Corporate entrepreneurship: teaching managers to be entrepreneurs

JMD22,4342entrepreneurs, with some championing at the senior level, to start to seeresults..A lot of ordinary corporate citizens can learn to act as corporateentrepreneurs with the right education, training, and support. The mostcritical piece is that they are helped to develop an idea that theythemselves are turned on to. Without this passion, it would be hard toimagine anyone willing to fight the uphill battle that many of our wouldbeentrepreneurs had to do. This really speaks to the mindset of theentrepreneur. Passion can’t be taught, but it can be encouraged. The skillset, however is much easier to teach. Market analyses, cash flow analysis,operations management etc., can be taught, as we know from workingwith MBAs and other executives..Catalytic coaching and the business planning process were the two mostimportant educational tools for the development of new businessopportunities. Catalytic coaching sounds like an oxymoron, but itinvolved pushing managers to move from an iterative focus to a platformfocus. Most managers, when asked to think about new businessopportunities, tend to start close to home with iterative, relatively smallchanges to products or services. It takes a push from a coach whoaggressively challenges this “close to home” mentality typically found inthe ideation phase. We saw many mediocre ideas blossom into trulyentrepreneurial ideas as a result of this type of coaching. In addition, thisis where some of the real passion developed within the corporateentrepreneur. They started to fall in love with their ideas, especially whenthey became really interesting and more risky. Many of Mott’s peoplestarted off with ideas about packaging and apple sauce color. At the endof the program they were thinking about day care centers and managingbrands for the World Wide Wrestling Federation, a far cry from blueapple sauce. These types of ideas are more of a platform of ideas in thatthey leverage the corporation’s capabilities, but into significantlydifferent product offerings or markets. The importance of the businessplan is obvious. Great ideas without the discipline of the businessplanning process are generally not great opportunities. This was the mostimportant tool for differentiating the two and further shaping theopportunity. One of our entrepreneurs came to us in a perturbed statebecause his business plan was telling him that he could not make anymoney with his original idea. He was afraid that he would some how “fail”the entrepreneurial course. We soundly congratulated him for notspending the company’s money on a bad idea and told him to find anotherone. This little story says a lot. Being entrepreneurial also means knowingwhen to “pull the plug”..Entrepreneurs can come from anywhere in the organization. One of ourbiggest lessons was our inability to predict who could become a corporate