OOBE

We all know what entrepreneurship is. It is the cover-all-bases, create-from-whole-cloth style of leadership that must be exercised in order to establish or re-launch a new business entity and achieve sustainable success doing so. Some people mistakenly believe the central theme of entrepreneurship is the great big idea, but there have been plenty of game-breaking ideas that have been brought into the commercial landscape only to fall flat and fail miserably. Given the choice, I would much rather take hold of a somewhat pedestrian, but defensible, business idea or opportunity and support it with a market-winning strategy and near-perfect execution. There have been plenty of highly successful businesses built and sustained for the long-term on products and services that are nether revolutionary or exclusive. I’ll take a good idea and perfect execution every time over a great idea and marginal execution.

Now we find a new term… intrapreneurship… being batted around and added to the unofficial lexicon of commerce. Now what does that mean? Well, originally, the term intrapreneurship was coined to describe the process of driving entrepreneurial thinking and processes typical of start-ups and small businesses into and throughout large enterprise to promote creativity and positive change that sometimes gets lost or slowed as companies grow. It is a strategy of pushing deeper into the enterprise the authority and empowerment to effect change through the application of legitimate thought leadership, process re-engineering, and best practice creation/deployment. The end result is a large organization or enterprise that does not move like a sloth… that is agile and nimble… and that improves its ability to anticipate and gear up for changes in market conditions and capitalize upon emerging commercial opportunities.

The funny thing is… I am not certain that the concept of intrapreneurship isn’t just as relevant to the management and operation of small-to-medium enterprises (SME’s) as it is to large corporations. In my opinion, most small-to-medium businesses are still operating with a “plantation” mentality. In many cases, a single individual, typically the founder of the business, or a small ownership or executive management group, continue to lead the business in a manner consistent with a model that Jim Collins describes in his book, Good to Great, as “a shining star with a thousand helpers”. We at the executive/ownership level many times act as if we are feudal landowners possessing infinite wisdom and to whom all worldly resources have been rightfully assigned. Our regular routine is simply to summon all of our minions to the front lawn each morning so that we can assign tasks and responsibilities and then send them back into battle to do our bidding.

Intrapreneurship within small business dictates that the most accurate operational analysis be performed and necessary adjustments to product and process be recommended or made by those individuals that are closest to the work and in direct contact with the market. Scary, isn’t it? How do we adopt a new paradigm in which tactical business direction, measurement, and control is exercised though a distributed rather than a centralized model? It starts with the adoption of an intrapreneurial approach and attitude by all top-level executives or management. First, you must delegate authority for important aspects of your business. But you cannot pass the buck. You can empower individuals and delegate authority, but you can never delegate responsibility. As far as your Board of Directors is concerned, the responsibility for financial performance resides with the executive team regardless of how much authority has been bestowed upon other individuals within the organization. Secondly, the delegation of authority must carry with it an equal assignment of accountability. Each individual to whom authority has been assigned must also be provided a clear set of objectives (Key Performance Indicators – KPI’s) and be subject to an easy-to-administer measurement and reporting system so that each individual always knows where he/she stands against formal objectives and goals.

Exemplary intrapreneurial leadership requires an almost perfect blend of empowerment and accountability. Empowerment with no accountability is anarchy. Accountability with no empowerment is paralysis. An unbalanced operating model in either direction will kill your company or render it impotent. It takes both ingredients in equal measures to achieve an effective intrapreneurial operating model.