Page 53 - Grow from Within Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation

40 grow from within

vative, and assertive, can transform a company’s culture on
its own? Corporate entrepreneurs and larger innovation
teams can have a positive impact on a company’s culture, but
explicitly acquiring the role of culture change agent should
be pursued with caution. Before embarking on this journey,
make sure that you truly have the requirement and the man-
date to do so—meaning active top management engage-
ment—and that you have the necessary resources and access
to get the job done.
As Confucius observed, culture emanates from the house of
the emperor. Creating culture change companywide typically
requires a serious mandate from and direct engagement by the
CEO and his or her lieutenants. If the top group fails to model
innovative behaviors and make an ongoing, credible case for
innovation, real culture change will be a losing game. This is
especially true for individual executives or small teams with
the word innovation or entrepreneurship in their titles, no matter
how well funded they may be.
One of the worst situations in which to be left is holding the
culture change bag with insufficient authority and resources.
While limited budgets encourage ingenuity and resourceful-
ness, as in the BP case cited earlier, there is a point beyond
which even the most brilliant operator should not be expected
to cope. When the effort does eventually fail, it will be added
to a company’s graveyard of botched corporate initiatives,
shoring up cynical “we’ve seen this before” attitudes that throt-
tle true, meaningful change. You will have done more harm
than good.
Though most corporate entrepreneurship teams do not have
to pick up this mantle, many of them do so on their own ini-
tiative. They define their objectives more broadly than senior
management has requested and set the bar unnecessarily high.
Heeding the advice of professors and consultants, some eager