Intrapreneur: Difference between revisions

}}So sayeth Wikipiedia, “[[Intrapreneur|Intrapreneurship]] is the act of behaving like an [[entrepreneur]], while working within a large organisation.” Wikipedia also defines “[[entrepreneur]]ship” as “the capacity and willingness to develop, organise and manage a business venture along with any of its risks to make a profit.”

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<ref>Well; one, as {{author|Nassim Nicholas Taleb}} has observed: an [[employee]] has one enormous [[tail risk]], which those who have found themselves clutching [[Iron Mountain]] boxes outside the premises of [[Enron]] and [[Lehman]] can tell you. But even that is the sudden discontinuation of your [[coupon]], rather rather than forfeiture of your [[capital]]. </ref> 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, even ''resemble'' risk.  

To be sure, the organisation itself will take risks — it has to: there is no [[return]] without [[risk]] — but the key for the canny [[intrapreneur]] is to “syndicate” their underwriting to the gormless laggards, the [[Boxer the Horse]] types — men and women who plough loyal furrows through valleys in the shadow of death, unwittingly risking their own limbs to clear a safe path through terrain infested with mines, snakes, vermin and illness, that their [[intrapreneur]]ial colleages can safely follow, as soon as they are back from the [[panel discussion]] or [[awards]] presentation at which they have been blowing their trumpet.  

[[Intrapreneur]]s are the organisation’s [[apex creditor]]s: 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.