Our approach will always reflect the organisational issues and desire to change and we are consistently keen to ensure that research is conducted, sometimes very quickly, to establish current state (see our approach).

Encourage Entrepreneurship

Generating the balance between entrepreneurial behaviours and large organisation cultures of compliance and risk aversion has been notoriously challenging – although the results are extraordinary and exciting.

In the final years of the 20th century a number of leading business schools began to each and promote Intrapreneurship – the ability to function with appropriate levels of entrepreneurial flair within a large system culture.

Although this approach was successful in getting the subject matter discussed in many forums it did not provide a tool-kit based approach that supported organisations in executing the concepts and delivering the advantages for themselves.

The emergence of the 'corporate entrepreneur' was largely a reaction to the failed notion that big companies needed big strategies and even bigger plans. Although conceived during the 1960s and 1970s when big companies grew 'in line with their plans', it was always clear that real change and accelerated growth comes from:

• vision
• comfort with change
• a high tolerance to ambiguity
• passion for a new outcome
• a willingness to confront the status-quo
• and a willingness to place oneself 'on the line'. 

All of these are characteristics of the entrepreneur!

Our approach to building organisational acceptance of entrepreneurship is partly based on our culture work but is more centred on our ability to translate the language of small-business dynamics into the boardroom.

Too many organisations have taken the option of delegating 'responsibility' rather than delegating 'authority' – the former, normally labelled as empowerment, means that an employee can be held responsible for an outcome but the same employee cannot change the dynamics that generate that error state or failure.

We promote the creation of 'bounded authority' – a simple concept that creates the 'space to act entrepreneurially' without compromising the core needs of any business unit. By coupling this approach to a review of the overall business architecture, as defined by the emergentedge four-box model, we are able to suggest subtle changes to business process, fine tuning of the culture, the promotion of new behavioural standards and a higher level of engagement, alignment and the release of higher level of discretionary effort.