A story about my experience as an intrapreneur, looking back with nostalgia, and serendipity. Mostly serendipity.

Before I turned to social entrepreneurship and then to (commercial) entrepreneurship, I was an intrapreneur at a large Indian consulting company. Coz that's what Intrapreneurship is really about - too chicken to let go of a salary, and in return one hands over all the oversized benefits 🦄 to the company.

We were a "small" ~80 member semiconductor expert product group who had converted from creating products to offering services. (Lot of backstory here about us acquiring a foreign company in EU, then divesting it after 4 yrs, and us being forced to exit the product biz due to settlement terms, yada yada).

Together with my boss, I was the leader of this band of very talented and well-knit individuals. We made the shift from a product mindset to services mindset, and it was quite hard. Having spent more than a decade doing products, I think we were ill prepared about the capriciousness and unending idiocy of a services biz. So not unsurprisingly, we failed. After 2 years of trying, I gave up and moved on, my erstwhile boss followed soon enough and the group was disbanded.

But this is not a usual story of fighting against mean corporate bosses etc... it fact it was the reverse.

Railing against over protective parents, haha

More than anything else, to our surprise, we were not being taken seriously within the organization. Imagine that. We had a stellar 15 year track record, we had a list of prospects around the globe, we ourselves were a hot acquisition target for semi product companies setting up in India, but our own company did not think that we should be allowed to give it a go on our own terms!

We wanted all kinds of fun things. Why? Umm, that's how startups work:

• independent group with its own PnL and G&O
• ability to make the right hiring calls and pay whatever it took to acquire talent without being subject to the standard company norms
• do biz with prospects / customers that did not come from the corporate approved list
• do biz with startups. Gasp! And sometimes get nothing but an IOU at the end - thats how startups work, and its OK
• not be subject to OM norms on all deals
• and you know simple things like our own separate flag 🚩

But we might as well be tilting at windmills. I wanted us to be treated as an startup within the organization - But we were getting molly coddled! Sr mgmt did not trust us to give us a free hand on any of these things. We kept getting clubbed with the overall service line, where of course, we were a decimal place in terms of size, and thus of no real importance.

Meetings with CEO office, CSO and corporate doublespeak

At some point, we starting having bold discussions with gents from the CEO office who were newly hired and responsible for driving funny things like innovation centers. This gent was a ex-entrepreneur who was tasked with finding and nurturing innovative projects across the org. Then we starting making pitches to CSO office, with 3 and 5 yr projections of the usual goobledook in order to get what was internally euphemistically called "investment". This was a giant company wide competition of sorts.

But we never quite managed to get any prizes in these dog and pony show where investment would come only if we were able to somehow guarantee results. Huh?

The whole point of doing an internal startup is to have potentially easier access to investment and nurture, without going through the rigmarole of fighting for investment. If one has to do that, might as well take one's ideas and chutzpah and be an entrepreneur, innit?

The rules of Intrapreneurship

Anyhoo, like all random MBA types, I've also come up with my rules of Intrapreneurship for organizations trying to do this. Note that no articles were harmed in creating these - I came up with this myself.

1. Recognize that Intrapreneurship is more difficult than entrepreneurship

Yes really. As an entrepreneur, there are few rules and little oversight. The only rule could be "don't be evil" and we all know how that one's gone for The Goog. And oversight? What startup oversight? That's a joke even you recognize gentle reader.

But intrapreneurship comes with the baggage of of rules, oversight, corporate politics and - ye gods - endless reporting. Best of luck trying to be innovative when someone is doing the bhangra at the end of quarter asking for Excel sheets of whatever.

2. Don't get in the way of intrapreneurs

One of my early bosses had a NSFW succinct saying:

Opinions are like a**holes. Everyone has one, nobody wants to see another's.

Easier said than done. Do try not to bog the poor intrapreneur with too much gyan. Its a tough life as shown in #1 above. Give her some room to figure things out.

Don't add hurdles, just coz, hey we be big company, that's how its done. Just because everyone across the organization is toeing the line, doesn't mean that the rules should be the same for the intrapreneurial group. In order to have even a chance of success, the rules MUST be different for intrapreneurial units.

3. Success not guaranteed

Don't pretend to nurture intrapreneurship because it looks good on the website / corporate report / analysts call and what have we. The corporate mindset and culture has to consciously transform to calculated risk-taking, in order to sustain intrapreneurs. This is not business as usual.

Going by the standard failure rates of startups - your intrapreneurial units will certainly fail. That's OK. You as a company will lose money. That's OK. But the 10% that will succeed will make up for the ones which failed.

So if the DNA of the company is not open to failure - please, skydiving is not for you.

4. Passionate intrapreneurs are company touchstones

People who are passionate about birthing something new, esp within an organization, are perhaps unique and may be able to provide benefits that go beyond their immediate business.

They have a kida 🐛 inside them. They are compelled to do more, and they need to be recognized for it - they need their moment in the sun. If you keep them hidden in the drawer for a rainy day, chances are they'll go where the sun is shining.

So give them some love, feature them in your company wide newsletter and website, showcase them every chance you get - give them a chance to talk to your big ticket prospects instead of taking your prospects thru yet another desi innovation center. The passion and pride of the successful intrapreneur may well carry the day.

Featured image: From a new tab on my browser.

By a most remarkable coincidence, this showed up when I opened a new tab to look for a featured image for this article! Gotta love the serendipity that drives the universe.