Members Column Day: On intrapreneurship

FakeMike, it seems to me it would be highly beneficial for the company to breed real entrepreneuship. When you empower people to think on their own instead of following the rule book, big things can happen. Unfortunately, most corporations - CGI included - ignore this. Why do large corporations always put a cap on human spirit? Why is there this desire to alienate people? Felipe from Spain

Dear FFS, my experience at CGI and previously at Bell taught me that entrepreneurship can be a lethal disease when it spreads within the ranks of a well-managed and profitable corporation. Let's face it, entrepreneurs are not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. These deviants tend to quit to start their own company and next thing you know they want to invade your sandbox, steal your clients and put you out on the streets.

I know, I know, our founding fathers did just that in 1976 but that was for a good cause, look at where we are today. Today's entrepreneurs are not the same breed, it was different and nobler back then. Men were real men, not just shadows of a Facebook profile.

A company is about order, rules, consistency, and yes status quo. Status quo should be cherished, it is much more polite than saying no, and it gives a subtle hint that the situation may change 500 years from now, so status quo gives hope. Status quo gives plenty of time to weight all options. This is why most serious businesses - including ours - run on XP and Explorer 6. Change is a devil in a slutty red velvet dress, it looks enticing at first but underneath that nice exterior is one ugly beast oozing problems.

Overpaid management consultants have invented this incredibly great idea called "intrapreneurship" where people operate like entrepreneurs within all the existing rigid rules and red tape and by respecting status quo.

This is all bull of course, but it allows us to capture the energy and time of a few naive individuals who fall for this idea. We first create a trap by stating that individuals who want to "invest themselves" in the corporation are welcomed, this usually triggers a few people - usually rookies with rosy ideas about career management - to knock on the door. We assign them an open-ended project with a vague scope, no management support and of course no budget. After a few months and a few dozen unpaid hours, the "intrapreneur" understands the gimmick and abandons. The project is then picked up by the next gullible junior and the process repeats itself.

To sum up my answer, empowerment is all about trouble and pain, a top-down approach is always preferable. If a business can disguise unpaid hours into empowerment, that's a direction one must favor if this initiative does not impact the status quo and improves the bottom line.

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?

My yearly evaluation was yesterday

No one escapes ISO 9001, Serge once said to me when we were hunting ducks, once you implement this standard inside your company, it becomes part of you. So he called this morning, reminding me that my yearly evaluation was overdue and that he had reserved a table in a bistro on Crescent Street.

So Serge and I had lunch, and he brought the same standard form that every director uses to evaluate its soldiers. This is kind of lame, you would assume that being a CEO puts you above the bureaucratic process, but not here.

We went through the objectives that we had discussed last year, put some new realistic objectives for the upcoming year (like, increasing our bottom line by 10% without any new revenue), you know - the usual stuff. Then Serge asked me how well I was integrating the company values into my daily work, especially the "intrapreneurship" value.

Now folks, most of you think intrapreneurship within a fat corporation is some kind of "special" project under the radar that is so cool and sexy that management puts you in a separate building to work on it secretly. For a top CEO like me, intrapreneurship is really about putting non-paid hours into a project, a project so mundane and dull that we have to put extra effort to attract people on it. That's it.

Sure, the intrapreneurship buzzword is sometimes enough to attract a few people, but we need to do more than that. If you really want your employees to put unpaid time on something, you gotta do a few things. Like, tell them it's "normal" for an employee to do this, this behavior is "expected" when you're part of an organization. Psychology 101. If the employee resists and start talking BS about this personal obligations, family and whatnots, then you use the second argument. You say, if you contribute unpaid time on this project, we might maybe consider giving you possibly a slightly higher profit-sharing bonus by the end of the year, restrictions may apply and it is subject to your Business Unit approval. People are so cash-strapped that they'll do anything to get another buck from the company, and that usually closes the discussion.

So I gave Serge a long spiel on how I wanted to put micro-management to a new level, remove some decision power from our BUs, give them ludicrous sales objectives in their stale markets, and all those efforts I would do on week-ends.

He seemed happy with my attitude, and then we discussed salary and bonuses. I won't go into the specifics, but let's say I got a much bigger raise than anyone in our company combined. But keep this to yourself, it's a secret.