Guy Kawasaki has started a blog, and you should be reading it. Go ahead, I'll wait....
Okay, back? Good!
This morning's piece is on The Art of Intrapreneurship, and it's a goodie.
But I'm going to add a couple of items:
1. Don't make the "reward" for intrepreneurship a pink-slip. I've just recently recovered from a corporation that with great fanfare and hoohah created a "new concepts" area. And over the past two years, most of the people who went to that area were laid off. Why? Most of them found themselves on the outs when their idea was sucked up by mainline corporate, and apparently the managers in those areas wanted to make sure no one ever found the bodies. Okay, what message are we sending here? And a few found that what they came up with couldn't be made commerical--yet. You think they're going to get the credit when some VP intros the ultimate product three years from now? Believe me, when I was wrangling sys admins, we spent a bunch of time getting the specs for old prototypes off of frighteningly old tape. Yes, Virginia, there is a reason someone is keeping the old SCSI tape drive alive, much less the 6250 bpi (eep!) reel tapes. It's for all those archeological expeditions on product that never saw the light of day.
Way back when I was a chemist (and we are talking a long time ago), the rule of thumb was that if one idea came out of R&D and made it to market, well *that* was great. But for some reason, when you get to an industry that doesn't burn holes in your jeans, they want everything to come out of research to make them a mint. Sometimes (the not-so-apocryphal story of how we got Post-it Notes) what you're looking for doesn't have an application in the area you're researching, but it's certainly useful elsewhere. Sometimes you have to wait for the rest of the industry to catch up with you, and sometimes you have to wait for society to catch up with you. Some stuff just doesn't pay out in 18 months. (Sidenote to the new kids on the block--the 18 month horizon was cut from whole cloth by MBA schools that were turning out all those arbitrage pirates in the early 80's. It's still not backed up by anything particularly useful.)
2. Whatever you do, don't let your corporate IT people anywhere near the intrapreneurs. Nothing will kill an idea in progress faster than some drone handing out 100-page forms to be filled out so the group can get a server installed in a place that *may* get the server UPS and back-ups. I have had these forms dumped on my desk, because as the manager-mom of the coders, it was my job to run interference for the group. Nothing like wasting time with 90 pages of "this isn't SAP, so this page isn't applicable" instead of getting actual work done. Another idea-killer is being told that yes, you can get your server installed, but you can't have access to it--you'll have to have the IT dept install all your builds. On their schedule. Because according to the SOX docs, they only install software on alternate Friday nights. That's if they can work it around their "real" work. Do you really think that when you miss the 18-month window because the IT dept caused massive delays and disasters, that the IT dept is going to get nailed? Nope!
I get asked a lot why so many companies have a corporate IT dept, and then have engineering or R&D systems and network support groups. There you go. And if I'm running or supporting an Intrapreneur group in that building a football field down the road, I'm setting up my own systems and network support. The last time I looked, it was the company's name on my check, and not the IT dept's.
3. The Aeron chair is a back-killer, especially for women. I was told this by an Occupation Therapist, and from experience, I'm inclined to believe her. If I get an office with one of those monsters, I grab a proper chair from the closest conference room and use that. Facilities ought to check offices some time, and see how many people are actually using those alleged ergonomic chairs, and how many are using anything else. You could fund a bunch of Friday beer bashes with the difference on a $650 chair, and a standard $150 office chair multiplied by all the people who'd be a lot happier with the cheaper chair.
(technorati tags: business, IT, intrapreneur)
