WHO, EXACTLY, IS AN ENTREPRENEUR?

 

As I travel the world talking about the Lean Startup, I’m consistently surprised that I meet people in the audience who seem out of place. In addition to the more traditional startup entrepreneurs I meet, these people are general managers, mostly working in very large companies, who are tasked with creating new ventures or product innovations. They are adept at organizational politics: they know how to form autonomous divisions with separate profit and loss statements (P&Ls) and can shield controversial teams from corporate meddling. The biggest surprise is that they are visionaries. Like the startup founders I have worked with for years, they can see the future of their industries and are prepared to take bold risks to seek out new and innovative solutions to the problems their companies face.

Mark, for example, is a manager for an extremely large company who came to one of my lectures. He is the leader of a division that recently had been chartered to bring his company into the twenty-first century by building a new suite of products designed to take advantage of the Internet. When he came to talk to me afterward, I started to give him the standard advice about how to create innovation teams inside big companies, and he stopped me in midstream: “Yeah, I’ve read The Innovator’s Dilemma.1 I’ve got that all taken care of.” He was a long-term employee of the company and a successful manager to boot, so managing internal politics was the least of his problems. I should have known; his success was a testament to his ability to navigate the company’s corporate policies, personnel, and processes to get things done.

Next, I tried to give him some advice about the future, about cool new highly leveraged product development technologies. He interrupted me again: “Right. I know all about the Internet, and I have a vision for how our company needs to adapt to it or die.”

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Mark has all the entrepreneurial prerequisites nailed—proper team structure, good personnel, a strong vision for the future, and an appetite for risk taking—and so it finally occurred to me to ask why he was coming to me for advice. He said, “It’s as if we have all of the raw materials: kindling, wood, paper, flint, even some sparks. But where’s the fire?” The theories of management that Mark had studied treat innovation like a “black box” by focusing on the structures companies need to put in place to form internal startup teams. But Mark found himself working inside the black box—and in need of guidance.

What Mark was missing was a process for converting the raw materials of innovation into real-world breakthrough successes. Once a team is set up, what should it do? What process should it use? How should it be held accountable to performance milestones? These are questions the Lean Startup methodology is designed to answer.

My point? Mark is an entrepreneur just like a Silicon Valley high-tech founder with a garage startup. He needs the principles of the Lean Startup just as much as the folks I thought of as classic entrepreneurs do.

Entrepreneurs who operate inside an established organization sometimes are called “intrapreneurs” because of the special circumstances that attend building a startup within a larger company. As I have applied Lean Startup ideas in an ever-widening variety of companies and industries, I have come to believe that intrapreneurs have much more in common with the rest of the community of entrepreneurs than most people believe. Thus, when I use the term entrepreneur, I am referring to the whole startup ecosystem regardless of company size, sector, or stage of development.

This book is for entrepreneurs of all stripes: from young visionaries with little backing but great ideas to seasoned visionaries within larger companies such as Mark—and the people who hold them accountable.