Around 60% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list for the year 2000 were gone or didn’t make the cut by 2020 . Nobody wants to become irrelevant, but dodging that fate involves intention. The most successful companies are the ones built on a culture that widely promotes and rewards innovation. However, expecting all innovation to come from an organization’s leaders is like driving a Ferrari in third gear. The key to unleashing a company’s full capacity for innovation? Intrapreneurship.
Intrapreneurship is a system that empowers employees to behave like entrepreneurs within a company. As part of such a system, employees can take responsibility for turning their bright ideas into value for the company and all its stakeholders.
I joined Allianz Trade (previously Euler Hermes) right out of college. I quickly dove into exploring and challenging processes, and then trying to improve on them. My first role was in business development, where I generated leads for our salesforce. I drove the team to better results and moved up the ladder by challenging the status quo and using innovative techniques to become more productive. What I didn’t realize, was that getting a new title on my business cards didn’t immediately give me all the answers.
Experience taught me that managing a team is a lot more difficult if the information only flows downhill. I started encouraging my team to develop their own perspectives so that we could collaborate, rather than have me dictate them. Many of our best ideas came from new employees who added a fresh angle to an existing process. Partnership programs, innovative marketing campaigns and speaking engagements for our chief economist all came from the people “in the trenches”. These ideas led to exponentially more successful campaigns because they were driven by people who understood the market and were able to make their visions a reality.
Since then, I’ve held various roles in marketing, management and even in outside sales, before heading over to the credit side. And because I’ve worked within innovative teams at every turn, we’ve had so much more collective success than if we were waiting for senior management to be our only guide. Instead, I’ve always tried to envision myself in the corner office. By thinking like the CEO and understanding the company’s vision, I’ve been able to break down the silos of our business. When I didn’t understand or agree with a company decision, I asked myself, “What I would do if I were the founder, the president or a shareholder?”
Recently, I was asked to create an “information support team” within the risk department. I was given the opportunity to hire people and develop a completely new process to support different teams across our organization. The launch was heralded as a success because the affected departments’ processes and concerns were considered in the initial development and not discovered as an afterthought.
The key to intrapreneurship is to dare to try new things. Not all of them will be a roaring success, but if you don’t try, how will you know what works? Testing new things to quickly learn and pivot can be one of the fastest ways to enhance processes, especially within a large company. You may be forced to work within a framework, whether it be financial or headcount constraints, or validation processes. But the key is to find a way to understand your internal or external customer’s needs and ultimately—through trial and error—find the most viable solution as quickly as possible. A culture that encourages being bold and taking chances without reprisal for failure supports the “fail fast, fail often” mantra of entrepreneurs.
I’ve been a part of a number of product launches and corporate initiatives aimed at growing the business and giving our clients what they want. Some have been hugely successful, while others didn’t work out quite as well. Sometimes they mis-read the market, while some couldn’t be integrated into our processes on a large scale. But through every success and failure, myself and the organization have learned how to develop products more effectively and implement change in a way that keeps us ahead of the competition.
Throughout all my roles at Allianz Trade, the common thread has been continuous learning. And this is one of the cores of my philosophy: Stay relevant! Don’t ever stop looking for ways to learn about new topics and understand new technology. Keep your eye on how the world is changing and how this affects our company and industry. Be your own expert, have opinions, and take the initiative to help your organization get ready for the next evolution.
Our company is 128 years old, but it certainly doesn’t look it. And the way we keep up is through a culture that inspires its people to try new things at every turn and think like entrepreneurs.
