Page 153 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

140 grow from within

decisions about corporate entrepreneurship structures and
processes. As discussed in Chapter 3, in the late 1990s, BP’s
CEO, Lord Browne, was a leader in mega-mergers and acqui-
sitions within the oil industry. In the face of low oil prices and
diminishing proven reserves, driving overhead efficiencies and
broadening the customer base was the industry’s general strat-
egy for driving profit growth. Beyond this, however, Lord
Browne believed that there could be “intellectual economies of
scale” across the much broader size and scope of BP’s busi-
nesses. In particular, he believed that information technologies
should be seen “not just as a service function but as an activ-
ity which could change the nature of the business itself.” This
was the context in which he asked Daru Darukhanavala in the
office of the chief information officer to build an organization
for conceiving and pursuing IT-based innovation across BP
business units.
As described in Chapter 3, Daru built an advocacy organi-
zation focused on bringing external capabilities to bear on BP’s
business units’ most pressing problems. The organization was
structured and managed to drive business transformation
across BP, consistent with BP’s corporate culture. What BP’s
executive leadership wanted to accomplish, combined with
the political realities of implementation, led to the unique
organization and processes of the office of the chief technol-
ogy officer.
High-level visions such as those propagated by DuPont and
BP help provide general alignment across the corporation for
the direction in which new business development should be
pursued. However, in order to make the vision actionable, spe-
cific objectives need to be outlined. Is the company seeking cor-
poratewide cultural transformation, or is it looking at the
renovation of particular divisions to address either commodi-
tization or disruptive threats? Or perhaps the problem is that