Lessons From Serial Intrapreneurship

Recently, someone asked me what I’ve learned as I’ve worked within large companies to build new businesses, such as a division to acquire a different audience at Nordstrom, a store format with an innovative operating model at Verizon, and a set of revenue streams to increase margins at Yahoo.

Three lessons immediately came to mind:

📣 1. Communicate, communicate, communicate. More senior executives and peer stakeholders all have a primary focus of steering the main ship. They may forget about your “start-up” until they want a reminder about when it’s launching or how soon they’ll see results. Don’t wait for the questions to come. Instead, cement a regular communications cadence to set expectations, which becomes especially important when (not if) there are setbacks.

🧠 2. Know enough about a lot. Yes, I’m somewhat intentionally being vague. But these intrapreneurial roles often require significant scrappiness. Even though there may be some safety net in sitting within a large company, new businesses within it often don’t get all the resource prioritization one would hope. This means it’s a necessity to be able to wear many hats cross-functionally and jump ego-free from the very strategic to the very tactical in one meeting.

👏 3. Don’t forget to be a team leader — both for those who directly report to you and for those in other parts of the organization who are supporting your business. While this is always critical, it can mean something different in a pre-launch or nascent business. The team - however big or small it is - is facing the same challenges described in 1 and 2 above, but may be less confident in handling questions. Providing air cover is one of the most important jobs a manager can play anyway but, especially here, try to take on a lot of these questions for the team. And constantly, publicly recommit to the vision so everyone will continue to feel inspired by it when things are tough and other parts of the company seem to be getting more limelight.