The Pinchot Perspective

Framing Ideas So They Get Support.

 

Watanabe San, an engineer at NEC who had been assigned to selling microcomputers, was getting nowhere. This was several years before the first IBM PC and people could not imagine what microprocessors were for. To solve this problem he built a small computer to demonstrate an example of what microprocessors could do.

His boss was not pleased, because he thought sales were driven by number of sales calls that you make. Nonetheless, he let Watanabe San present the idea to NEC’s computer division. They laughed. The computers they were building filled a room. In their minds, the little computer was at best a toy.

Watanabe San did not give up. He went to the household products group and showed them what he had. He imagined new hobby clubs of engineers, who would play with the computer, build extensions to it and eventually design products that used the microprocessors that NEC had created. He was not well received in household products. This was not the kind of market they knew anything about.

At this point his boss lost patience. “You engineers are all the same,” he said. “You no sooner are given a sales job than you try to turn it into an engineering one. Stop working on the computer and go out and make sales calls.”

At this point Watanabe San did something unexpected. He took apart the computer, put it in a bag, put in instructions on how to re-assemble it, took out a magic marker and wrote “Sales Tool” on the outside of the bag. He went back and showed it to his boss. The result may surprise you. His boss was quite pleased, “Finally you are really working on selling microprocessors.”

Watanabe San began selling the computer in a bag and people bought them. He was surprised that the customers ranged from engineers to flight attendants and people from all walks of life. Someone added the interface for a screen, which the computer in a bag lacked. Someone else added a keyboard. The little computers grew more powerful and more useful. Sales grew. NEC became the largest manufacturer of PCs in Japan.

What this story illustrates is a very important fact: Like the human immune system, which responds to what is on the outside of a cell not the DNA inside, the corporate immune system responds to the outside of an idea, not to the essence on the inside. The inside of the idea was still a tiny computer. The outside as seen by his boss changed from a useless tiny computer to a tool for selling microprocessors, and that made it acceptable.

Positioning in marketing is about how you want the customer to see your offering. Getting the positioning right plays a major role in success. When seeking approval, and even in making sales to customers, intrapreneurs must pay attention to the power of the outside positioning of their idea. Later the internal essence matters to its usefulness and longevity in the market, but much less to whether it will be approved.

Spend time designing the outside of your idea so it does not threaten the corporate immune system and has an appeal to those whose support you need. The name and the elevator pitch may be all most deciders hear. Craft and test them carefully.

Rename and Press On

And when all else fails and your idea appears to have been definitively killed, rename and press on. This, in essence is what Watanabe San did. He renamed his computer project. A new name very often disguises the continuity of the effort and gives you a new start. 

Next Week 

Next Monday we will post on a strategy called, "Restarting the Clock."

Posts in this Series:

How to Sell Your Ideas

Express Gratitude

Avoid Triggering the Organizational Immune System

It's Only a Test

 

 

“It’s Only a Test”

 

One way to make approving your idea easier is to reduce the consequences of the decision you are asking them to make. A manager confronted with a new idea they are not sure about has an easy out if they ask for more information before making the decision.

Play along with that tendency.

Position what you want to do as gathering more information before the important decision has to be made, not as asking permission to begin the roll out of the idea.

After asking for advice, a gentle next step is to ask for permission to do a feasibility study. After that, when you want to run a real market test, say, “It is only a test. The real decision comes later.” Once your innovation is delivering value to customers (internal or external) who are willing to pay, the decision to scale-up the test and continue next generation development becomes much less scary.

When Michael Phillips wanted to sell certificates of deposit to ordinary people rather than corporate treasurers, for whom CDs were originally designed, he told the stakeholders in operations, legal and marketing, “This is only a test.”

For example, he told the folks in operations, “This is only a market test. If the test reveals that people will actually buy them, then you can put the time and energy into designing operating systems to process them at scale. You don’t need to do anything but wait for the test results. There is no reason for a big operations design project if no one will buy them. For right now we can use this simple procedure (which he designed himself) for the test.” That was easy to say yes to.

Now Michael, who was on the wilder side of the intrapreneurship spectrum, then went out and sold forty million dollars of certificates of deposit in the three-month test. That put some pressure on his sponsor who had to protect Michael from the outrage that followed, but by then the product was so profitable that there was no turning back. For ordinary intrapreneurs it is probably better that when you say you are going to do a test, you keep it small.

The next step after a test is a pilot program – an extended test, and so it goes, one small step at a time so it never seems that new, never seems that different from business as usual.

 

Next Week 

Next Monday’s post in the series will be on "Framing Ideas So they Get Support."

Posts in this Series:

How to Sell Your Ideas

Express Gratitude

Avoid Triggering the Organizational Immune System

Avoid Triggering the Organizational Immune System

 

An intrapreneur in the grip of an idea often sees the grand potential of it in the many different innovations it makes possible. You are thrilled by the overall significance of it and the huge difference the idea and its children can make for the company. In selling it, you are tempted to say something that implies, “This will change everything.” You are tempted to tell everyone about it and the massive benefits that will come from it.

That is exactly the wrong message.

When a manager hears this, at some level it scares the heck out of them. They don’t want everything changed. They have a good job they want to keep. They have deliverables and don’t want resources pulled away from what they are being held accountable for. And they don’t want any big failures or turf wars that can be traced to them. They like things more or less the way they are, only a bit better.

For most managers, instead of saying how big your idea is, instead of talking about the massive changes it will produce, make it sound small and ordinary. Show how it fits right in with what is already going on and is already expected of them. If possible, position your idea as an extension of what is already going on.

The organizational immune system exists to stamp out ideas that are too different. Even if your idea is actually quite different, and we hope it is, don’t make it sound very different from what is already going on. It is just a new way of supporting an existing strategy or strategic intent.

 

Next Week

This section of my blog series will continue next Monday with more on how to avoid triggering the organizational immune system.

Next Monday’s post will be on what I call, “It’s Only a Test” strategy.

Posts in this Series:

How to Sell Your Ideas

Express Gratitude

 

 

Express Gratitude

In my last blog entry, How to Sell Your Ideas, I showed how asking for advice rather than resources was a powerful first step in selling a person whose support or resources you need. When people help you and your idea, even with a little bit of help like giving you advice, they become a little bit more receptive to your idea. In this post we take it a bit further by discussing what to can do to amplify the effect after you get advice.

Let's say the person whose support you need is Brenda. Last week you told her that you needed help from someone in marketing. She introduced you to Bill.

So you go to Bill, who helps you better understand what customer’s might need from the new service you propose. As you talk to him, you see the opportunity to make a small improvement of your messaging and your business model. You go back to Brenda and tell her how Bill contributed to your idea of how to go to market. You explain the mistakes you can now avoid. You give genuine thanks.

What happens to Brenda’s attitude toward you and your idea? Before when she gave you a little help it made her friendlier to your idea. Now it turns out the help she gave was bigger than she had thought. Because she helped it more, she likes your idea more. More genuine gratitude for the advice she gave makes her opinion of your idea more positive. You have moved forward again.

Gratitude can even help convert someone who is dissing your idea. Suppose you are part of a team meets once a week. Every time your idea comes up, George criticizes it harshly. It is not only getting under your skin, it is also slowing you down by causing others to have less faith in you and your idea.

Here is what to do. Listen carefully to George. Listen to his criticisms with the goal of finding, among the issues he’s identifying, ones that you believe would be worth checking out. Perhaps you are you are not ready to see his criticism as help during the meeting, so just don’t get into a fight. Later, search for issues he raised that you think are interesting and do a little research on them.

If you research with an open mind, to your surprise you will probably find that one of more of the issues that George raised turn out to be legitimate concerns and suggest some changes in your plan.

In the next week’s meeting you thank George, “Thank you for raising that issue last week. I did some research and what I learned was important. You have helped me avoid a significant mistake. Thank you.”

Consciously or unconsciously, the fact that George has helped your idea feels good and makes his a bit more open to it. He moves toward a more neutral position. Keep accepting his help and he will probably end up on your side.

But here I have to give a big warning: GRATITUDE ONLY WORKS IF IT IS GENUINE. If you pretend to be grateful but aren’t, it will probably make things worse. Nobody likes being BSed. And human beings, at least at the subconscious level, have pretty good BS detectors.

To apply gratitude effectively you have to feel it. To feel gratitude when your cherished idea, is being criticized is not necessarily easy. I like to say it requires emotional weight lifting. It’s about getting your ego out of the way, not defending yourself and instead seeing the good in others. Listen as generously as you can. Enjoy checking out the issues raised. Learn from them. Be glad you did. Then you can be genuinely thankful.

There is a bonus in gratitude: feeling gratitude and being happy are almost the same thing, especially when gratitude includes being grateful for the opportunities you get to be of service to others.

Some folks increase their overall capacity to feel and express gratitude by at the end of the day writing down a couple of things they are grateful for. But whether you like that idea or not, remember to express genuine gratitude for criticisms so you can turn what feel like attacks into help. As they say, it takes two to fight. Turn your enemies into friends.

The series so far:

How to Sell Your Ideas,

Express Gratitude

Coming next: This doesn’t matter; it’s only a test

How to Sell Your Idea

One of the many tasks intrapreneurs face is getting approval, funding and resources for their ideas. Of course getting organizational support is just a small part of the challenge of turning ideas into realities, but it is necessary and sometimes difficult step. Here a few tricks of the trade that make it easier.

1. Ask for advice before you ask for resources 
2. Express gratitude
3. This doesn’t matter; it’s only a test
4. Hear objections as efforts to help
5. Listen, test their assumptions, give thanks and morph your idea
6. A coalition of sponsors
7. It’s the outside of the idea the corporate immune system reacts to
8. Rename and press on
9. Restarting the clock
10. Focus on the risk of not doing it.
11. Play to the hummers
12. Chaldini’s 6 Principles of Pursuasion

In this blog post I will only address the first, but will follow rapidly with the others in subsequent blogs.

Ask for Advice Before You Ask for Resources 

Asking for what you need

Suppose you go to your boss and say, “I have this great idea.” You describe what it is in glowing terms and tell her how great it is going to be once it is implemented. Then as an extreme example of this approach you ask, “Can you give me a budget of $300,000 and a headcount of two for the year?”

There is a brief pause in the conversation. What do you suppose is going on in your boss’s mind?

Although you have described the idea compellingly, she has no way of judging whether your idea is good or bad. Opposing that uncertainty, she does know that she had plans for your work that relates to what she is immediately held accountable for. She does know that your absence on that task would somewhat reduce her chances of delivering what she has promised. And she does know that she does not have a spare $300,000 in her budget or a spare headcount of two more people.

The safest and most sensible thing for her to do is to say “no,” or the polite equivalent of “no” such as “not now” or I’ll think about it.” So she does.

As you walk away you may be thinking about what happened and reassure yourself, “At least I got her thinking about it.” But what is she actually thinking? At least subconsiously she is considering two possibilities:

1. Your idea is actually a great idea, she said “no” to it, in which case she made a bad decision and she is a bad manager.
2. Your idea is a bad idea, she said “no” to it, in which case she saved the company money and is a good manager.

Which will way of seeing the situation appeals the deep motivational structure of her emotional brain? She still does not know how to judge the financial value your idea, but she is quite sure she prefers to be a good rather than a bad manager. She chooses to see herself as good manager and therefore, so it all fits together, your idea is bad. That is not the result you wanted, so let’s try a different approach.

Asking for advice first

“Hi Susan, I have an idea for a new widget, but I don’t understand the market for it. Could you recommend someone in marketing who could answer a few quick questions to see if this thing could possibly work?”

What is she likely to do? You are not asking much or asking her to make a decision about your idea. It’s easy, she says, “Daniel Isagawa knows a lot about the widget market. He can help you.”

Now the truth is she has spend a tiny bit of Daniel’s time and her social capital on your idea. A similar logic holds:

1. Your idea is a good idea and she has committed a small amount of corporate resources to it, so she is a good manager. Or
2. Your idea is a bad idea, so she has wasted Daniel’s time and she is a bad manager.

Again she chooses "good manager," so your idea becomes a bit better in her estimation. And this is in the direction of the movement you wanted, so asking for advice was a good strategy.

This psychological principle behind this surprising impact on decisions is called cognitive dissonance. We don’t like dissonance in our mind so we arrange our beliefs to reduce any dissonance by seeing things and acting in a way that all the ideas fit together comfortably. If saying “no” to an idea that might be good creates a dissonance with your belief that you are a good manager, you change your evaluation of the idea to reduce the dissonance. So the idea becomes bad. And vice versa.

From a practical point of view this leads to a simple rule: When trying to sell an idea, don’t ask for anything that causes important stakeholders to say “no” to it. Always ask for something to which they will say “yes.” And what is the one thing that people are almost always willing to give? Advice! So that is the place to start.

Later on

Later on, when the idea has achieved goodness in their minds though their small acts of support, you can ask for more. Again cognitive dissonance is on your side. They feel good about supporting it and don’t want to admit that they were wrong in supporting it earlier. So they commit more.

This is not to say that they are in any way unworthy of their leadership positions. It's just how the human mind works underneath the veneer of rationality. Use this powerful tool for good, not for evil.

Next week

This is the first of a series of posts on how to sell your ideas. Next week I will describe the next step: What to do after getting advice?

More on intrapreneuring: 

 

The Strategic Use of Intrapreneuring

Years ago the headquarters of one of our clients developed an overall corporate strategy.  Each division was asked to implement the new strategy in their businesses. Our client managed a large division.

All the other divisions put together strategic planning teams to develop and rank possible ways to implement the strategy in their businesses. Instead our client went to all his locations and gave all the employees a talk about the new corporate strategy. He asked for volunteers who had an idea  they wanted to work on that aligned with the strategy. Volunteers were invited to an idea fair – a poster show of their potential innovations and new businesses. 125 intrapreneurs showed up.

At the idea fair we asked the intrapreneurs self-form into teams around specific ideas. Requiring people with ideas to recruit a team  screens for both leadership ability and idea quality. 

The teams that formed and met minimal criteria were given a seat in the School for Intrapreneurs™, an accelerator in which they developed their ideas through rapid prototypes, customer conversations, specific questions to answer, etc. The school culminated in business plan presentations to a panel of top divisional leaders. Our client's division launched 14 new businesses implementing the corporate strategy before any other division had gotten out of the planning phase. 

Implementation is where most corporate strategies fail. In this case, intrapreneuring was used to drive the rapid implementation of a corporate strategy. The brains of the organization are widely distributed, about one per person. It makes sense to use them to find ways to make the strategy work. 

Can you think of situations in which intrapreneuring might be used to implement a strategy? Can you think of ways in which this method could be useful or ways in which it would not be appropriate?

Why Intrapreneuring is Suddenly Happening Again

“The rise of the intrapreneur is driven in part by a restless, younger
workforce eager to make a real impact with their careers.
                             Fast Company The Rise of The Intrapreneur

The word, “intrapreneur” is iconic for many millennials. They use it as shorthand for the freedom to pursue their own ideas and the chance to make a meaningful difference early in their careers. This is what millennials are demanding. As millennials spread the word, companies are implementing intrapreneuring to recruit and retain the best and the brightest.

The rapid growth of corporate programs in intrapreneuring is also driven by a rapid rise in th strategic importance of internal innovation. Fast Company, in its 2015 article, The Rise of The Intrapreneur, begins with this sentence:

“Never before has there been such a push for employees to take ownership of their own corner of a company.”

Many major companies have run out of large opportunities to cut costs and easy opportunities to expand globally with existing products. Acquisitions only turn out well if you innovate with what you have bought. To remain relevant in a rapidly changing world companies need a high volume of cost effective innovation.

Just as innovation in startups requires entrepreneurs, innovation in big companies requires intrapreneurs. In hundreds of cases, we and other researchers have consistently found that at the root of every successful corporate innovation, there are one or more passionate intrapreneurs. Intrapreneurs have the persistence, courage and cunning to get through the inevitable corporate immune system resistance and turn opportunities into profitable realities.

If you encourage and support intrapreneurs all the way through implementation of their ideas, more intrapreneurs will come out of the woodwork. If you block new ideas, intrapreneurs go into hiding. This frequently happened with “Stage Gate” processes, which became popular in the 90s. At each stage gate a committee decided whether to let the intrapreneurs proceed to the next gate. This created many ways to say "no" and almost no way to say "yes." Since it requires great imagination to understand the value of a really new idea, only mediocre ideas (if any) survived the process. Often the wrong lesson was learned, giving up on internal innovation rather than giving up on a process that looked good on paper, but didn’t work in practice.

What works to support intrapreneurs is a relationship, not a process. The relationship is between an intrapreneurial team and one or more sponsors. The sponsors deeply understand the value of what the intrapreneurs are trying to do and trust the intrapreneurs to make good decisions. They are betting on the people as much as on the ideas. They help the intrapreneurs find resources and guide them around political dangers. They defend them with higher ups and help them to hide when hiding is the best strategy.

An effective intrapreneuring program is a cultural shift. It involves educating both intrapreneurs and potential sponsors on their roles and effective behavior. Because these roles involve trust, not everyone can find a sponsor. That’s OK. A company generates more good ideas in a month than it can implement in a decade. All we can ask for is that a significant number of the better ones succeed. 

The key is senior leaders who can recognize the genuine intrapreneurial spirit and recognize projects with potential. If those sponsors exist and the system supports them in trusting and supporting intrapreneurs, intrapreneurs will emerge. Potential intrapreneurs exist in every organization; in most they don’t think it safe to come out.

 

The Fun of Climate Change

I recently did a TEDx Rainier talk on The Fun of Climate Change. I hope you will watch it and forward a link to this page on to your friends. In a nutshell this is what I said:

There are three ways to respond personally to the news about climate change: Denial, Depression or Doing something about it. One of these is far more fun than the others.

We need to have fun with global warming for two reasons:

1. Gloom and doom are not selling very well; in fact it appears that they drive people into denial and depression.
2. We need a lot of creativity to solve the challenges of global warming and people are a lot more creative when they are having fun.

That said, we appear to be headed rapidly toward a tipping point after which, even if we stop emitting CO2, the temperature is likely to run away to a stable hot house state which is about 13.5° hotter than now. We are talking alligators in the Arctic. So how bad it that?

Mother Nature will be fine (forgive the metaphor)

Mother Nature has been in the hothouse before. In fact she has spent more time there in the last 600 million years than in any other state. In her moment of greatest creativity in the last 600 million years, the Cambrian Explosion, the carbon dioxide level was 3000 parts per million and the average temperature was around 13 degrees hotter than now. In a brief moment of only about 20 million years, nearly every major category of multicellular life came into being. In a later hothouse era, flowering plants evolved. Later in another hothouse era most of the major categories of mammals evolved.

If we let the temperature rise out of control we may lose over half the species on Earth, but that loss will be followed by a period of rapid species creation, which might even be a leap forward in the complexity, diversity and amazingness of life.

As you can see my recovery from climate depression has forced me to take a very long view, but I ask you to understand. I became deeply depressed by the threat I perceived after reading too many James Lovelock books in a row, a threat not only to the human race, but also the vitality of life on Earth. It is good to know that, even if it does not relate to human time scales, that in the long run nature will be OK. Nature has been in the hothouse many times before.

But what about Humans?

Will the human species survive runaway climate change? To be sure it seems likely that as we adapt to the new conditions we are likely to greatly reduce the human population. However it also seems clear that humanity will survive. Again I take comfort in that. But why do I believe it?

The species that survive ecological catastrophe are generalist species like raccoons, foxes and cockroaches. These species can adapt to widely different climates and conditions. Specialists not so much. Monarch Butterflies, for example, depend on arriving at their temperate feeding grounds just as the milkweed ripens. If anything interrupts that cycle they are toast.

Generalist species like cockroaches, raccoons and foxes can be found in almost every climate and every ecosystem. They adapt to new conditions.

So what about people. Short of bacteria we may be the ultimate generalists. We flourish on ice flows and the tropics, deserts and rainforests. People will still be part of the mix.

With a little luck we will be smarter as we rebuild civilization. Every religion will have some version of “Don’t mess with mother nature,” built into its core principles. We may even learn to work together for the good of all. Generally after each catastrophe humans create a renaissance. I wish I would be here to see it.

One basic principle emerged again in this talk, The Happo Dammo Ratio. You can check that out in an earlier blog post by that name. It is, I believe, the basic metric we need to optimize to address climate change and environmental destruction.

                                          The happiness created by an activity

Happo Dammo Ratio = -------------------------------------------------

                                          The damage done by that activity

 

In the TEDx talk I give an example of raising the Happo Dammo Ratio 1000 fold. If we can do that in some cases we can achieve an average an improvement of five fold, which is what we need to stop climate change. Get good at raising that number and there will be enough for everyone.

The Happo Dammo Ratio also shows what is going wrong. When I was a young lad I believed that I needed a 400 horsepower car to get laid. That shows how little I knew about women, but it also illustrates the basic mistake we are making over and over in our society. We are trying to improve our relationships with stuff. 

After moderate amounts of food water clothing and shelter, what makes people happy are the quality of our relationships, the meaning we find in their lives and our institutions, the generosity we display and so forth. These qualities are not about things. By seeking happiness through things we are not only destroying the systems on which our civilization depends, we are also directing ourselves away from any effective path to happiness.

Check out an example of improving the Happo Dammo Ratio one thousand fold either in the The Fun of Climate Change or the The Happo Dammo Ratio .

The rest of my talk was about examples of high Happo Dammo performance in business. I hope you enjoy the stories. 

Intrapreneuring Today

 

I am speaking at the 2014 Intrapreneurship Conference. They interviewed me on what is going on in intrapreneuring today. Below is the interview, which is borrowed from their website (see link above): 

=====================

If you read any random article on intrapreneurship, chances are the author points to Gifford Pinchot III as the one coining the term in 1985 as well as being the creator of the “the Intrapreneur’s 10 Commandments“ that have circulated widely since their creation.

Some even call him the father of intrapreneurship.

 

Why is intrapreneurship a must-do for companies?

In a rapidly changing world, innovation is the source of both profit and survival. The faster the world is evolving, the faster old ways of doing things, old products and and old service designs are made obsolete by innovative competitors. So innovation is essential.

The surprising fact is this: You don’t get innovation in large organizations without intrapreneurs. Dr. William Souder did a 10-year life cycle study of 289 innovations in 53 companies. He was hoping to discover a process for driving innovation in large companies. He came back a bit discouraged.

The only thing he could find in common between the successes was the presence of a passion intrapreneur. As he put it, “The intrapreneur is an essential ingredient in every innovation.”

 

Why do companies struggle with innovation in the first place?

Companies are organized to do what they are currently doing. Anything new cuts across organizational boundaries and probably is not directly helpful to the metrics by which people in all those boundaries.

 

Are companies really ready for intrapreneurship in its true form?

Most companies have a culture and a structure that makes innovation difficult. But that doesn’t rule out intrapreneuring. What works is a relationship between an intrapreneur and a sponsor. The sponsor helps the intrapreneur get through the challenges and gates of whatever system has been put in place to support (block actually) innovation. In general successful intrapreneurs gather a team of sponsors who collectively support them despite “the slings and arrows of an outraged bureaucracy.”

Another relationship is also important: the relationship between the intrapreneur and the team.

If all of these relationships are strong, there is a good chance of success. If not, it won’t happen. 

 

What is the most surprising development in the field of intrapreneurship since you coined the term in 1985?

To me, the most surprising development has been the success of free intraprise. Free intraprise supports intrapreneuring of internal services. Most people in a large organization provide services to other people in the organization. What if the way those services were provided was fully intrapreneurial?

This system has proved to be 1.8 times as productive as more normal ways of providing internal services.  It works also and especially in government, as I have outlined in this post: http://www.pinchot.com/2010/03/intrapreneuring-in-government.html

Some of the free intraprise system establishing dynamics:

1. There is an internal bank that manages the details of the free intraprise system.
2. The bank and its steering committee license “intraprises” to operate after they present a plausible business plan. It maintains accounting for the teams.
3. The bank provides intraprises with a loan to get started.
4. The intraprises get no allocated funds; they generate the revenue to support their salaries and costs by selling services inside the organization.
5. As long as an intraprise does not break any fundamental rules they may pursue any internal customer in competition with other parts of the organization such as staff units, direct hiring by their customer, outside suppliers, etc.
6. An intraprise may set its prices and choose what customers to pursue
7. An intraprise deposits funds received in the bank. They carry over from year to year until they used. They may be used for any legitimate business purpose without requiring permission.
8. Insolvent intraprises will be dissolved (HR will try to find members other jobs).
9. An intraprise may chose its members from willing applicants
10. No outside manager can force the team to accept a member or prevent one from joining
11. No outside manger can commandeer an intraprise team member
12. The leadership will be determined by the team and leaders will not be removed by outside authority except by the Steering Committee with cause

 

What have you been up to lately?

I have just created a series of 3 online courses in intrapreneuring. The first was a 3-hour course introducing the basic principles of intrapreneuring. It was a mandated course for 1100 IT professionals in a German firm. Despite the negative impression created by being forced to take it, it got a 95% approval rating at the end. This rarely happens with a mandated course.

The second course continued lessons on how to succeed as an intrapreneur, however the main content was on preparing a business plan for an intrapreneurial team. 12 teams began the course. 6 were funded by an executive review panel on graduation. Others found some time and resources to continue. The returns for the company so far are ten times the total investment.

 

"Five Secrets to Engaging Aspirational Customers"

 

Check out Mitch Baranowski and Raphael Bemporad's article, Five Secrets to Engaging Aspirational Customers, in Fast Company’s Coexist.

 Aspirationals are 39% of all people, and, while not deep greens, they care about sustainability. They are a curious mixture of “materialism, sustainability and cultural influence.” They seek to consume less, but love to shop. According to the authors, they are the most critical audience if your want sustainability to go to scale.

Baranowski and Bemporad offer five ways to reach aspirationals:

“Manifesto: Give them something to believe in.” Make your brand stand for something.

“Badge: Give them something to belong to.” Let your brand be their badge of identity.

“Megaphone: Amplify their voices.” Give them a way to co-create with you.

“Currency: Give them social status. Help them to influence others and gain status for doing so, for example by "Points. Badges. Leaderboards." "Keep them “in the know.""

“Rally: Give them a platform for action.” Provide ways for them to participate in changing the world.

This kind of marketing is fun.