Gifford Pinchot III: Solving Problems

1980’s interview Gifford Pinchot, Richard Branson and Anita Roddick

SOLVING PROBLEMS

Entrepreneurship isn’t about leaving your 9-5 job to start a company. It’s passion – a passion to solve problems and scale your project in the right direction. And to passionately solve problems within an industry doesn’t require starting a brand new company. Sometimes, all it takes is opportunity and support.

This is where intrapreneurialism comes in. And the idea is growing in popularity on a large scale. More and more large organisations are putting programs in place to encourage intrapreneurship. Likewise, there is an increase in companies, like Pinchot & Co., whose sole mission is to help organizations celebrate and cater to their intrapreneurs. Pinchot & Co. was founded over 30 years ago, by Gifford Pinchot III and his wife Libba,to liberate the creativity and passion of employees and drive profitable innovation inside of sizeable firms. To launch the intrapreneuring movement, they wrote Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become and Intrapreneur.

The book was wildly successful, being translated into 15 different languages, and began the long string of offering with their, now, long-term clients. For the past 34 years, Pinchot & Co. has been helping companies use the intrapreneurial spirit of their employees to launch over 800 new products and services, implement new strategies, cut costs, address climate change, and improve functional performances. We spoke to Pinchot about how employees can navigate the resistance of the organisational immune system, how upper management can best utilise their intrapreneurs, and a brief forecast of the intrapreneurial scene.

How exactly does Pinchot & Co. help companies encourage and utilise intrapreneurs within their company?

Gifford Pinchot III: There are 3 main phases:

1. Widespread education in the basics of

innovation and intrapreneurship: Intrapreneurs can come from anywhere in the company. Many potential intrapreneurs, when they hear stories about intrapreneurs, have sudden realisations about who they really are. Even a mere 2-hour online training has surfaced a lot of intrapreneurs and given managers a sense of what to do when they seek coaching and support.

2. Quick successes: Accelerators that help would-be intrapreneurs develop their vision, team, and business plan. We couple the accelerator with a module in the high potential training that develops managers’ ability

to understand and coach intrapreneurs. Then we guide those managers in coaching the accelerator participants. The accelerators get quick wins, build internal support for intrapreneuring and leave a cohort of developed intrapreneurs and sponsors.

Using intrapreneurs to cut expenses, but not jobs, is another way to get some guaranteed ultraquick wins.

3. Institutional intrapreneurial systems and culture: This requires studying the culture and targeted organisational, system, and mindset changes. It includes building a “community of the willing,” committed to make the organisation better, safer, more

resilient, and stronger. It requires bringing the rest of the employees along at a pace they can embrace.

What is the “organisational immune system?”

GP: The organisational immune system is an evocative name for the web of resistance that too often bogs down intrapreneurs. In the formal decision system, there are too many people who have to say yes to an innovative idea. It’s the collective weight of

all the decisions and delays that discourages innovation.

We help leaders working to increase innovation and intrapreneurship in their organisations by identifying the barriers and building on the existing positive cultural factors to create an environment more supportive of intrapreneurship. We also teach intrapreneurs ways to calm the organisational immune system so it does not reject them, but instead lets them proceed. So how does an employee best act upon their innovative ideas? GP: Often that takes patience. A few hints: Ask for advice before you ask for resources. Everyone is willing to give advice. Ask them to refer you to others for answers to your questions. After talking to those suggested, go back and express gratitude for the advice. Then ask for a bit more help. The more they help, the more willing they are to help more. Building the relationship slowly by not asking for too much too soon. Test rapid prototypes with potential customers and users. Face reality, redesign, and try again. Build your team, at first with volunteers. Meet regularly. Eat together. As success grows, build an approved project and get your teammates time and budget to work on it officially. Build a high performance team.

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Find sponsors and build a strong

relationship with them. Keep them informed about the problems as

well as the successes. Don’t oversell your idea. Be honest and you are more likely to earn the trust of managers who then take up your cause. Overselling doesn’t work in close, long-term relationships.

What about tips for upper management in terms of creating an intrapreneur friendly environment within their company?

GP: Bet on people, not ideas: 80% of determining success in innovation is the quality of the people doing it.

What makes intrapreneurship work is not a process, but rather a relationship: In big companies, what works, instead of formal processes, is a supportive

relationship of trust between one or more courageous managers and an intrapreneurial team.

Trusting the right intrapreneurs is the innovation system that works. A good first step is to learn how to tell the true intrapreneurs from the “promoters,” a venture capital term for those who talk a good game, but don’t have the character to finish the job.

The big shortage is sponsors: There are plenty of potential intrapreneurs hidden in the woodwork who will come out in a supportive environment. Courageous sponsors are rare. How will you find them? Ask your intrapreneurs, “In your darkest hour, who still supported and coached you?” Those are the real sponsors, not the higher ups that came in once the idea was successful.

Do you see any global trends for intrapreneurship emerging?

1. Intrapreneurship describes what the young increasingly want from work freedom and a change to make a difference early in

their careers. Intrapreneurship is the answer to the epic levels of disengagement among the young. It’s gaining currency with both employees and employers. 2. Increasingly the best intrapreneurs choose projects that address challenges that address issues like the environment, health, happiness and poverty. Their connection to deep values often drives creativity and unstoppably determined implementation that is both highly profitable and successful in addressing the world’s major challenges. Leaders are learning to respect a burning purpose coupled with frequent market testing as a predictor of success rather than an indicator of excess emotion. 3. As machines take over mechanical and analytical work, the bulk of work that is left for humans will require some combination of caring and creating. Machines don’t do these two things well and neither do humans in a command and control system. You cannot command someone to care or to innovate; it has to come from the inside – from “intrinsic motivation,” which can only flourish if employees have freedom to make many of their own decisions. Intrapreneurship provides the tools for managing intrinsic motivation and these growing categories of

work. 4. It used to be that most intrapreneurs were men. Now 50% plus are women. In intrapreneurship you often get unambiguous feedback from the marketplace. Success is factual, not a matter of opinion. It requires

collaboration across boundaries. An intrapreneurial role helps to offset the tendency to undervalue the contributions of women.

5. There are now ways to use intrapreneurship to drive efficiency, quality, and innovation in the internal facing and

operational jobs, and even jobs doing the everyday work at the

very bottom of the hierarchy. This can vastly increase the scope of intrapreneurship – it’s not just about new products, it is about getting anything done better, faster, cheaper, and more sustainably. Follow Gifford on Twitter

@GiffordPinchot