2) Intrapreneurs
An intrapreneur is someone who uses entrepreneurial thinking within a large organisation or system. They replace slow and dumb with fast and smart when no-one’s looking.
As a service-based startup, intrapreneurs make up the bulk of our client base. Other than being fun people to work with, I’ve found they possess some similar characteristics:
Deep, dark secrets
Intrapreneurs have intimate access to the multi-faceted complexities and failures of their industry, technology or company that external entrepreneurs don’t see.
Ask anyone who’s worked within a 1000+ seat organisation for more than a few years what sucks about their department. Most of their pain points are problems a startup mentality could fix.
Political leverage
It's no good having a great system-changing idea if you can't convince people it should be implemented. Intrapreneurs have a habit of landing in a position of influence. Even when they don't have seniority in their own right, they'll earn the trust and respect of a senior.
This is also expressed as a willingness to play the politics game. A common strategy for more junior employees is to shoulder all the risk of a new venture, whilst offering the glory to a senior colleague.
A habit of upsetting the apple cart
These are the people who install Google Chrome on all the office computers without asking IT, or convince their peers to have stand up meetings with clear agendas. These are the problem-solvers.
A real world example:
I’ve a colleague who manages a team within a large government body.
He ramped up his team's productivity to a point where they could hit their KPIs whilst simultaneously building new apps and smarter systems. A few tactics included refusing to use PDFs (plain text only, please) and physically installing domestic wi-fi routers at branches with dumb or restrictive net policies.
Many of the apps his team creates never see the light of day.
Sometimes, however, there’s an emergency that needs immediate government attention. His team has already created an appropriate solution. With the fear of a massive PR fallout looming, purse strings open and the solution is implemented, sans red tape.
Without anyone realising, the infrastructure is laid for the next round of legacy-system-breaking technology.
Another, corporate example:
We’ve a very clever client at a very big Australian corporation, who has skillfully wrangled the right people within his organisation, allowing us to implement dramatic technology changes.
He explained to the powers that be that the only way timelines could be maintained was to the minimise the scope of the project and almost entirely disregard all overbearing (and drastically out of date) brand guidelines. The small budget received less internal attention and increased design freedom. Bureaucracy demons vanquished, Squareweave designed the entire web application within a week.
Another ‘trick’ was testing early. We tested the app with real users at their head office before the app design was even complete. The positive internal reaction strengthened the internal business case.
An important part of this was having senior staff in the room during testing. They saw their employees getting excited and experienced a true bottom-up critique of internal systems. Importantly, this was all proportioned via the lens of an external company so no blame could be attributed to anyone internally.
Whilst intrapreneurs may have a tougher time wrangling the various internal mechanisms of their organisation, the payoff can be huge.
To quote one of my favourite (anonymous) intrapreneurs who rocks the social media department at one of the big Aussie banks:
“Sure, risk mitigation and red tape are nasty. However, if you ninja the politics you suddenly get to play with numbers that end with ‘illion’.”
This is part two in a series about startups. Next issue, we’ll figure out an idea by just freakin doing it.
