Promote Yourself (26 page)

Of course, creating a new business at work and becoming an intrapreneur isn't going to be easy, but hey, there's no true reward without risk. I actually think it's risky to
not
take risks at work. The downside of taking a risk is that you crash and burn. But most smart managers respect someone who's tried and failed more than someone who's never even tried. And the upside is that people can't help but notice you if you're going above and beyond your job description. They'll want to work with you (and possibly, for you). And that's how careers are made.

 

Intrapreneurship Might Not Be New, but It's Becoming a Big Deal in Corporate America

Although the word
intrapreneurship
isn't used nearly as often as its cousin, entrepreneurship, the concept has been around for a long time. One of the first examples was Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works (more formally referred to as the Advanced Development Programs, ADP), which got its start in 1943. Skunk Works is credited with developing a number of revolutionary products, including the U-2, the SR 71 Blackbird, and the F-22 Raptor. The project was headed by Kelly Johnson, and according to Lockheed, “what allowed Kelly to operate the Skunk Works so effectively and efficiently was his unconventional organizational approach. He broke the rules, challenging the current bureaucratic system that stifled innovation and hindered progress.”

Today, seventy years later, Skunk Works still exists at Lockheed, and hundreds of other companies have launched similar initiatives (sometimes even referred to as Skunk Works projects). Knowing they need to think entrepreneurially if they're going to survive and thrive, they've found that intrapreneurship programs help them attract top talent, fuel innovation, and build competitive advantage. As Ingrid Vanderveldt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Dell, told me, “Companies are under pressure more than ever before to be innovative and they know entrepreneurs are creative, innovative people who make big things happen on limited resources.”

And companies are definitely walking the walk (instead of just talking about it), implementing corporate intrapreneurship contests, Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) programs, and more. Overall, 30 percent of large companies now provide seed funds to finance intrapreneurial efforts, according to management consultant Gifford Pinchot. Let me give you a few examples:

 

• At Google, employees can spend 20 percent of their time on projects that are outside their job description—as long as they benefit Google customers. Google says that half of their original products were developed in these 20 percent programs. These include Gmail, Google News, and AdSense.

 

• Facebook has a nontraditional intrapreneurship program called the Hackathon
,
which promotes product innovation by encouraging engineering teams to collaborate on software projects. The famous Like button was a Hackathon product.

 

• PwC (a large consulting firm) has the PwC PowerPitch that encourages innovation by offering $100,000 to the team that comes up with the best service offering. PowerPitch winners have created new analytic centers and new innovations in cloud computing. The company estimates that 60 percent of its global workforce of 30,000 are engaged in the program.

 

• At DreamWorks, top execs—including the Chief Creative Officer and the CEO—are willing to listen to anyone who has an idea for a movie. DreamWorks is so serious about this that they teach their employees how to pitch—something hundreds of people have taken advantage of.

 

• Entrepreneurs in Residence at Dell meet with intrapreneurs and provide mentorship and guidance. The company also supports a MSTC (Master of Science in Technology Commercialization) program at the University of Texas to help intrapreneurs evaluate new ideas and possibly go out and start their own companies. The Dell Innovators Credit Fund will be making partial scholarships available to Dell employees.

There's no question that corporations are taking intrapreneurship seriously, supporting and embracing it—and they should get plenty of credit for that. However, it's important to recognize that a lot of it is being fueled by young workers, people with great ideas that they don't have the resources to develop on their own, young people who aren't afraid to take risks and to do something outside their current job description.

Before I get into how to become an intrapreneur, I want to spend a few minutes talking about
why
you might want to do it in the first place, and some of the challenges you may face. Let's start with the good stuff:

 

•
It's a great way to better align who you are with what you do.
If your job isn't everything you want it to be, you can change it by pursuing and developing pet projects you're passionate about.

 

•
Intrapreneurship allows you to create new positions and advance in your career faster than you might have been able to on the regular track.
The connections you'll make and the supporters you'll have behind you will allow you to potentially skip entire layers of the corporate hierarchy.

 

•
Intrapreneurship gives you unique experiences that differentiate you from your peers.
We've talked a lot in previous chapters about how important it is to stand out, to be seen as an expert or go-to person. Nothing will highlight you more than building your own business inside your company. Intrapreneurship is also a fun, challenging way to learn and make changes.

 

•
Intrapreneurship is less risky than being an entrepreneur because you'll have the corporation's resources available.
If you're an entrepreneur, you could be financing your idea with credit cards or borrowing from friends and family. If the idea goes belly-up, you could be out a lot of money and relationships could get strained.

 

•
Intrapreneurship can be a bridge to becoming a full-on entrepreneur later on.
By starting your own business on the job—on your employer's dime and time—you're gaining the skills, understanding of the process, and the confidence you'll need to run a business without your company's help in the future.

As you can tell, I'm pretty passionate about intrapreneurship. But there can be a few challenges because you're trying to do something that hasn't been done before or improving something that
has
already been done. With change comes resistance and you have to be ready for it. As we talked about in the previous chapter, your primary responsibility is to keep doing your current job in an exemplary manner. If you aren't impressing the hell out of everyone around you, you'll never get them to support your efforts to do something else. So at least in the beginning, you'll need to juggle (brilliantly) your day-to-day job along with your intrapreneurial goals.

Another challenge you might face is your fear of failure and that's natural so don't think you're alone. You may be afraid that you won't get the management buy-in you'd need to succeed or that you'll be fired if you fail. There's also a possibility that you'll bump up against a kind of reverse ageism: Since you're young, a lot of people will automatically think you're inexperienced, that you need to prove yourself, and that you might not be capable of starting a business. Your job is to prove them wrong through hard work, persistence, and creative ideas. All entrepreneurs know what rejection feels like and have the scars to prove it. Pushing through these obstacles will make it that much more satisfying when your project is a success.

 

Is Intrapreneurship Right for You?

Intrapreneurship isn't right for everyone. But if half or more of the following statements are true for you, you should definitely consider pursuing it.

1. You've got a passion for something your company isn't doing right now.

2. You see opportunities that others don't.

3. You're creative and innovative in your thinking.

4. You're willing to take risks.

5. You're a great networker and can build cross-functional relationships.

6. You're a natural salesperson.

7. You're good at working on teams and collaborating.

8. You're politically savvy and understand how your company operates.

I want to tell you about a friend of mine, Ken Pickard, an Advisory Senior at Ernst & Young, who definitely could have answered yes to most of the statements above. Ken had—and still has—a real knack for social media (1, passion). During Ken's second year with the firm, a senior manager in the Advisory practice asked him if he would be interested in joining her team for an internal competition, the Innovation Challenge (4, willing to take risks). The goal of the competition was to challenge employees to come up with new service offerings for Ernst & Young clients. After a brainstorming meeting, Ken suggested that his team, which consisted of several staff members senior to Ken, explore social media risk. “I questioned what, as a firm, we were doing to address the risks associated with businesses adopting the new technology,” he said (2, seeing opportunities, and 3, creative, innovative thinking). During the first meeting, Ken convinced his colleagues that “the risks were real, that companies were investing in the technology, and that the global Ernst & Young organization hadn't developed a publicized offering to address the issues” (6, natural salesperson). Ken's team made it through the first few rounds of the competition and made it to the finals.

To make sure his team's product was the best it could be, Ken reached out to a team based in Switzerland that had been developing, and actually delivering, a similar service offering, and found ways to collaborate (7, good working in teams). At the same time, Ken formed an alliance with a competitor from one of the other finalists, a guy who had some knowledge in social media that Ken was lacking (5, networking and building relationships). He also took me out to lunch a few times and peppered me with questions about how he could use social media to empower his brand.

In the end, Ken's team won the Innovation Challenge, which really paid off in terms of building his own brand within the firm as an innovator, a leader, and subject matter resource. “Because of the experience and my ties to social media, I'm often sought by others to contribute to potential social media projects and I'm seen as a real thought leader. It's also made me a resident expert of our enterprise 2.0 platforms where I've held several presentations on how groups can utilize the software to work smarter and deliver better client service.”

 

Okay, Ready to Learn How to Become an Intrapreneur?

Becoming an intrapreneur isn't something people typically fall into. If you want it to happen, you're going to have to get out there and make it happen. And to do that, you'll need a plan.

Item number one on your list is to master your job. This is actually a two-parter. First, become an expert in your current role. Second, you'll need to hit certain milestones if you want to pull this off. The first one is being at your job long enough for you to learn your role and feel that you could teach everything you do to another person. You need to prove your worth and demonstrate that you can handle the responsibilities you were hired to do. You'll also want to build in enough time on the job to make your boss look like a rock star and gain his trust before you venture outside your role. Otherwise, you're going to have a really tough time getting him to buy into and support your ideas (and to support you in your desire to expand your role in the company). In my experience, it usually takes six months to get to this point. Of course, if you can do it in less time, great! But don't rush things. It's better to take a little more time than to try to make a move when you're really not ready.

That said, depending on how you frame things, it is
sometimes
possible to become an intrapreneur when you're just starting out. Marie Artim, Vice President, Talent Acquisition at Enterprise Holdings Inc., told me about a young man who, while still a trainee, had some concerns about what was being communicated to new hires and whether it was consistent with what they had been promised during their initial hiring and orientation. “He built and implemented a New Hire Survey that he sent to new hires to find out what was working and what wasn't,” Marie told me. “We saw immediate improvements in new hires retention and retention in first-level management. Those things are all really important to our business, made a huge impact on our business, and actually became the driving force behind rolling out a formal mentoring program.”

Passion, persistence, and commitment are key to seeing your ideas come to life. “Every employee who wants to excel should look at taking on projects that push them to do better, contribute more,” Dell's Ingrid Vanderveldt told me. “Thinking like an entrepreneur enables employees to think creatively and cost effectively about solutions that have the potential to make a big difference.”

Throughout this process—and throughout your entire career—it's important to think in terms of how you can best leverage your strengths and weaknesses to help your company succeed. What are some things your company does really well? What does it do less well? What
should
it be doing to improve? How can your strengths and intrapreneurship goals get your company where it needs to go? With that in the back of your mind, you'll be better able to articulate to your manager how your intrapreneurial idea will benefit the company.

You'll also need to be able to clearly define your objectives and metrics. In other words, what does success look like and how can you measure it? Be absolutely sure that your project aligns with the corporation's mission and values.

In most cases your project will be directly tied to what your company already does. However, there are times when a project that, at first glance, doesn't seem quite right turns out to be so good that an employer will fund it anyway—as long as you can show how it will benefit the company. Jonathan Mildenhall, VP of Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at the Coca-Cola Company, told me a great story about a young man who worked for Coke and who wanted to start a jeans company with his wife—not something you'd typically associate with a soft drink company. But there was a connection. “We understand that he has this thing that he wants to do and we give him the financial security that he needs because he's part of the big corporation,” said Jonathan. “Yet at the same time, we actually benefit because he's meeting with people in the fashion industry that we could potentially work with. He has this entrepreneurial spirit and that is enabling his corporate existence and his own business experience to exist side by side.”