HRpreneuring Where Entrepreneurship and HR Intersect

I currently run a number of social network groups, blogs, etc... I have also led numerous training courses in Lean Six Sigma. One of the techniques I used to get students to return to class was to play short 3-5 min video clips. Everyone would be quiet so as avoid the hard looks of their peers, most were attentive, and soon, students would be looking forward to breaks and the next video. Back to social networks and the groups I have led, where I have some of the most successful groups on the internet with over 22M subscribers, how did I grow the groups so big, why do so many come back? Same concept I learned in the classroom, where I added video to the social networks, made them fun and appealing, and others come to watch and participate. Innovation does not just mean creating something new, but in applying something old in a new way that can create a new paradigm, change, emotion, change, that others want or need.

As an IT person, I'm one of several working with our HR and Comms teams to get them more comfortable with the collaboration technologies available. Many people in both groups see the need to try new things, and several have taken up our grass-roots efforts to "open source" the intellectual property in the organization and make the means of getting to the content experts easier. We've been trying this for nearly three years and are just now getting significant traction - a fair amount has to do with having to do things different in a tricky economy.

Slowly but surely people are getting that good ideas can come from anywhere and we're working to challenge the idea that only a select (perhaps chosen) few innovators come up with the new, big idea. Even if the new, big idea is a tweak of something that's been done for years.

@MarkPalmer, at lunch today I plan to ask specifics about your comment, "introducing Twitter changed the way I blog, and changed the way I think about communication" Des

The importance of, and in my experience, limitaitons of organizational culture cannot be stressed enough. Working for a leading health care firm, I have lately seen our staid, inflexible culture assaulted by several intrapreneurs. I am in a technical group that is attempting to lead change in some key areas that will change the relationship between our IT department and internal customers, and empower the organization by focusing technology on business goals, and not on the technology itself. I kept feelers out in some other departments and recently tied in our group to a small HR team that has an overlapping goal - to drive organizational excellence.

It takes concerted effort, initially at great cost, to drive cracks in a corporate culture and open up opportiunity for flexibility and collaboration (in our case). This plays off Hugh MacLeod’s idea of "initial resistance".

It is exciting to see the power that intrapreneurs have to challenge the status quo and start to gain their initial successes.

As the CEO of a VC-backed company that was founded by innovative MIT computer scientists, and having been involved with dozens of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial enterprises, I struggle to choose one story for you. But my most recent experience holds perhaps the timeliest lesson - to look for new sources of innovation during the most challenging economic times. The story is about the communication innovation - specifically, about leveraging social media to revolutionize the way companies communicate with customers, prospects, press, and analysts.

It started 4 years ago when I started "experimenting" with a blog. In preceding years, one of my fellow execs and I had published over 50 articles in traditional print publications. I ran a division of a $1B public company, and they were looking for volunteers to experiment. I volunteered. The blog took off - it attracted over 40,000 unique visitors in the first year, which is about the size of many print publications in my market (electronic trading in financial services). The awareness of my division, began to eclipse the awareness of our parent company, even though we generated a tiny fraction of the company's total revenue.

Fast forward - 4 years later - I moved to my current company (StreamBase), and, in the first year, we have changed our entire approach to communication. We fired our PR agencies. We started a blog. And we’ve started to use Twitter.

The results? The communication innovation that social media affords has lead to some compelling quantitative results. Since beginning this transformation, we have simultaneously cut marketing spend in half and tripled our awareness, as measured by lead generation volume, cost per lead, press coverage, and so on). This was the purpose of rule #1 in a blog post I wrote recently called "26 Twitter Lessons for CEOs," which you can read here:

http://streambase.typepad.com/streambase_stream...

I think many of the key tenets of intrapreneuring are illustrated in this story including:

- Allow innovative efforts to be independent (my old company let me blog without corporate shackles)
- A bias for action (I communicate what I want, when I want)
- Come to work willing to be fired (I went out on a limb with my opinions)
- Course correct quickly (introducing Twitter changed the way I blog, and changed the way I think about communication)

Mark Palmer, president and CEO, StreamBase

All great comments ... thanks! You are right, John, how did CBS fail to see opportunities CNN saw? How did GM miss the minivan? Why didn’t Borders Books produce amazon.com? and my favorite two: Why haven’t newspapers harnessed the internet ... still and why didn’t the large staffing companies invent RPO? So let's at least take this to the reasonable level at which HR can "invent" and "execute" better ways to ensure the organization meets its objectives. Bruce, kudus to you for the idea, the execution in pilot form and most importantly, the measurement! Track it all the way thru to store revenues, share, profitability, etc. Finally, Asheen, I LOVE your comment on either "nobody" or "everybody" likes your new idea. Which is one of the points Hugh makes ... ideas change things, people, circumstances, etc.

Any of you have specific requests for Hugh's note to you on your book? John, I have a couple I can think of for you!

Thanks for your comments and let's keep the dialogue going.

Talking about getting a huge ocean liner to make a turn, try selling that "development stuff" to some old time restaurant folks! The good news is they saw enough benefit in my idea to allow me to put together a targeted high potential manager group to allow us to provide some EI development for potential GMs and provide our company with a pool of candidates. Today we are having the fifth workshop with our first group and so far have promoted 5 of the 10 members. And now we are in the process of selecting the members for the second group. So while the idea was unique to the world, creating a sustainable program like this in a smaller restaurant company (we own 69 Applebee's) was, and so far its legs are growing.

You pose an interesting challenge, Sue. In order to be effective, HR is often in charge of maintaining the status quo. Conventional wisdom is the stock and trade of the industry. Real intrapreneurs in HR are rare indeed.

It's not at all clear to me that 'lots of little conversations' do, in fact, pave the way for innovation. My sense is that innovation very rarely happens within the confines of an established market leader. The blinders of conventional wisdom are so severe that most interesting innovations are delivered by upstarts. Currently, our culture is littered with the carcasses of incumbents who couldn't innovate.

IBM couldn't have started Google (nor Microsoft, for that matter). None of the big last generation players invented Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or ten thousand new enterprises.

New ideas are resisted for a variety of reasons. My good friends Claudia Faust and Alise Cortez are trying to make a company called "Improved Experience" gain some traction. The idea is to use survey tools to assess candidate experience on corporate employment websites. It's a good idea that I sunk $150K into about 7 years ago.

No one was interested back then because it was too early. Claudia and Alise are having somewhat better results than I did. A great idea at the wrong time is a particularly useless thing.

It's also worth pointing out that great ideas are the cheapest thing imaginable. While there is a massive surplus of great ideas, there is an enormous shortage of good execution.

Give me good execution over a great idea any day.

Having worked as the second employee of a successful biotech startup and picked up my MBA from the top Entrepreneurship school in the world (Sue, you know Babson well!), I thought I understood well what it takes.

But I've been running my own sustainable innovation consultancy for a year now, and it's been an eye-opening experience. Consulting practices are weird enterprises: easy to start with minimal capital expenditures, but (perhaps consequently) difficult to create and maintain competitive differentiation.

So here's what I've learned that I think is relevant and non-obvious: nobody, and I mean nobody, thinks your startup is a *good* idea. People either think it's a GREAT idea, can't fail, why didn't you start it six months ago?!, or that it's a terrible one, and here are a dozen reasons for your inevitable intrinsic failure.

The truth, of course, is that both groups are right. Entrepreneurship -- or intrapreneurship -- boils down to knowing when to sit down and listen, and when to stand up and speak. When you get the balance right, it's called leadership; when you're off, it's either arrogance or lack of vision. The trick is to find that balance!