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Strategic Diversification and New Growth Cannot Thrive If You Value Size Above All Else

Leaders who are attempting to launch innovation and corporate entrepreneurship (intrapreneurship) initiatives within their organizations might be doomed to fail before they even begin, if their organizational culture is one that promotes and rewards people based on “big” above all else.

Unfortunately too many companies still use a performance and reward measuring stick based on “big” such as how “big” is the P&L being led, how “big” are the budgets being managed, how “big” are the size of the departments, and how “big” is the territory being covered. That approach might work for some organizations that are asking their leadership teams and employees to manage the status quo and focus on the core business. It also helps to encourage the all-too-common culture of doing more with less.

The problem with using the assumption that bigger must be harder to handle, and therefore warrants more recognition, is that it is flawed and will destroy your innovation spark and jam your entrepreneurial gears because it does not measure the size of the potential and the very difficult job of realizing that potential. The reality is that launching, leading, and growing new businesses from within corporations can often be a much more complex and demanding task than running an established organization. I speak from experience because I have done both.

For new businesses to succeed, the intrapreneurial leaders must be highly adaptive to change, demonstrate significant creativity and business savvy, be able to define strategies and pivot them as required, understand customers and have keen market awareness. They must also be change agents and be able to lead major changes from within the core company for it to adapt its core systems and processes in support of the new business. This level of complexity and creativity can be much more significant than what a manager will face when running “big” established departments and well established businesses.

Organizational reward systems and incentive programs must better value the level of leadership and management difficulty that is associated with corporate entrepreneurship (intrapreneurship) and recognize it as equivalent to managing the “big.” It is only by doing so that companies will be able to provide the recognition and compensation that will encourage people to step out of the corporate comfort zone to foster innovation, lead change, and take on entrepreneurial roles inside the corporation. This is also a fundamental ingredient for nurturing the innovators and incubating the intrapreneurs that are critical to an organizations capacity for diversification and new growth.


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