When Operations and Entrepreneurship Collide
The Pursuit and Pace of the Intrapreneur
This is part 1 of our intrapreneur series. Read part 2 here.
A company functions primarily to offer a good or service. But there’s a whole ethos around this offering that makes a company what it is, crafts its identity and allows it to be a living entity that engages with its audience, customers and employees.
How do you evolve that ethos, keeping it fluid and adaptive instead of static and, heaven forbid, irrelevant? And who are the agents within that push and negotiate and test to make and keep innovation possible?
Sustainable organizations need entrepreneurs, innovators on the inside to push change along. Companies of all sizes need intrapreneurs to survive and to thrive.
To Dream is to Disrupt
Rather than starting out on their own, intrapreneurs have the power and leverage to influence exponential change from within an established company.
Though the same spirit as that of an entrepreneur, intrapreneurs may experience even greater hurdles. Their organization may not want change. In fact, they may even actively fight it.
But on the plus side, intrapreneurs benefit from the stability and structures of a larger company to work within (if managed correctly).
Sources define intrapreneur differently. Often, they are the ideators and inventors who can see the bigger picture.
“Someone who can spot a problem, often before others realize it exists,” Jim Link says. But they also do. Not only do they identify problems, they are often the ones who come up with a solution and path to implement.
“[They] figure out a solution, regardless of its context within the existing organizational structure,” Flink continues. And that can mean a lot of tricky steps along the way. Getting buy-in, managing change, adjusting expectations and empowering the right team(s) — this, all while still handling day-to-day operations.
Let’s Get Uncomfortable
How do intrapreneurs make internal innovation happen? It depends on the company and its either overt or veiled definition of innovation.
At Autodesk, innovation means industry leading. Global Content Marketing & Social Media Director Dusty DiMercurio and Content Marketing Manager Erin Hanson are on the team that publishes Autodesk’s award-winning thought leadership publication, Redshift.
The Redshift team is an innovative hub that cross cuts other teams to help the company put out the best content. Driven by the desire to lead in content marketing, they work in partnership with horizontal and vertical teams to expand and leverage prospective audiences.
“The Redshift team grew from within, and we’re always looking to build efficiencies in world-class storytelling across the company — which at times can be a challenge,” DiMercurio says. “Innovation can cause friction, as it tends to disrupt the status quo.”
Alex Cook at Salesforce defines innovation more as perpetual change management. Cook is Senior Manager and Content Product Manager of Global Enablement.
“Innovation is about incremental operational improvements and team-building within an existing environment,” Cook says. Cook helps manage the technology and governance of content for internal audience distribution.
As a continuously growing company focused on scaling and sales, the use case is in the implementation, he says.
In both situations, intrapreneurs — whether defined as such or not — bring change into practice.
“[Intrapreneurs] do for corporate innovation what an entrepreneur does for his or her start-up,” Gifford Pinchot III says.
Though true, a key difference is that intrapreneurs don’t work in a silo. With so many other factors, business goals and personalities at play, the methods and speed by which action happens can vary drastically.
Let’s look at some ways these frictionists overcome these challenges.
Judicious Leadership that Empowers
Challenge: Cultivating an innovative space within established systems
“At large companies, everyone wants innovation to be easier,” DiMercurio says.
So how do you leverage the characteristics of a large company to create an environment conducive to ongoing improvements?
Back in the day Google’s 20 percent time allowed many features and fixes to be developed, leading to innovations like Gmail, Google Talk and Google News. A massive company physically carved out the space, time and leeway for its employees to think differently.
But supporting intrapreneurship is much more than running accelerators or incubators. You have to also have a method for implementing ideas.
It comes down to balancing structure and reliability with adaptivity and freedom.
“People work at big companies for a reason,” DiMercurio says. “Part of that is the structure and resources that come with being in a larger, established company.” So, putting some structure around the way team members innovate can actually work to empower.
“I try to create an environment where people can challenge the status quo daily,” says DiMercurio. “I assign ownership. You are a mini CEO of your area, and it’s clear what you’re responsible for.”
Accountability and role clarity breeds empowerment. They also do regular quarterly check-ins, where he both challenges and gives freedom.
“What are the three things outside of the norm that you’re going to tackle this quarter and why?” he asks. They then have the latitude to come up with what they believe will push the boundaries and move the business forward.
DiMercurio encourages his team to think holistically about what success looks like and then build back from there. The team also steps away for regular meetings, and sometimes few-day summits.
But not all companies have time and space built in to try new things. Cook has had to adapt to managing team within a company that’s hyper growth focused.
“When working on enterprise software and implementation, you inherently have to be more operationally focused,” Cook says. “I had to shift to be successful. I learned it wasn’t as much about me being the expert, but how I empower others to be experts.”
Though personal management styles differ, Cook, Dimercurio and Hanson say inclusivity and prioritization are musts.
“I give my team the problem, then they go work out the way it needs to be done,” Cook says. “I don’t micromanage, but rather define what’s important to me and then we work together to identify the work that needs to happen. Having the team be a part of the prioritization — that alone is empowerment.”
Hanson does something similar. “It’s not about my way or the highway. It’s less about managing and more about driving alignment, working with different teams and understanding their goals.”
Lastly, it’s about focus.
“There may be teams doing many innovative things but that doesn’t mean they’re doing them well,” DiMercurio says. “We’ll try to focus on one or two things we want to go big on, and then we put resources on doing them right.”
It’s all about where you place your bets, DiMercurio says.
So you or your team has identified an internal challenge or issue … and maybe even has an idea for how to solve it.
What now?
Cross-Team Buy-In and a Sales Mindset
Challenge: Getting the larger team (or company) on board
Unlike startups, most big companies have been around for a while. They have existing teams and ways of doing things, and often a lot of people. Salesforce has 30,000+ employees, with more than half in customer-facing roles. The matrix of internal content creators is in the thousands.
“Perpetual change is the biggest challenge we face, from people moving between roles to adding thousands of people a year to acquiring new companies,” Cook says.
How do you get a company that’s not only big, but in a constant state of scaling and acquiring, on board with new ways of working?
When Alex joined Salesforce three years ago, he identified a problem wherein numerous and disparate teams across the company were creating content for their individual use cases. They were creating in a vacuum, which was causing system redundancy.
As a new employee, he brought a fresh perspective and ideas from his previous roles — but he would need more than that.
“I wouldn’t be able to move as quickly as I thought in this role,” he says. “So I took the entrepreneurial spirit and built a cross-functioning team to share best practices from different teams, and see where overlap and redundancies lay. We then identified areas for improvement together.”
Alex quickly learned he would have to sacrifice one thing (speed) for another (success that sticks).
“I had to pause to make sure I was bringing the appropriate people along, so I could get the resources I needed to execute on that work.” Proving value early can save time down the road.
It’s like a mini internal sales cycle, Cook says. Ask any marketer what the first step of sales is: It’s understanding the concerns and frustrations of your audience.
“You must know your audience and what they care about,” Cook says. In this case, this means your internal teams. “You can’t lose sight of how important change management really is within these types of organizations.”
Though a different business model, the Autodesk team works similarly. Adopting a cross-functional and collaborative mindset proved critical since Redshift’s genesis. DiMercurio and Hanson have worked to share Redshift audience learnings with the larger Autodesk team — which has helped them drive valuable insights for other teams.
“Our peers in marketing are thinking regularly about how to grow Autodesk solution awareness and subscription,” says DiMercurio. Redshift audience insights can really help toward those goals.
“We have regular meetings with marketers across Autodesk to learn what’s important to their customers,” Hanson says.
Thematic consistencies help both teams to achieve shared goals. It also provides buy-in to what the team is trying to accomplish with Redshift.
When done right, the benefit can be mutual. The product teams have realized that they benefit from the kind of top-of-funnel Redshift content, as it helps generate demand for solutions by positioning Autodesk as a leader in the industries they serve. And Hanson and DiMercurio also end up getting a lot of story ideas from their peers in industry and product marketing.
“The form of owned media that Redshift provides for Autodesk helps connect dots across the company,” DiMercurio says.
More Challenges to Come
Once intrapreneurs have a process in place that they feel works well, how do you keep it current? And how can it scale for others in the company or be repurposed for another team?
For perspectives on these questions and more, check out part 2 of this intrapreneur series.
