Page 144 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Emerging Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship 131

It’s important to realize that a project moves through differ-
ent life cycles during this process, and the personnel have to
be matched to this. Some people are great inventors; others are
great evangelists; still others are great optimizers. Projects need
to be run like a relay race, with the results being passed on to
a different group as they reach the next stage of maturity. For
inventors, you want people with passion, but also “coachabil-
ity.” If they are stubborn, they can kill projects—what we call
“the founder’s deadly embrace.” In the next stage, you need
great marketing people, like a Steve Jobs. In the final stage, you
need great operational people, the kind who are running your
business units today.
EMTG found that it was not necessary to create large finan-
cial incentives for its projects. You will encounter many peo-
ple who want you to pay them up front for sharing their
ideas. In fact, the best entrepreneurs tend to be the ones who
are telling their ideas to everyone who will listen! Having
separate financial incentives can disrupt internal equity in a
company. (Even in freewheeling Google, this happens some-
times with its Founders’ Awards.) Success has a thousand
parents, and everyone gets into haggling about how much his
contribution meant. Instead, Cisco has found that people are
eager to become a part of EMTG, without any special com-
pensation. Many of them have been involved in failed start-
ups. They are mostly motivated by the desire to see their
ideas succeed. More broadly, having a home for ideas such as
EMTG, even if those ideas are still not implemented, can
serve as something of a pressure valve for a company. It gives
people a place to go, someone who will listen, which is use-
ful in its own right.
Cargill’s EBA and Cisco’s EMTG are exemplars of produc-
tive Producer Model organizations. However, the Producer
Model is not without its share of challenges and risks. First, it