Page 202 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Leadership from All Le vels 187

company had a critical challenge to face or a new business con-
cept to explore, Frey would call on someone from that list. One
of the women he recruited started at the company as a staff
assistant and eventually became the leader of a new division
that she helped build. “In my 17 years at Bell+Howell, I never
had more than a dozen people on that list.” Corporate entre-
preneurial initiatives should provide the context and top-level
support necessary to discover and enable more people to pur-
sue meaningful new growth for the company.
As with any endeavor worth pursuing, it is important to know
how well you’re doing, which means that tracking performance
should be part of the top leaders’ role. Your company’s top lead-
ers should be directly involved with setting the objectives and
success metrics for corporate entrepreneurial initiatives so that
everyone recognizes success when they see it. After appropriate
metrics have been set, at least some members of top management
need to show great interest in performance against those metrics.
Then create mechanisms for regular, open assessment, such as
IBM’s monthly meetings with the top executive in charge of the
EBO program or DuPont’s direct feedback from business unit
and divisional leaders engaged with the Advocate team. New
business building can be so all-consuming that it is important to
develop performance tracking as a discipline early on.
Most important, any CEO who is serious about internal
growth must lead by example, engaging new business teams,
telling stories of entrepreneurial success, and lifting up the
company’s future leaders. Simply setting aggressive targets for
more of the same will eventually plateau. If corporate entre-
preneurial teams are absent from the CEO’s agenda, they’ll
ultimately become marginalized.
To help keep corporate entrepreneurship on the agenda,
many companies employ internal boards to inject senior exec-
utives into the process. The internal venture groups of some