Digital Zero to Hero: Mastering Intrapreneurship — Can incumbents move at the speed and agility of a start-up? (2/8)

This is a series of 8 blogposts on Digital Leadership.

20 minutes. It’s the time it will take you today to decide whether you are an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur. CEOs, it’s the time it will take you to decide to appoint a Chief Intrapreneur Officer, to get your company moving at speed. In any case, don’t leave it there, it’s time to master this skill and beat millenials and GenZ in their ambition to change the workplace. We are all driven by passion and big projects that could change the world. We’ve got this big idea that should not be missed by this monolithic FTSE company. We don’t like 9–5pm jobs, even if we like to work 9–5pm. We want purpose, we are seeking impact. As an IT engineer specialising in AI, opportunities to remake the customer experience simpler, easier and more inclusive, cut costs and launch new ventures through technology became an obsession. But it’s hard and you need to engineer your plan carefully. Above all, you must accept that success will be collectively to the company rather than individually for you, which is the fundamental difference with entrepreneurs.

It was another of those 6pm-pub moments, I was catching up with one of my close colleagues and he told me: ‘I know you are feeling a bit down, but you know, you’ve managed the hardest thing in a corporate world: create something new that didn’t exist and could shift a corporate course’. I never thought about it like this, but when I feel the pain again, I just think hard about what he said. It eases the pressure, probably like entrepreneurs have things to hold onto during the demands of the funding round.

Here is your guide to mastering Intrapreneurship.

Step 1 — You need a project that will change the world

Everything starts with a big idea. There is an opportunity not to be missed. And your idea if it succeeds could make the world better, you can change the course of thousands of jobs, increase the GDP by X%, give everyone access to something. Start gathering information by reading CEO, CFO, HR interviews and annual reports, financial performance to understand where the opportunity will best fit.

Now, you have to make this big idea as dumb as possible. If a kid in your family can’t get it, neither will an adult with a 30 second attention span. Test it with friends, professional network, on Quora or other relevant social media.

Sample pitch:

Eg. I have the most successful vein authentification technology company. I know there are similar products on the market but mine is different as I calculate the

Eg. Can you imagine a world where we all get secure and frictionless access to devices and internet. I mean getting rid of passwords, especially this excel file. It will massively save XX$$ of fraud. It’s an opportunity not to be missed, several are tackling it in the market, but here is my view of what can make you very successful.

Step 2 — Your sense of purpose needs to be dedicated to the organisation and be greater than your personal goals

Be ready for intrapreneurship. This is not a story where you are the hero. Your success will be measured by a number of senior executives succeeding because of your idea. Navigate under the radar or someone else is likely to get in your way. You will have to develop a great deal of inner resilience. So start your new daily routine practising Headspace, patting yourself on the back for achieving 3 successes a day and understanding what drives your energy and passion up and down.

Step 3- Sponsorship and Collaboration are key

Find your sponsor or make sure she finds you. Practise the pitch of your big idea and have a ready deck of just 2–3 pages. Get onto the radar of senior executives, attend their external presentations or all-hands meetings; and get hold of them at the end of the session, catch them in the lift, between 2 meetings but don’t ask for a coffee or a meeting. Try the company social collaboration tools. Be prepared to take feedback on-board and once again measuring success will very much look like them standing and talking about your big idea in their own words. Practice Influences skills.

The deck will always be the same:

• a 1-pager summary talking about the opportunity — what is the big idea, who has done it, who to aspire to, how to do it.
• a second page with a bunch of graphs and data proving your points
• a couple of experiential pages with a very slick design that makes your idea concrete and accessible

Step 4- Do it cheaper, quicker, accelerate, fail and pivot, validate with customers

You found the sponsor of your big idea. She gave you a little investment to mobilise your project. It’s time to take your idea to execution a bold solution prototype tested with customer in a couple of weeks, for the lowest possible cost. The main divergence between Intrapreneur and a Corporate Executive is in the way they execute. Whilst for you, Intrapreneurs, iterating products as we test and learn from customers, accelerating, pivoting and failing is nothing then than normal, however for the corporate, it’s sounds risky, scary thoughts and missing a detailed plan. This reminds me of a time when one of my team came back from lunch with one of the exec’s team member. She was slightly disappointed, so I had to ask… She complained that ‘Apparently in innovation, we execute before we think through’.

As an intrapreneur, you will leverage the so called ‘lean start-up’ or ‘design thinking’ technique. You will set-up your first minimum viable proposition (MVP) in couple of days, and rapidly design solutions concepts, prototypes and demos better than any other existing solution. You will use co-creative innovation methods to deliver the maximum value in the minimum time: qualitative research, identifying emerging trends and unmet needs, benchmarking, ideating, prototyping. Two validations are crucial in the process: the validation of both your sponsor and your customers. The speed of your execution matters most. Let’s be clear: this is not going to be perfect first time. Then you will create a convincing visual and experiential solution in whatever the best format is to get it viral: prototype, demo, video, posters, …

Source : https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/497155246337148959/

If you already have a team in the company, you can leverage part of your resources to support the project. If not, it’s time to fish around town for the best and most creative start-ups in tech, work with sourcing and procurement on how we can on-board them quickly.

Step 5- Talks number and measure impact

Money will not flow forever, eventually someone will come and cut your budget or shut your idea down. Intrapreneurs generally have a high level of creativity. But one of the issues is the way they express themselves. Using iterative techniques with customers at the heart doesn’t mean we don’t track reporting on experimentation. Each of your experiments needs to have a clean start with a well-defined set of hypotheses to be proven. The final outputs must be consumable by senior executives. What happens between these steps is dependant of the needs of your organisation vs your ability to execute at speed. I have seen some project fail under the burden of a heavy reporting. The ones that succeed are always the same: they report on the impact you had on customers, margin increase or revenue growth.

Let’s have a look at a concrete example:

Recommended training: read the Economist in depth each week or hang-out with a McKinsey Consultant or an Investment Banker (yes, I know, I married one).

Step 6- Build a team, where each person is better than you at one thing

This one is obvious, but you will have to recruit top talent. And as your big idea becomes more visible to senior executives, you will have very little time to train your team and will be looking for the best to execute. So, hunt hard for your talent at the beginning: the ones that share your passion for this big idea. The ones who will be eager to trailblaze in a large corporate while always wearing a velvet glove. The ones who will always remember their frustration is only a sign of their ambition. The ones who will be able to deal with high level of ambiguity and are equipped with a certain dose of emotional IQ to ride the chinese walls to their advantage. Not everyone is made to be an intrapreneur, nor wants to be.

In your team, you need to make sure each of the recruits is better at one skill than you and support them to develop it and expose this new capability to the organisation.

Step 7 — Greenhouse the ideas of your sponsors and others

Intrapreneurs have the skill to rapidly join the dots, to understand the strategic context and to drive execution in an ambiguous environment. Some time ago, I was working for a C-level and whilst he was talking to me my body language probably translated my uncomfort at his thoughts. He stopped for a sec and said ‘Claire, I know you are already forming a plan in your head as I am explaining my problem. And next time we see each other, within a week, you will come with a proposition. If I am talking to you about it, it’s because it’s not easy’. Well, maybe he just wanted to bring me some comfort and get some free work to get done. But it appeared in my career that I learn to master the NIG: Networks, Influencing, Get stuff done. There is still much to learn though.

Here is the thing: listen carefully to what people are saying to you and ask questions if you can. If you like the challenge of this problem, take it on board and greenhouse the idea. Put a 1-pager together and send it back within 24h and move on. Ask questions about the big problems of your executives and what keeps them awake at night. Talk with your sponsors about how you can support them, find the ideas they don’t have the time to develop and come back with a plan. And don’t be naive, senior executives generally seed the ideas in 5–10 heads, so use your network to find out who else is working on it and if you can join some dots here.

Step 8 — Dismantle when achieved

As mentioned in step 2, the big idea is not yours; success belongs to the corporate. As you go along your journey, your success is measured by the ability of the organisation to learn something new and different. Create your initial plan to dismantle your fantastic execution engine. Talent will feed through the organisation or just decide to move on. Extracting yourself from this situation will not be easy though, as the organisation will have adjusted to your difference.

Here we go again, you have become a lamp near grandma’s comfy armchair — so wake up, it’s time to get out of here and go to your next idea!

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The series of 7 blogs is inspired by my daily interactions with senior leaders across industries. As Digital became the norm, several leaders are transitioning their leadership.

I am Claire Calmejane, a computer engineer who has spent a decade supporting large organisations harness the power of Digital. I am always scouting for talent across the globe for my projects, if you are passionate, feel free to reach out!

Follow me on Twitter @ccalmeja.