Intrapreneurship as seen through CGI glasses

Last night in Paris was memorable, our CGI members took us to the Moulin Rouge after the formal meeting where we had a very nice evening. There was a girl named Loulou who did one heck of a show. Too bad she’s not into system integration, I would hire her right away. Serge and I sang the Marseillaise in the cab on my way back to the hotel. Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrive!

Our tour d’Europe is unfortunately over, I’m heading back today to the U.S. to continue our annual tour. During our formal meeting with the Paris VPs, I emphasized why intrapreneurship is so ingrained in the CGI culture. I used a slide from a standard presentation that we do:

Our success is based on the competence, commitment and enthusiasm of our members. Therefore, we promote a climate of innovation and initiative where we are empowered with a sense of ownership in supporting clients, thus ensuring the firm’s profitable growth. Through teamwork, sharing our know-how and expertise, we bring the best of CGI to our clients. As members, we share in the value we create through equity ownership and profit participation.

This carefully written paragraph is full of gems when you spend time analyzing it, I’m actually very proud of this. For one thing, we were able to plug a wide collection of buzzwords in just 6 lines: competence, commitment, enthusiasm, innovation, initiative, empowerment, ownership, profitable growth (love this one), teamwork, know-how, expertise, value, profit participation – just to name a few.

The whole paragraph is of course meaningless because it surfs on so many concepts, but that’s the beauty of it. The average reader will go through the paragraph and then think: Holy mackerel, where in this paragraph does CGI actually talk about intrapreneurship?

Wiki says that intrapreneurship is the practice of using entrepreneurial skills without taking on the risks or accountability associated with entrepreneurial activities. Employees, perhaps engaged in a special project within a larger firm are supposed to behave as entrepreneurs, even though they have the resources and capabilities of the larger firm to draw upon. Capturing the dynamic nature of entrepreneurial management (trying things until successful, learning from failures, attempting to conserve resources, etc.) adds to the potential of an otherwise static organization without exposing those employees or self employed people to the risks or accountability normally associated with entrepreneurial failure.

Please note that the keywords used in the paragraph above are entirely different from CGI’s definition: risks, special project, entrepreneurs, resources, dynamic, potential and failure. The dreaded F word.

Why the difference you ask? Fact is, CGI is defining its own version of intrapreneurship, one that does not involve risks, resources or entrepreneurial spirit because those are bad ugly things especially from an accounting perspective. Simply said, the CGI intraneurship is about putting unpaid hours into something that doesn’t get billed to any client. Period.

We consider that this extra work is your contribution to CGI, that’s right. We give you a day job and in return you scratch our back by working nights and week-ends.

This - my friends - is intrapreneurship. There’s no risk involved, there’s no real reward too, and we make you feel guilty if don’t do like the others. And by guilt, I mean it’s nothing hard, but you know if you’re a director and want to become a powerless VP you’ll need to work your ass off. Regular sickness is one good sign you’re working well.

Have you been bleeding, lately?