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How to Be an Intrapreneur

Guy Kawasaki Co-Founder, Alltop Recent Posts

1 Comment

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July 7, 2009

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“Hi Guy, I started my entrepreneurial career ...”

Anita Campbell

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As the saying goes, “The grass is always greener.” This applies to entrepreneurs as well as cows (if, indeed, it applies to cows). An entrepreneur looks at an intrapreneur inside a large company and fantasizes: “If only I could be an entrepreneur with the kind of capital, brand awareness, production capacity, salesforce, and customer support infrastructure.”

Intrapreneurship is not easier or better than entrepreneurship—it’s simply different. Thus, it requires a different perspective and different expectations. Here is a real-world list of what it takes to succeed as an intrapreneur:

A passion to kill the cash cows. The primary purpose of innovation is to create a new product or service that will replace the existing revenue generators of a company. And herein lies the challenge: few people want to kill the cash cows of a company. They’re rather pretend the cow will give milk forever. This simply isn’t the case, so if you don’t kill your cows, someone else will.

An ego-maniac leader. I mean this only in a positive way. Intrapreneurship takes a strong leader because the rest of the company is going to say that the new product or service can’t be done, shouldn’t be done, and customers aren’t asking for it. At the first hint of bad news, the rest of the management team is going to call for the intrapreneurial organization to die first.

Rebooted brains. Basically everything that a large company does is wrong for an intrapreneurial group—especially planning, budgeting, testing, and marketing. The successful intrapreneurial team needs to reboot its brain and use fresh, and often controversial, approaches to building a new product or service.

A separate building.The ideal distance for an intrapreneurial group is greater than one mile but less than ten miles from headquarters. This is because you want to be far enough from management interfering in what you’re doing but close enough to grab resources and people from time to time.

Infected people. To many employees, an intrapreneurial business looks like lots of fun. But this doesn’t qualify them to work in the group. What you want are people who “get” that you’re trying to kill the cash cows, change the world, and make a little history. They may have even lost hope inside the bowels of your large organization and don’t worry about them not having the perfect background.

With these five characteristics, an intrapreneurial effort inside your company is a lot more likely to succeed. It won’t be easy, but maybe some entrepreneurs will look at what you’ve done and be right for once that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence.

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Guy Kawasaki, Article, innovation, entrepreneurs, perspective

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Anita Campbell 2 years 6 months and 12 days ago

Hi Guy, I started my entrepreneurial career as an intrapreneur -- and I can tell you it is much harder than being on your own. In some ways you have it better because you have a bigger budget (generally), plus market power. You can get key appointments easier because you have the brand name of the big company behind you. But on the flip side, I spent 50% of my time just fending off all the interference from the rest of the corporation -- some of it well-meaning and some of it driven by jealousy and other negative junk. I was pretty good at corporate politics, and could deal with most things or I would never have been able to get my "intrapreneurial venture" started in the first place. But having to expend so much energy fighting everyone off just wears you down over time -- and it slows you down, too. I'd rather be on my own. -- Anita