November 2006
Drive Innovation by Getting Out of the Way!
-- by Tom Nies
Thanks to Cincom’s long-term success, we are often asked how do we, as a medium-sized, privately held company, effectively compete with larger, publicly held companies.
In 1985, Gifford Pinchot III coined the phrase “intrapreneurship” to describe the marriage of an entrepreneurial spirit – complete with its fierce independence and lack of deference to established views – with the resources of a large corporation. While these two spirits may seem in conflict, they actually thrive in many of the world’s best-run companies.
Intrapreneurship is a strategy for stimulating innovation by making better use of entrepreneurial talent. When effectively promoted and channeled, intrapreneurship not only fosters innovation, it also helps employees with good ideas to better channel the resources of a corporation to develop more successful products.
Some of the greatest business leaders of the past century made their early mark in business as intrapreneurs. Former General Electric chairman Jack Welch made a name for himself by building GE’s engineering plastics business as if he were starting his own company. Lew Lehr, former chairman of 3M, similarly built his career on his intrapreneurial pursuit of 3M’s expansion into the healthcare industry. Both General Electric and 3M are long-time Cincom customers, and both are very successful.
Cincom fosters an intrapreneur ethic within our company. The result is many of our associates are empowered and enabled to become company “change agents” who are comfortable bringing new ideas forward and promoting their execution.
Posted by TomNies on November 14, 2006 at 04:10 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink
