TOO BIG TO FAIL
ARTICLE BY SAHAR HASHEMI - ANYONE CAN DO IT LIMITED & AUTHOR OF START UP FOREVER: HOW TO BUILD A START UP CULTURE IN A BIG COMPANY
How can we think and behave like a nippy start-up when we’re clearly not a start-up? How do we encourage entrepreneurial behaviour in large organisations? The process of turning an ephemeral idea into reality puts everyone on the same course: You use the same behaviours; you use the same toolkit. But entrepreneurship is a process anyone can follow and once you take the leap, you start behaving entrepreneurially, quite unconsciously.
The agenda on every meeting in big businesses (BB) amongst; staff, executives and leadership are largely the same; change and coping with change. Of course, change has been a constant since time immemorial, but it is the pace that is necessitating new tools and approaches. Suddenly, companies that took a certain comfort in their size, scale, and market position are under threat as fast and unpredictable change pushes firms out of their long-time comfort zone harbours and into the choppy waters, full of uncertainty, shifting customer expectation and scarce resources. It is these white-water riptides, where entrepreneurs operate from, but BBs don’t know how to survive those waters - being too set in their ways, and because of their sheer size and scale - what once gave them their biggest edge has now become their biggest liability. They cannot manoeuvre quickly or keep up with the pace, and they need to constantly learn new ways of behaving, ways that are much more like how entrepreneurs have always done business, ways that are more agile, fluid, and lightweight. The solution that presents itself, again and again, is not some giant reorganisation or top- down innovation initiative. Instead, it’s simple shifts in mindset and behaviour that start with one person, or one team, and then spread around the business, building up big changes from many small
tweaks. It’s a few individuals thinking and acting more like entrepreneurs and, in doing so, showing just how powerful, do-able, and successful such behaviours can be. Then, step by step, almost by osmosis, these ways of working catch on.
But before we go into the behaviour shifts, I need to bust two big myths I encounter again a nd again when the phrase ‘entrepreneurial behaviour’ is mentioned in a BB. These myths create resistance to change, and they are not a million miles away from my own mindset at the beginning of my journey, so it’s worth tackling them head on. The first myth is: “I am not an entrepreneur, or at all entrepreneurial”. If it is challenging enough to demystify entrepreneurship for would-be entrepreneurs, it’s even more challenging to do it for someone who has worked all his or her life, in a corporate environment. In the dictionary, the antonym of ‘entrepreneur’ is, believe it or not, ‘employee’. No wonder so many employees feel that ‘entrepreneurial in the corporate world’, is as much of an oxymoron as a square circle and worry they don’t have what it takes to adopt these behaviours. But the truth is that, entrepreneurs and employees were never really opposites. They were never all that different from each other in terms of character or skills.
12 | thehrdirector | MAY 2019
SPECIAL REPORT
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