Intrapreneurs, Golden Children, Bobble-heads, and Ding Day

Someone recently said to me...

"HL, you'll never understand how stressful my job is. The boss treats you differently than he does me. You turned this company around. You are his Golden Child."

That last statement left me speechless—at least for a minute or two.

I never thought of myself as an Eddie Murphy type, but I have seen myself as sort of an intrapreneur. That is someone within an organization who behaves like an entrepreneur—someone who is always thinking beyond "that's the way we've always done it", pushing the envelope, trying and testing new processes until something is proven to work.

In a Scrum world, intrapreneurs are required, but in many offices, intrapreneurs are considered Satan's offspring and must be destroyed.

Said another way, some intrapreneurs are supported by management and some are not. It all depends on the culture within the organization.

This understanding and supportive culture was not always the dominant culture at Decade Software. There was a time when management was not trusted by the workers and vice-versa.

Most new ideas from employees were shot down before ever reaching the ears of upper management, and ideas from upper-management were seen as ridiculous, because employees were seldom told why something had to be a certain way.

In such an environment, employees had to leverage Kevin's open-door policy to discuss such ideas—and risk offending a more immediate manager or coworker—or the employee could be creative and send broadcast e-mails to all concerned.

That last option usually got you into trouble.

Your manager would label you a trouble-maker, and you would be called into Kevin's office for a discussion. Seemingly, to give you something to mope about over the weekend and make your family hate you, these discussions always happened on a Friday—a day once known throughout the office as "Ding Day".

Eventually, Ding Day events became so common-place that staff invented an award. They routinely presented a Jack-in-the-Box bobble-head to the person who received the most unusual "ding".

This award rotated from person to person and from department to department—until the day Kevin created a Microsoft Power Point presentation to demonstrate why I shouldn't "rally the troops" to encourage changes to company policy.

Ironically, Kevin didn't know then that the organizational hierarchy between he and I had clouded his view and that he and I were actually on the same page all along.

Kevin wrote the following over six years ago...

"Our business should be based on trust, respect, and proper ethical conduct. We believe that to become and remain successful, we must gain and maintain the trust and respect of our clients, our suppliers, and our fellow employees. To achieve these goals, we will create a self-aligning and self-sustaining culture by distributing leadership throughout the organization."

Eventually, our culture did change—just as Kevin's vision described—and the bobble-head was never awarded to anyone else in our organization.

Today, the trophy stands grinning in the office of that intranpeneurial spirit some call the Golden Child.