Intrapreneur

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So sayeth Wikipiedia, “Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.” Wikipedia also defines entrepreneurship — in turn quoting the Online Business Dictionary as “the capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks to make a profit.”

Now you might wonder whether you are alone in sensing a smudge of cognitive dissonance about this. You are not.

However imaginative they feel themselves to be, people who work in large organisations — and the JC speaks here from thirty odd years’ coalface experience, by the way — not only take no personal risk but construct their entire professional trajectories around the singular objective of avoiding anything — anything, however innocuous at first sight it may seem — which could, in any conceivable light, resemble risk. To be sure, the organisation will take risks — it has to: there is no return without risks — but these will be gormlessly, unwittingly underwritten others in the firm: the laggards, the Boxer the Horse types, who will loyally plough furrows through landmines, clear paths through the valley of the shadow of death at their own cost, but to the exclusive benefit, should they be completed without ambush, immolation or catastrophe of their intrepreneurial colleages.

Intrapreneurs are the organisation’s apex creditors: they feed first, drink longest at the well, and manage their own private conflicts of interest — namely, to spend as little time at the well as possible, while drafting as much as is humanly possible from it — while the stockholders and actual workers stand by.