Intrapreneurship is a buzzword right now — everyone wants to find the secret recipe for innovation, and big companies are looking to startups for pointers on how to cultivate the energy and creativity needed to create breakthrough products and services and avoid being disrupted.
All of which makes the idea of intrapreneurship — “the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization,” according to Wikipedia — pretty enticing.
Too bad it’s mostly a myth.
As entrepreneurs, we should be happy about this. If intrapreneurship really worked, success as a startup would be almost impossible. Many of us in the software field have been challenged with this question (or something like it) during our initial startup phase: “Why couldn’t Microsoft/Google/Apple build this?”
On paper there’s no good answer; bigger companies should be able to do things faster and smarter, because they have more resources and market share. But somehow entrepreneurs are able to believe they can succeed in a market occupied by large, entrenched incumbents. And because real intrapreneurship is so difficult and rare, startups keep winning.
So why do large companies have so much difficulty fostering entrepreneurship?
There are many answers to that question, but I think one of the most salient is summed up in this graphic a colleague of mine sent around recently. It shows a monkey trying to climb a ladder to get to some bananas resting on the top of the ladder. Whenever a monkey gets to the top of the ladder, his friends on the ground are soaked with water. Of course, in no time, all the monkeys are attacking anybody who tries to climb the ladder.
The scientists replace the group with new monkeys one at a time until none of the original monkeys that witnessed the water-soaking remains in the group — yet the bananas are still at the top of the ladder. No monkey dares climb the ladder for fear of attack by the group.
It’s funny and sad that the story the illustration tells is so instantly recognizable. You’ve probably experienced it: you take a new job, join a new team, offer ideas about what you did at your last job or new perspectives on how things might be done better or differently. And your new ideas are ignored, dismissed, or outright squashed. Soon you find you’ve given in to the way things are done — and then you find yourself shooting down the next new guy’s ideas.
As a company grows it naturally develops procedures and policies. Often they are created after someone has abused a privilege or made a bad decision, and executives decide a policy is needed to prevent someone else from repeating the mistake. That logic is reasonable and natural. But with more employees and history, the policies begin to pile up — and suffocate the creativity that might otherwise flourish. ‘We can’t do that,’ or ‘That’ll get us in trouble’ are the sorts of excuses people start using for not doing something different.
This doesn’t happen by design. I’ve never seen a vision statement or strategic plan with bureaucracy as a goal. Instead, bureaucracy drowns a company subtly and slowly, one rule at a time.
I’m an entrepreneur who came from a startup, but now that I’m part of a larger organization even I have fallen prey to the temptations of bureaucracy. Here’s an example: Like most groups, we have an ALL email distribution list for sending messages to all employees. A few years ago, a couple employees used the ALL list inappropriately, so we blocked all but a few from sending to the whole list.
Recently, a technical issue caused us to remove the block on the list. Sure enough, an employee soon sent an email that probably should not have gone out to everyone. We on the executive team immediately wanted to block employees’ access to the list again. But then we discussed the issue from a cost/benefit perspective: So what if a few times a year the group gets an email that wastes a moment of time? Isn’t that a small price for allowing open communication, eliminating time spent on the technical fix, and having one less policy? We decided to keep the list open for now.
Of course, some bureaucracy is necessary to sustain a large organization. Sometimes it’s good to codify experience so people don’t learn it the hard way over and over. What if the monkeys are climbing to retrieve poisonous bananas? But unnecessary processes and rules can often encumber large companies — and open the door for naïve entrepreneurs to come and steal perfectly good bananas.
Perhaps the best way to find the right balance is to accept that some level of bureaucracy is a natural byproduct of growth and success, but to never stop questioning it as it develops. Rigorously review policies, test and re-test new procedures, and make sure the harm they might help avoid is worse than the good they might inadvertently prevent.
