Openminds

I regularly speak with people who work inside of what they describe as an “entrepreneurial company”. They speak with both admiration and loathing for the company’s founders who they describe as erratic, unpredictable, too fast to action, and too slow to develop process.

These folks love the energy, commitment, enthusiasm, and above all else, the vision of their leaders. But they hate the lack of organization, policy and predictability that accompanies those same leaders.

Many times, I also hear them say they too are entrepreneurial, and ultimately they joined the company because it was led by someone they felt they could relate to. They wanted to be an entrepreneur and felt that by joining a company led by one, they would be able to live their own dreams without the risk.

It is in those conversations that I think to myself: I wonder if that company really needs another entrepreneur, or whether what it really needs is an “intrapreneur”?

Let me explain. Several years ago, I engaged a consultant to help us determine the personality types of the people who worked in our company. We all took a test and ended up with a coded color that helped to identify and explain our key motivators and actions. The colors were orange, blue, green, and yellow. Orange represented highly entrepreneurial-type people who didn’t require process and were bad at detail and follow through. At the other end of the spectrum were the yellows who needed clear process, direction, and detail in order to succeed. The objective of the exercise was for each of us to understand the other’s personality type in order to communicate in a more meaningful way.

I soon found myself engaged in a conversation with the consultant who pulled me aside to give me some unsolicited advice. She showed me that the company was approximately 50% orange with a mix of the other types of individuals across the remaining 50%. Her advice: I needed to quickly make the company more “balanced”. She said that what we needed wasn’t more entrepreneurial types, but more intrapreneurs - people who could act independently inside of a framed context. She said we had too many people who had no process discipline, and we could never be truly successful without those planner, detail driven thinkers to help ensure we were delivering in a scalable and repeatable manner.

I thought long and hard about what she said, and from what started as a simple, fun exercise to build teams, ended up with an epiphany of how to build my company. We didn’t need people who thought like me, acted like me and didn’t question me. What we needed were people in each area – thinkers, doers, dreamers and questioners. We needed to rethink the balance of our company and look for that perfect blend of process and vision that makes good companies great.

Subsequently, I made some significant changes in my organization. The biggest change was likely in my head. I accepted that the best thing I can do is hire great people who believe in the same vision as I do but aren’t exactly like me. I needed to surround myself by talented, unique individuals who can bring a different perspective and style to helping achieve our vision.

Together, we are an “entrepreneurial company”. Why? Because we are not bound by conventional thinking and we embrace what’s possible. But we are not “entrepreneurial” when it comes to disciplined thinking, process, structure and planning. In that sense, we are a professionally managed firm that can scale and compete with any firm, anywhere.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, intrapreneur, management, hiring, humanresources, venture

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 11:15 am and is filed under Business Culture, entrepreneurship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.