Innovation and jobs conference

I just returned from a two-day intensive, called I4J, International Summit on Innovation for Jobs.  Hosted at SRI, initially sponsored by Vint Cerf, and supported by a veritable list of "who's who" in entrepreneurial circles, the group convened an 'invite-only' list of pundits, entrepreneurs, VCs, and government leaders to debate the issues of 'what's wrong' with the long-held assumption that innovation creates new jobs in unimaginable areas even as it destroys old jobs.  While that view is still held, the question facing the group was more subtle -- have we reached a place where the net job loss is higher than the gain, for maybe the first time in human history?

Without getting too far into that debate, the take-away for me -- for INTRAPRENEURING -- was simple.  Virtually every VC in attendance, and many serial entrepreneurs of very successful companies, said "THE PROBLEM IS" lack of management teams to carry fledgling companies to scale.  Managers at large companies, they all agree, lack the risk-taking skills and mentality, even though they can provide an exit path in terms of capital investment.  Entrepreneurial teams are GREAT at product or service innovation, but sorely lacking in how to build infrastructure and organization so that hundreds or thousands of people can work together to build a sizable enterprise.  And that great middle ground of innovative leadership seems to be missing.

Duh!!!

We've systematically shot 'em.  The folk who used to learn those skills, at companies like HP used to be, are grown up and retired.  The large companies we all admire -- IBM, P&G, Boeing, Motorola, Nike, Fedex, Qualcomm, Cisco, Intel -- have all quit growing, and have replaced their innovative leadership with MBAs and CPAs.

The newer companies have grown too fast, almost like the gawky fast-growth teenager who will be great at basketball when he figures out how to make his feet go in the same direction as his body.

Ummn, maybe that wasn't such a good analogy.  Sorry

But the point, for this group, was clear.  There is a missing link, and they're just now discoering that it is a big one, not just an incidental one.  I couldn't agree more.  It's called INTRAPRENEURING.

Serial Innovators

You might have missed the new book, "Serial Innovators: How Individuals create and deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms," by Abbie Griffin, Raymond Price, and Bruce Vojak.  They made the mistake of using Stanford Business Press instead of Harvard Business Press, so the marketing effort was essentially non-existent.

I like the book, though in full disclosure, they did interview me for it, and a couple of passages include my name.  They are calling INTRAPRENEURS by another name, i.e. SERIAL INNOVATORS.  Works fine for me, especially since in Silicon Valley it has become fashionable for Venture Capitalists to talk about (and fund) SERIAL ENTREPRENEURS.

The irony of course is that an INTRAPRENEUR is almost by definition a SERIAL INNOVATOR, while an ENTREPRENEUR may well not be a serial type.   Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett were called ENTREPRENEURS (actually, this was well after the fact since the word didn't come into our vocabulary until they had retired from HP), but they more-or-less quit being entrepreneurs at some early point in the company history and became instead something else....  Packard became a manager/leader and Hewlett became a SERIAL INNOVATOR or INTRAPRENEUR.  The story of the HP 35 handheld calculator, with Hewlett as CEO and Packard off in Washington DC is a story of  a mature company taking an entirely new direction -- INTRAPRENEURING, not ENTREPRENEURING.

Ah, well, I quibble.

But this book by Griffin et al is really quite good.  It takes many case histories, including some great examples from Proctor and Gamble and other companies that usually don't make the Silicon Valley radar, and uses them to present the essence of a few guiding principles.

Significantly, the book develops an "hourglass" model for early break-through innovation that argues for patience, trial-and-error, and heavy investigative time -- all things that we know make a difference, and almost all are things that managers just cannot stomach for very long.  Managers are taught at business schools (and maybe from birth) to avoid risk; the safe play, not the 'long ball', is the game.

The book is available via Amazon.  It is hard to find in the Stanford campus bookstore, but that store doesn't even have Edward Tufte's new revised Visual Display of Quantitaive Information, which is an alltime classic, still selling in remarkably high quantity (and he speaks at Stanford regularly).

And then I found out that Stanford doesn't run its own bookstore -- it is outsoucred to another company who has essentially no connection with, or understanding of, Stanford faculty or whatever....

Hummn, I didn't intend to have this become a rant...

Intrapreneurs -- only in business?

I was asked the other day about Intrapreneurs in Social Enterprises, and it got me thinking that if this is a meaningful question, we've really lost sight of what I always thought of as American Ingenuity.

Some wag once said that Henry Ford did America the best service for innovation, because of the motto for FORD, Fix Or Repair Daily.  That was true for tractors as well as the Model T and Model A (and for that matter, to some degree for my current pick0up truck F250, replete with running lights).

The beauty was that this built a nation of fix-it kids, able and adept at fixing darn near anything.

The apocryphal story out of WWII was that the way General Patton beat the desert fox Rommel in North Africa, was that a sandstorm blew in, and wrecked the tanks, trucks, and jeeps on both sides.  Montgomery and Rommel were both stuck, but the GIs took apart the carburetors, blew the grains of sand out of the jets, and the Yanks just drove over and won.  Viva la Ford Motor Co and a whole bunch of farmer kids who enlisted as GIs.

You can just imagine that Patton assembled everyone and said, "I think you should take apart the carburetors and look for sand in the jets."  Bull....   He probably had no idea that was the problem, any more than did Rommel.  What made this work was that a whole slew of GIs 'knew' this problem from childhood, kinda like American kids learned to program and build I/O interfaces from Apple IIs.   And in Germany, chauffeurs drove -- and none of the soldiers knew to clean carburetors yet.

So, to the question.  Of course, entrepreneurs matter in all forms of organization.  The 2008 Obama campaign had lots of entrepreneurial kids contributing social network software ideas, but they knitted those ideas into a loosely organized federation for the whole campaign.  That's intrapreneuring, not entrepreneuring, as I define it.

Most of us, whether in clubs, social groups, neighborhoods, or companies, don't RUN things -- we contibute to things that are running.  Often, we contribute ways that they can run better, as opposed to just 'doing work'.   It is this incessant desire and ability to contribute to the organization, whether in process, product, service, or jsut efficiency, that I call intrapreneuring.  Vital to stay fresh.

We just never call it intrapreneuring.  Why not?

It's becoming fashionable

Breakfast yesterday with Lisa Solomon, whose new book with Chris Ertel is due out this autumn.  Lisa, one of the most enthusiastic management consultants I've met, has been working with her husband Glenn on the question of how intermediate-sized companies can rejuvenate innovation.   She showed me some fabulous cartoons that he has constructed -- shades of Intrapreneuring!

The question, of course, is how do companies stay innovative and responsive to changing conditions after their initial success.  Most don't.  Some do so for quite a while before becoming trapped by history or circumstance.  And some, seemingly, stay innovative for a very long time.

Apple, one of today's 'showpiece' companies, is touted primarily because of legendary Steve Jobs.  When he was 'off the scene' Apple struggled.  When he returned, it was a magical phoenix-like arising (well, okay, it did take him seven years before he could get consistent growth and profits).

Is it primarily the leader?  Well, at least in the Apple case, the legend is a bit different than the facts.  Jobs, clearly the emotional and intellectual leader for the early MacIntosh (and the Lisa before it) was fired, in large part due to the failed performance of those early products.  And when he returned, with the acquisition of the failed NeXt for its operating system (not its edgy hardware), it took him until the ninth year to 'right the ship'

If Meg Whitman gets eight more years to right the HP ship, I'll be stunned.

I know firsthand the same kind of 'what have you done for me lately' thinking, and I too was and am  one of those enamored by these ground-breaking products.   So I can unequivocally say, "No, the answer doesn't rest just with THE LEADER.  It rests instead with the culture, admittedly affected strongly by the leader, in terms of whether innovation is feared or embraced."  And this is deep, built throughout an organization, not just at the top.  The top is crucial, but the body must be aligned.  Then, and only then, can intrapreneurs flourish.  Intrapreneurship is not about 'fighting the system' except in rare circumstance -- it has to be in alignment in order to be systemic, repeatable, and enduring.

Intrapreneuring Innovation thoughts

INTRAPRENEURING, a word not used very commonly, is worth knowing about.  Gifford Pinchot III, scion of the founder of the U.S. Forest Service and running mate of Teddy Roosevelt on the Progressive Party ticket a hundred years ago, wrote a book that got briefly into the public lexicon about the time that ENTREPRENEURING became known.  The difference is that Intrapreneurs wend their craft inside larger corporations, on behalf of others, rather than starting their own company.

Pinchot ascribed many traits to these folk, and provided a list of characteristics so you could tell if you were one.  You probably know the famous saying, "Ask forgiveness, not permission."   Another was "come to work every day willing to be fired."  The clear implication was that intrapreneurs have to fight the system -- indeed have to fight their own company and management -- to be allowed to contribute to that company's success.

Many pundits, including Michael Schrage at MIT, observe that Intrapreneurs cannot exist today because corporate leaders are no longer tolerant of their spasmodic, episodic inventive approach -- they seek efficiency and productivity from their design teams rather than innovation.  And that, some would say, is indeed a function of the Harvard Business School teaching which has by now permeated the entire MBA school approach in America.

I think it is more fundamental than that.  One problem is that MBA candidates seldom are practicing engineers; they tend to be either recent graduates with little practical experience, or folk with financial training rather than scientific or engineering training.  This is a critical difference in two respects -- first, the constant experimentation / validation nature of scientific inquiry with lots of trial and error, and a whole lot of compromise, eludes such folk.  Secondly, the notion that failed experimentation is positive, i.e. that risk taking and learning from the duds is valuable and necessary, feels just somehow wrong.

The net result is that we have a nation of MBA leaders who are avowedly risk-averse, rather than a nation of designers who are not innovative.

Another problem -- maybe the core problem -- is that innovation is upsetting.  It IS risky.  And the next quarterly earnings statement will be due shortly, where 'voters' -- i.e. shareholders -- ask, "What have you done for me lately?"

This blog -- by a historic Intrapreneur -- proposes to discuss, describe, and debate Intrapreneuring, and its potentially significant role in business today.  My credentials are 'historic' -- featured as Chapter 1 of Pinchot's book nearly thirty years ago, interviewed by Jane Pauley on The Today Show which has been rebroadcast in seventy-five countries to my knowledge  -- through a recent memoir "Permission Denied: Odyssey of an Intrapreneur", available through InnovaScapes Institute Press.

So, maybe a new word for you -- INTRAPRENEURING.   More about this, and more about what InnovaScapes Institute might do to help it become more known, and hopefully more prevalent, to come