to Google+ Pages.  When they add posting to Google+ Profiles, I will likely be able to remove the SMS/Google Voice paths, as well.

By default, this setup will delay posting via Buffer based on your schedule.  This behavior can be modified with advanced controls on the Buffer Email Guide.  I usually add these as labels to the post so it is easy to identify which posts were sent immediately or to a specific profile.

UPDATE: You can only have one Google+ account activated per Google Voice number.  Also, links will not embed using this method.  Although not as visually appealing, it is still functional.

UPDATE 2: I have switched Automatic posting to Google+ from Blogger using this method: https://support.google.com/blogger/answer/1752748?p=share&rd=1 for My main NorahAura Profile.  However, Google+ SMS is still useful for other services like Tumblr, Disqus and posting to an alternate Google+ profile (tekNorah).

UPDATE 3: Opened to allow for reader comments.  Didn't realize I had it disabled for this post.  It appears I have to set this every time.  *Sarcastically* THANKS GOOGLE! You have made my life Oh-So! Simple as of late!.... Sorry guys, it is working now.  Also, please see the newly revamped Auto-share Diagram in the Related Posts.

Related Posts:
Closing the Auto-share loop: From Twitter to Google+