Cultivating Internal Entrepreneurs
"Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t - Anonymous." It's a compelling quote that captures the spirit of entrepreneurship and yet throws a blazing light on its inherent difficulties. Imagine then leveraging this entrepreneurial spirit within an organization – a process at once fraught with challenges and yet potentially replete with rewards. That is what we call cultivating internal entrepreneurs or ‘intrapreneurs.’
Outside the Silicon Valley enclaves and the startup incubators, intrapreneurship might not resonate as the typical modus operandi. However, drawing upon the steep learning curves, the relentless innovation, and the unfettered creativity inherent in entrepreneurial practices deeply benefits well-established corporates and often provides them an invincible edge over their competitors.
To harness this spirit, we must first understand – what stops organizations from cultivating their mini-entrepreneurial ecosystems? More often than not, the culprits are conventionally risk-averse corporate culture, fossilized processes, and bureaucracy overload.
Roger Martin, in his acclaimed Harvard Business Review article “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning”, emphasizes the need to abandon our fear of failure. He professed that the same applies to intrapreneurship. An organization that fears failure often fails to empower its employees thereby creating a culture of passivity rather than proactivity. Nothing kills intrapreneurship faster than the anticipation of punitive reprisals for a well-intended initiative gone adrift.
An ideal environment for internal entrepreneurs fosters collaboration, allows for failure, and unshackles the chains of conventional thinking, as suggested by Simon Sinek in his transformative book, “Start With Why". The question here is how to create an environment that emboldens employees to think outside the box and take calculated risks?
Organizations like Google and 3M have successfully done so by allotting a percentage of the employee's time to pursue passion projects. This 'slack time' policy, coined by Google, has led to innovations as profound as Gmail and Google News. 3M’s policy dating back to the 1950s has produced great products like the Post-It Note. By creating a supportive platform and by nurturing a mentally flexible work environment, these companies have spurred the intrapreneurs within their ranks to drive innovation and growth.
Another indispensable component in cultivating intrapreneurship is senior leadership’s commitment to promoting a culture of innovation and risk-taking. Leaders who are open to ideas and recognize the potential in junior employees, foster a climate where innovation thrives. Leaders should be open to cross-pollinating ideas, allowing their teams to learn from their successes and failures.
The quintessential elements of this culture must be rooted in the company's DNA. Without the right structures and guidance, even the most ingenious ideas can fall flat. Hence, alongside fostering a conducive culture, companies should invest in setting up formal innovation management systems. Such systems enable the monitoring of ideas, their execution, and their impact, thereby encouraging continued innovation and intrapreneurship.
Empowerment plays a critical role in cultivating an innovative and entrepreneurial environment. Companies must do more than just hinging on a set of well-formulated policies. They must confer ownership and provide the required resources to their employees. Institutionalizing the practice of internally funding viable ventures promotes the spirit of entrepreneurship.
Despite the numerous potential benefits, cultivating intrapreneurship isn’t a cakewalk. It requires not only change in the organizational culture but also a tandem shift in the mindset of its stakeholders, peppered with the sustenance of the leadership’s commitment. However, once installed, this engine of innovation will drive the organization to unforeseen heights of ingenuity and commercial success.
As Roger Martin intuits in "Playing to Win," strategy is a choice. Similarly, cultivating internal entrepreneurs is indeed a strategic choice, catalyzing a continuous cycle of creativity, “unconventionality” and risk-taking. It is, at its crux, a choice to invest in the future and grow.
As Simon Sinek noted, "People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” Organizations that foster an atmosphere of intrapreneurship substantiate their commitment not only to innovation and growth but also to their workforce, who are the backbone of their enterprise. Cultivating Internal Entrepreneurs, therefore, is not just a mantra for sustained business success; it is a clarion call for a challenging yet rewarding cultural transformation.