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Failure & Intrapreneurship

Working in R&D I realized that effectively we are all intrapreneurs.   We’re constantly trying to develop new businesses for the corporation.

Intrapreneur is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as:  

“A person within a large corporation who takes direct responsibility for turning an idea into a profitable finished product through assertive risk-taking and innovation”

One thing that entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs share is the goal of profitability.  We both are creating businesses, we are both looking for ways to create value and systematize the creation of that value.

The added complexity of contending with entrenched culture, entrenched bureaucracy and toxic organizations can make the intrepreneurs’ job more difficult.

On the other hand the added restraint of available funds make the entrepreneurs’ job more stressful and more risky.

One thing however that both the entrepreneur and intrapreneur must struggle with is …FAILURE.

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The failure rate of my projects in R&D over the past 17 years is much greater than 50%.  Projects fail for a variety of reasons sometimes due to technical challenges, other times due to external market conditions, other times due to poor leadership or employee performance.

Entrepreneurs have the luxury of controlling their culture around the topic of failure because the entrepreneur can just adopt a positive attitude about failure, the entrepeneur usually works alone or with a very small team of like-minded leaders.

“I never fail, I just learn how things don’t work.” – unknown

In other words an entrepreneur can make up his/her own mind that failure is just part of the process, it is just a mechanism of learning.

The intrapreneur must contend with organizational health, a large team of people many more powerful and influential than himself, he must deal with culture, if the culture in ones R&D organization does not handle failure this can spell trouble for the intrapreneur.

Failed projects can result in finger-pointing, in blame politics, which can spell real career trouble.  One thing that R&D organizations should do is to constantly frame the story, the attitudes of everyone around failure. 

I have been part of organizations that lambasted the members of a failed project, the courageous leader was “torn to shreds”  so to speak, blamed for the wasting of millions and it was a career altering delay.

This is not healthy, R&D leaders can learn from the attitudes of entrepreneurs and lead accordingly.  Blame and perfection are culture destroyers in the innovation organization.

“The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure.” ~ Sven Goram Erikson

A healthy perspective about failure is easiest way to rapidly improve R&D culture, at the highest levels corporations need to stop the blame game and permit failure, so we can relax and create system for capturing and spreading learnings and developing R&D professionals to develop business’ more effectively and more rapidly.

How does your organization handle failure?

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The Sound of a Healthy Spring

Every year this is the sound that lets my family know that spring is here: peepers in spring

Peeper

The first animals from our pond are the peepers, they are very loud.  This winter had seemed particularly long so this sound is particularly sweet to us.

These little frogs will get progressively louder, after them come the bull frogs, then the toads.  This post is also my first attempt at adding an audio file to my blog, I plan to host a podcast soon so this mp3 file is practice for what is to come.

What sounds remind you of spring time?

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“Corporate America” Bashing

I listen to the motivations entrepreneurs often and have noticed that one of the top reasons they give for starting their own companies is to escape from “Corporate America”.  The “Corporate America” term has come to mean bureaucracy, dysfunction and frustration for many many people. This bothers me because…it does not have to be this way!

Fist-in-air

What if leader’s in “Corporate America” began a personal mission to heal the bureaucracy, dysfunction and frustration within their organizations?  What if organizational health became one of our top objectives?

Think of impact that this would have on productivity, think of the impact this would have on turnover rate.  Think of the impact this would have on financial performance over time.  Think of the impact this would make in employee’s lives and in job satisfaction.

I believe that the impact from this would be amazing!

Get healthy corporate America! care about the impact of your team and project leadership, don’t be lazy in your people management, understand the impact of your leadership …or lack of leadership in people’s lives, in people’s careers, on people’s salaries and most importantly on your company’s performance in the market.

Here are three things that we can do in the short-term to improve the health of our organizations:

  1. Communicate the purpose of the organization and your commitment to health constantly, even if it seems redundant, say it out loud repeatedly.
  2. Care about the growth of our people, challenge them to grow and expand their skills and tangibly reward them when they do.
  3. Ask our people for help in making healthier teams, because they have a major role to play in team health.

 What other things can we do today to make our organizations more healthy?

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