Intrapreneuring

My post last week about "Great Companies... Once" and their leadership aroused some interest, and some controversy.  Some of it ran like this -- You're right, of course, that these companies have falied us and we don't yet call them out....   But you cannot just say this is Harvard Business School's fault, without saying more, or MORE IMPORTANTLY, giving us some options."

Apt critique, don't you think?

One antidote, in my view, is INTRAPRENEURING, a word not used very commonly, but one that got briefly into the public lexicon about the time that ENTREPRENEURING became known.  The difference is that Intrapreneurs wend their craft inside larger corporations, on behalf of others, rather than starting their own company.

Many pundits, including Michael Schrage at MIT, observe that Intrapreneurs cannot exist today because corporate leaders are no longer tolerant of their spasmodic, episodic inventive approach -- they seek efficiency and productivity from their design teams rather than innovation.  And that, some would say, is indeed a function of the Harvard Business School teaching which has by now permeated the entire MBA school approach in America.

I think it is more fundamental than that.  The problem is that MBA candidates seldom are practicing engineers; they tend to be either recent graduates with little practical experience, or folk with financial training rather than scientific or engineering training.  This is a critical difference in two respects -- first, the constant experimentation / validation nature of scientific inquiry with lots of trial and error, and a whole lot of compromise, eludes such folk.  Secondly, the notion that failed experimentation is positive, i.e. that risk taking and learning from the duds is valuable and necessary, feels just somehow wrong.

The net result is that we have a nation of MBA leaders who are avowedly risk-averse, rather than a nation of designers who are not innovative.

What to do about it?  Well, for one, we can stop extolling ENTREPRENEURS as the only way to solve the riddle (this, you might know, is the Stanford antidote, and also the Obama 'answer').   Entrepreneurs, as almost any Silicon Valley venture capitalist will aver, are seldom suited to running a company once it passes the 'first product' stage.  Instead, a 'serial entrepreneur' is brought in as "adult supervision" -- think Eric Schmidt at Google to 'help' Sergey and Larry for a decade.  But note that Eric was a key Intrapreneur at Sun Microsystems in its infancy, then a leader at Novell when it contended strongly with Microsoft, before going to Google.  Earlier, he had stints at Bell Labs, Zilog, and XeroxPARC, all noteworthy "corporate" innovators.  In short, he was a risk-taking intrapreneur himself, rather than an MBA financial type.  Richard Branson, the crazy genius entrepreneur for Virgin Airliens and several hundred other 'companies' did an interview for Entreprenurs.com where he said that the only way he could build his companies into something substantial was by using Intrapreneurs.  The editors about gagged, but ran the story.  Branson was spot on.

So, maybe a new word for you -- INTRAPRENEURING.   More about this, and more about what InnovaScapes Institute might do to help it become more known, and hopefully more prevalent, to come