The Art of Intrapreneurship

Those of us who are trying to help ours or a consulted business get to “Future Business” can be called “Intrapreneurs”.

If you are one of these people, you should take some time for Guy Kawasaki’s excellent books about start-ups. “Reality Check” is primarily about brand-new start-ups, but it has many important messages for those of us who attempt to innovate within companies.

You may not have to deal with hiring new resources or tracking down angel/VC financing, but you certainly do need to build a good team and you do need someone to dedicate budget to your idea. Buy’s lessons about how to direct your efforts are very helpful.

Below are my spin on some of Guy’s advice

• Kill the cash cows – In his words, “Cash cows are wonderful – but you should milk them but not sustain them until, pun intended, the cows come home”. He suggests that if you do not innovate, two kids in a garage will do it for you.
• Reboot your brain – Most practices inside a large company are designed in successive stages (eg. Check with everybody, get consensus, focus groups, design, re-design, test, test, launch in the same old way as always) and/or designed for evolutionary continuous improvement. These will not work for a brand new idea
• Find a separate building – He suggests that the building be nearby but distinctly separate and distinctly low-budget to create an air of suffering. Swan Note: be careful here if integration with the parent is essential. You do not want to be seen as outsiders if you need any of the parent depts. for your success
• Hire infected people – Passion is paramount. Obviously resources must be capable, but do not focus too heavily on background/skills to the detriment of passion.
• Give hope to the hopeless – as you are able to achieve some level of success, those in the company who are frustrated by the bureaucracy will reach out to you. Maintain a relationship with those people. You need all the support you can get.
• Put the company first – remember that you are not a 100% entrepreneur. You are part of a larger company. Keep your employer’s best interests front of mind at all times. You will face challenges because some will react violently to any conflict of interest with a cash cow.
• Stay under the radar – once you have the initial buy-in and budget, resist the temptation to continue growing your executive sponsorship. It will create more flak than air-cover. If they come to you, then show them you are working on it and wherever possible make them believe it was their idea. Swan Note: if you are going to need effort from other depts., get the buy-in from that dept up front. Once you are in full swing, you may be perceived as a threat to the core and therefore get push back.
• Collect and share data – be prepared with all of your cost and revenue projections so that when attacks come, you are prepared
• Dismantle when done – help everyone who participated both re-integrate with the parent and hopefully improve it for their experience

There are so many other great ideas in this Guy’s book. If it’s not already in your library, I highly recommend it.  As Frans Johansson discusses in his book the Medici Effect, breakthrough ideas often come from alternate disciplines.  So, even if you are not an entrepreneur, you will likely gain some insights about how to better innovation in your job.

Best of luck with your own intrapreneurship. Please post your comments regarding best practices you experience.

Future Business Tribe Building

Seth Godin’s recent blog post about what makes a great blogger got me thinking, who is my tribe? I initially started this blog in order to help organize my thinking and progress my ideas beyond meandering thoughts. But, MS Word could have done that. There is another reason why I blog. I am hoping that like minded people (my tribe) will find my posts interesting enough to want to dialogue on these subjects. Thereby, taking the ideas to another level.

So that brings me back to Seth’s question which is, “who is my tribe?”. After thinking about this, I believe that my tribe is made up of those who are passionate that the way we do business can/should be improved. That may be too broad for a tribe, but I am hoping not.

My life on the road to “Future Business”

• Started with a general interest in IT as a means to do things more efficiently
• With the the advent of the web I turned to eCommerce as a great new channel through which to sell
• Late 90’s I focused on Systems Requirements Analysis and Process Consulting as a way to turn business goals into realities
• Around 2000 I realized the power of Knowledge Management as a game-changing concept and have been hooked into various flavors of it ever since

Any of this sound familiar? Are you a part of this tribe?

Marcus Buckingham wrote a book called “Now, Discover Your Strengths” and with it you get access to his StrengthsFinder application which, after a 100 or so questions, will tell you his interpretation of what your strengths are. Mine always comes back as #1: Future Focused. Anyone else get that in the top 5?

I am just a novice tribe builder and while I am just as happy joining other tribes, I do like to be a leader wherever I go. Any tribes that you suggest I should join based on the info above?

Centralize vs. De-centralize. Is SOA the answer?

With the economic downturn, businesses will be looking for ways to control costs. Will that mean more centralization? How will more centralization conflict with the web2.0 trend towards lighter more de-centralized apps. Will the lighter and more niche software/hosted products find that funds from business units are drying up?

Popular Knowledge Management expert David Gurteen spoke about this tension even before the financial crisis on his blog. Larry Hawes has a recent blog post discussing Autonomy in Collaboration.

I have had several discussions in the last few days with a VA-based firm currently struggling with the issue of centralization. Historically, their business has been run as autonomous business units free to operate in the way that best meets their customers’ needs.

While I am sure this firm has always struggled between centralization and de-centralization, the web has exacerbated the problem and web2.0 has taken it to yet another level. With the advent of the web, each unit began developing a channel to interact with their customers. A few years ago when the company wanted to upgrade to a more web2.0 approach which allowed their customers to contribute more in the online environment, they sought to build a common platform.

However, the autonomous business units lived on. Because they are quite independent, they are constantly seeking to diverge in order to meet the specific needs of their customers. At the same time IT continues to work towards increased centralization. As you can imagine, this is creating some tension.

A service oriented architecture (SOA) with shared web services and appropriate SOA governance might be their salvation. If IT can control the main architecture and help facilitate the sharing of approved web services, this firm may be able to get the centralization they need while allowing for business units to meet their own customer needs.

Is SOA the way that this increasing tension might be relieved in many organizations? I doubt IT is going to give up working towards standardization and cost savings and I know that if business units feel their customers are not being served by what IT is providing, they are going to continue pushing for autonomy. If not SOA, how is this tension going to be resolved?

Prediction Markets here to stay?

Web2.0 is all about contributions from end-users aka. The wisdom of the Crowds. Prediction Markets are a very efficient way to consolidate that wisdom which can be found in various nooks and crannies. If this concept is new to you, read Wikipedia for a primer. If not, read on.

Prediction Markets always receive a huge surge around election time because studies have shown that with enough activity they are more accurate predictors than polls. This year InTrade.com went very mainstream getting mentions on numerous news reports and getting link outs from Yahoo and other mainstream online information providers.

There was a move by DARPA in 2003 to use a prediction market to predict terrorist activity. While ideally that was a good approach to help understand the threat at any given moment, someone forgot to consider that most Americans don’t currently understand the concept of a prediction market and so just heard, “We are going to be betting on terrorist attacks”. You can imagine that program was shut down quickly.

So, will Prediction Markets maintain their momentum post-election this time around? I certainly hope so. We have learned from the worldwide financial crisis that we need people who make decision to have more information at their disposal rather than less. BI, Balanced Scorecards, and, yes, prediction markets should be getting attention/funding from those who feel that their organization is being led too much from “the gut”.

Future Education

There is no doubt that Education is critical to the future of the United States economy. Thomas Friedman talks about it extensively in his very popular book, The World is Flat. Therefore, the concepts in this post on Future Education are not only directly applicable to business, but our success in Future Education will have a direct impact on our abilities in Future Business.

I spent 90 minutes last night on the phone with an excellent visionary from the NYC Dept of Education.  Arthur VanderVeen is focused on how best to achieve knowledge sharing for NYC educators.

We talked about the difficulty of turning tacit knowledge into explicit and we talked about the challenges of fostering active communities of interest/practice.

Two of the main tenets of our discussion were

1. Give them what they want: the sharing needs to have value to the way they work today or want to work today. There are some technologies (eg. Computer, cell phone) that completely change the way we work, but most enhance the way we already work in a more evolutionary fashion rather than revolutionary
2. Work bottom-up rather than top-down. Try various programs in schools and see what works. Where there is success, invest more to work out if it can be scaled up.

One thing that has come to mind since our discussion is the 100-10-1 rule of community involvement. In the case of education it is probably 1000-100-10-1 due to the challenge of getting already overworked educators to even view information.

• For every 1000 educators
• 100 will actively or passively browse the knowledge-base
• 10 will comment on or use existing content
• and 1 will contribute something new

That means that for 80,000 teachers you may only have 80 contributors. This is likely not sufficient volume to create a critical mass of content that keeps the 100 coming back and gets more of the 1000 to view. The larger districts may decide to invest in “librarians” who seek out good content and take the time to get it into the knowledge-base, but this is not the most efficient model and is probably not tenable for the smaller districts.