Only an over-jealous incompetent boss would keep his subordinates muffled. This is the general refrain that one gets to hear in HR talks, but, more often than not, this is the slogan practised to the tee in most organizations. That is probably why so few companies in the world win the race for being called ‘excellent’. An excellent organization would be the one in which there is ownership across the entire team, with everybody encouraged to think like an entrepreneur or, in management parlance, an ‘intrapreneur’.

But ownership that translates into entrepreneurship, as in innovative thinking while doing stuff, does not come naturally to an employee. He or she needs to be led into believing that there is freedom in the organization to do it. No two organizations encouraging intrapreneurship would do it the same way. But there would be one thing all of them converge on. That would be giving employees the freedom to experiment, giving them a say in the way things get done, and in continuous innovations. This can only happen when an organization starts reposing greater faith in their employees, preferring reward over punishment to raise efficiency bar.

How does one do it? How does an organization achieve this? There is no actual roadmap in achieving this, but one thing that’s common in all such organizations is role models. But how are the role models created? That’s where the top leadership comes in. The first role models are the top leadership. The process starts with the original entrepreneur, who starts setting the performance bar and encourages others to think innovatively for the organization’s benefit. He must prove his receptivity and must encourage and reward such behaviour among the rest. Once it starts out and role models are created among the staff members, the process can only reverse once the leadership reverses its values.

The fun in intrapreneurship lies in the innovations that happen in the production lines, products, or marketing but in the internal management processes. Innovations begin from the shop floor and spread across the organization. This is why all organizations ranked as “excellent” and where employees would die to work for are the ones that recognize some form of intrapreneurship for achieving what they have achieved.