Corporate entrepreneurship: teaching managers to be entrepreneurs

companies were either unwilling or unable to change their pay structuresin order to support corporate entrepreneurship. Pay structures in largecompanies are often quite structured and systematic and therefore easyto administer but equally hard to change. They are often geared toequity and fairness, not the creation of internal entrepreneurs. Personnelpeople have often spent extraordinary amounts of time fine-tuning thesepay programs to ensure both external and internal equity. However, fewif any, of these pay systems are capable of dealing with an internalentrepreneur. It is not the purpose in this article to discussentrepreneurial pay schemes but they involve current payment on thepromise of future success, and they often involve some equity stake bythe internal entrepreneur in the future venture. For these reasons alonesome companies prefer to spin out the venture so that it will not beconstrained by the company’s often fair but constraining policies,especially those of pay.(2) A second barrier involved time. In all four of our companies,managers were expected to do their day jobs and develop anopportunity to the point where it would either be funded or killed. Onthe surface, this approach makes sense from a “vetting” point of view.If you don’t really love your idea and see it as a real opportunity, thenyou won’t have the motivation to do your day job and work on a newventure at the same time. Start-up entrepreneurs also often work for alarge company, and in their spare time pursue their dream of startingtheir own business. Unfortunately, for most of our company “wouldbe”entrepreneurs, their day jobs were almost overwhelming. All thedownsizing and increased pressure for short term quarterly resultshad pushed many of the managers with whom we worked into tenand 12 hour days. So there was precious little time or energy left topursue another opportunity especially if the rewards were not clear fordoing so.(3) A third and quite surprising obstacle that we discovered from our workwith these companies involved the peers of the program participants. Itwas surprising how many of these manager’s peers hoped they failed intheir efforts to become corporate entrepreneurs. Because thisphenomenon (no head shall rise above the rest, unless it’s mine)existed across all four of our companies – we have been led to concludethat this may be a human condition in many companies. Competition forjobs, promotions, etc., undoubtedly causes many of us to judge our worthin terms of others’ successes. In large bureaucratic organizations whereit is difficult to differentiate oneself or to stand out, the prospect of seeingsomeone else chosen as a corporate entrepreneur with the potential torun their own businesses and get rewarded accordingly, can createintense jealousy. Many of our would-be entrepreneurs found this changeCorporateentrepreneurship339