The Intrapreneur’s Dilemma: Be a Trouble Maker or Strategic Irritant?

We all heard of Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, but what is the Intrapreneur’s Dilemma?

I Stumbled onto this blog post at the Innovation Journalism blog by David Nordfors.  I felt so completely identified with this that I have to repost it here.  Here is what David says is the Intrapreneur’s Dilemma:

When someone tries to innovate within a traditional organization, few will understand what he/she is doing, but everybody will understand who is a trouble-maker.

After the innovation has been embraced by the organization, few will remember who started it,
but everybody will remember who was a trouble-maker.

This is the dilemma encountered by many intrapreneurs - they risk punishment for success.

In many cases, it is indeed more difficult to be an Intrapreneur than an Entrepreneur.  Being an Intrapreneur in a traditional organization often means that you are swimming against the current.  Not only you have to be mindful of the “Corporate Antibodies”, you have to deal with organizational rules and processes that are the opposite of agility.

To existing cash-cow businesses, you are doing things that might appear threatening to the “establishments”.  Yes, you work hard to get Top Down support for your programs, but the “Executives’ Memory” is often short.  At the first sign of trouble, you will feel like you are walking around with a target sign on your back.  If your team is successful, Business Units might fight to take over the project prematurely.  If you are not successful, then your team and/or budget get cut.  Another phenomenon is that in order to justify your projects, the sponsoring executives put such a high expectations on the teams, that it often forces the teams to make stupid mistakes - pushing things to far or too fast.  So, essentially, your incubation program have a high risk of becoming a perpetual failing machine.

So why on earth would someone want to be an Intrapreneur, or be responsible for an Corporate Incubator?  Why would the “good ones” not go out on his/her own and be an Entrepreneur instead?  The interesting dilemma for a company, is that if you do not setup the right environment, you ended up losing all your best ideas and people.  And what you do ended up funding might not be the top people or ideas that you would have gotten because the “really good ones” are already gone.  In other words, if you do not do this right, you might be better off NOT doing it.

On the positive side, in any company, there is no shortage of good loyal employees who want to help the company prospers.  They will work just as hard if they are properly motivated, and feel like they are having a material impact to the future of the company.  And no, I am not just talking about “lifers” employees who wear polyester ties.  You will be surprised how loyal and productive even the new younger employees can be.  I have argued with HR people before, about how loyal you can make the “Gen Y” employees.  My observation is that if you can cultivate a sense of mission, meaning, and belonging, you can get employees of ANY age group to be ultra loyal, productive, and creative.

Here are some specific suggestions I have for those who are responsible for creating and maintaining an environment for intrapreneurs to flourish:

1. Hire a Marketing Person

Raise internal and external visibility of your incubation program.  Constantly celebrate successes and more importantly the people behind them.  In a funny way, this is actually against my nature to trump my own horn.  But the right marketing person will be able to find the perfect balance, to help you get the visibility that you and your teams deserve without looking like a brown-noser.

2. Give Credit Where It’s Due

When an intrapreneur opportunity becomes a Hit, resist temptation to take credit.  Let the intrapreneur team gets the glory.  Give them the exposure for PR, Executives briefing activities, etc.  First, they deserve it.  Second, this is really the only real currency you have to motivate the team.  The good people, especially after they produce a “Hit”, can probably get a job anywhere in or out of the company.  They only way you can keep them motivated is to let them feel they are climbing the ladder and getting the exposure and the opportunity of a lifetime.  You the manager of the Incubator will get the credit, when you start producing multiple Hits.  Then people will realize that there is some magic behind this “madness” you are stirring…  Plus, you will get the loyalty and the love of the best people in your team.

3.  Be Vigilant in Constantly Educating the Executives

Executives’ memory can be short, especially when they are feeling the financial crunch or having a couple of bad quarters.   You have to constantly remind the Executives why they need an incubation program, show tangible results when you can, and talk their language.  (eg. You have a pipeline of X white space opportunities, that will produce $X billion in X number of years.  X% of your projects become cash flow positive in X number of months.  Chart your EBT impacts over time, etc.)

4. Get More Than One Executive Sponsors

You’ll need more than one Executive sponsors.  Frankly, you want the program to survive the C level “revolving door” syndrome.  Try to get more than one C level executives excited about the incubation program.  They have to feel like this is their “baby”.  Give them at least quarterly readouts.  Preferably, get them involved in some of the decision making so that they feel ownership of the projects.  C level executives are extremely time constrained though and thus their attention span is short.  You have to make things short and sweet and pre-digest the materials for them.  Don’t make them sit thru endless powerpoint slides.  Get right to the decision points and get their feedback.  Also, make your meeting with them very VALUABLE so that they want to come back for more.  Being the Incubator, you are running projects that are at the tip of the spear in terms of exploring new technologies, business models, etc.  You should be able to provide a lot of valuable market & customer intelligence that should be very interesting to the C level executives.

If you handle things correctly, you have an opportunity to brand yourself and your teams as Strategic Irritants, rather than Trouble Makers.  And this will give your incubation program and your intrapreneur teams a fighting chance to survive any potential short sightedness that you know is bound to pop up in trouble times…

P.S. I didn’t invent the term Strategic irritant.  I first heard of the term from Gary Bridges from SRI, and I loved it.  It’s always good to turn something negative (Trouble Makers) into positive!