Corporate Entrepreneurship: Look Before You Jump
I just finished reading the book, Entrepreneurs Inside: Accelerating Business Growth with Corporate Entrepreneurs, by Susan Foley. If I had to give this book a new title it would be “Intrapreneurship: Look Before Your Jump In” because it does an excellent job of providing the reader with the insights of what a corporate entrepreneurship journey looks like by placing the reader in the eye of the intrapreneurial storm and making you experience the ups and downs of the intrapreneurship journey. A nice addition to your intrapreneurship library.
I discovered the book somewhat by accident as I was corresponding with Susan on intrapreneurship. We realized we had several points in common; including being authors on corporate entrepreneurship, having myself published Winning at Intrapreneurship in 2015. So, I jumped on amazon and ordered her book. The author is well versed in the topic having a very strong background in corporate entrepreneurship herself. The book was published in 2007 but its content remains as relevant today as it did then. Specifically, I benefited from the following:
Intrapreneurship is a business process. What I found refreshing is that the book stresses all along that intrapreneurship is a business process, something I firmly believe in myself. Like any business process, it must be defined and its effectiveness and efficiency measured to ensure it is delivering on the business objectives of intrapreneurship. Because no two businesses are the same, the deployment of the corporate entrepreneurship process will vary from company to company. You will gain insights on how to understand the need to change existing systems and processes that simply will not support a new business.
The distinction between an intrapreneur and the intrapreneurial leader. Susan explains that intrapreneurs are a distinct breed of employees, which is backed up by her extensive research (comparing her results to 10,000 profiles) and is summarized by her Corporate Entrepreneur Profile. This profile lists the 17 core competencies that distinguish these employees from the rest. Her analysis further explains how the senior leaders of corporate entrepreneurship initiatives - the intrapreneurial leaders - display the same core competencies but six of them (accountability, adaptability, collaborative, execution, problem-solving, and tolerance for stress) to a much higher degree than the intrapreneur. She also points out that there is generally a lack of intrapreneurial role models in most organizations and suggests that some companies wanting to succeed with intrapreneurship may need to hire external intrapreneurial leadership help.
Assessing an organizational culture and transitioning to a culture of innovation and intrapreneurship. Based on her solid experience, the author provides several tools to assess (audit) your company’s current culture and readiness for intrapreneurship. These tools, along with real world examples, provide you with a good place to start to evaluate if you and your teams are ready to take on this challenge. She also covers the transition to an innovation culture and how to nurture creativity and address the resistance to change that will be felt.
The constant struggle to coexist within the corporate environment. Her descriptions of how the new business venture will struggle to survive along side the company’s core businesses rang very dear to my heart. I stress this in Winning at Intrapreneurship. She deals with the harsh reality that the initial excitement for the new venture will be quickly replaced by a resentment that the new venture requires capital, access to resources, and senior leadership attention well above what its business results justify. She emphasizes that the entrepreneurship team and its intrapreneurial leader will have to ride (as a team) a very stressful roller coaster before achieving success.
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