The Day I Became An Intrapreneur

Today is the first day of my twelfth year at Centerline. It’s a very different agency today than it was on the day I started. And it’s likely going to be different one year from now as well. It has always been an evolving organization; and that’s one of the reasons I love it.

But eight years ago, I thought my run at Centerline was over. It was the realization of Centerline’s comfort with ambiguity and evolution that kept me here at the time. Let me explain…

Just a few years into my tenure at Centerline, management sent out a survey to the agency that included this question: How long do you plan to be at Centerline?

There were several check-box options. I was the only person (out of the 20 or so Centerliners at the time) to answer: Less than 1 year.

It was my honesty in that answer — and more importantly, my honesty in articulating “why” when asked about it—that changed everything.

The “why” was this: Not only did I feel stagnant in my role, I thought the agency was stagnant in our view of what we were capable of. It seemed that talents and desire (of not just myself, but other Centerliners) weren’t being fully exercised. I knew we had more to offer. We just needed to push ourselves and clients a little harder… illuminate some new possibilities.

I expressed all this when Charles (Founder and CEO) stopped me one day shortly after the survey to ask me about what I wanted my future to be –about why I didn’t feel I’d be at Centerline much longer. I had actually already started looking at other opportunities; but that open conversation launched me down the path of many more years of challenging, rewarding, fun days of work at Centerline.

Because after articulating that I felt we could be more strategic and holistic in our offerings — that we should be pushing more toward the leading and trailing edges of marketing, rather than just production—Charles’ response was: We agree. Let’s do that. Let’s build it here together.

That open invitiation to be a driver of evolution lit a fire. It wasn’t an invitation to “more fully develop an interactive group” or “build a formal strategy offering and team.” Those were part of the acts to be done; but only as a part of the larger invitation to continually look for and build “what’s next.”

It’s a path of intrapreneurship that keeps me engaged, day in and day out, year after year.

From Wikipedia:

Gifford Pinchot III and Elizabeth Pinchot (1984) defined intrapreneurs as “dreamers who do. Those who take hands-on responsibility for creating innovation of any kind, within a business”.[1] In 1992, The American Heritage Dictionary acknowledged the popular use of a new word, intrapreneur, to mean “A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”.

Now, to be clear, the idea for evolving into something more as an agency — perpetually — wasn’t solely mine. Obviously, Charles and others had been thinking similarly about what the next iteration of Centerline might look like. And I’m not saying that the invitation to me was the catalyst that launched us to where we are as an agency today. Credit for that belongs to many people.

But I feel my statements identified me as someone who would take the reigns of driving innovation and the responsibility for making new ideas and offerings work within our agency. And I am excited to have been a part of leading the growth, maturity and continual reinvention of Centerline over the last several years based on that.

Perhaps I’m even more excited every time I get to pass along that invitation to new leaders. That happens often. Every time someone leans in — way in — and expresses that they want to build something bigger than themselves.

Those people are comfortable with not quite knowing what “next” will look like as they drive forward. They want the new iteration of Centerline to offer more paths for their colleagues to exercise their own talent and intelligence. They have a clear vision of what they’re driving for as professionals, what they want their agency to be driving for. And they’re continually evolving in their own goals. They, too, are intrapreneurs.

It makes for a dynamic environment. I’m glad I got my opportunity to discover the true, evolutionary nature of Centerline those many years ago. I’m happy that I opted in. And I’m looking forward to helping navigate the evolution with new leaders and partners over the next eleven years or so.