- Summary of articles
- Leadership is creating a world to which people want to belong
- Do you really know your organisation's world?
- Managing as a creator of Worlds
- Create sales contacts through your breakfasts
- Mergers
- Create a dynamic vision, keystone of your Desired World
- Secrets of CEOs/salespeople out to conquer your Market World!
Managing as a creator of Worlds
P-Val Conseil was created around this simple idea. As former employees of major consultancies, we reaped the practical benefits and limitations from major organisational and IT transformations. They did not change managerial practices and did not create long-term added value (Fr. Plus-VALue).
You, the managers, hold the key to these flourishing developments by personifying the spirit of enterprise.
Why this interest in the concept of manager entrepreneur?
Major companies are looking to put some dynamism back into their teams bogged down in heavy operations, endless decision-making, internal wars more political than business. The bosses of these companies cherish the myth of the entrepreneur, creator of value. "Ah, if only we were surrounded by Bill Gates (Microsoft), Richard Branson (Virgin), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), François Pinault (PPR), Pierre Gatignol (GL Trade), then you would see!"
Over 70% of the CEOs we questioned saw themselves as manager entrepreneurs. On the other hand, they are much less clear about their efforts to promote this entrepreneurial behaviour within their companies. Forced into their retrenchments, they claim that the out-and-out search for efficiency has killed the entrepreneurial spirit, that this concept only applies to a limited number of colleagues, that in their opinion too much entrepreneurial spirit leads to a loss of control.
What are the demands, the qualities required to act as a manager entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs identify business opportunities, small or large, that few people have identified, and that even fewer people have translated into action. The manager entrepreneur has the ability to combine with his creativity the energy of the resources needed to achieve his objectives. He has the will and the passion to achieve success for his project. They manage to create added value faster, better and with less investment. And to these ends they take risks, change the rules of the game, transgress borders.
Conversely, the individualistic side, the heroic and solitary leader, is more part of the mythology than of operational reality.
CEO, General Manager, what can you do to develop your manager entrepreneurs, to make them creators of Worlds?
1. Unite around a vision and a clear strategy
Know and understand management and the desired aim strengthens the feeling of trust amongst your colleagues. They know in which direction to deploy their entrepreneurial talents. They can feed strategic analysis and offer broad analysis of the markets, clients and competitors. This clear and shared vision strengthens the idea that success will be collective, that it is achieved through collaborative work. In entrepreneurial management, strategy is not the private domain of the general management.
2. Think big, act small
Once good strategic decisions have been made, the "entrepreneurial" organisation must be able to execute quickly. The difficulty is throwing off the inertia that all large international groups develop “naturally”. A frequent way is to encourage the emergence of small-size entities, equipped with high autonomy to be able to act quickly. Unfortunately, the risk is that this entrepreneurial spirit remains confined in this structure, without contaminating the whole and without providing a result commensurate with the requirements of a large group. The La Poste group organised that through its subsidiaries accommodated in its holding Sofipost. Each of its subsidiaries was able to freely develop a manager entrepreneur in its start-up mode. The paradox is that, to succeed, the CEO of a subsidiary has to do his utmost to slough off the sluggishness of the group, but once he has managed to launch his activity, he has to deploy it on a scale suited to La Poste: he then needs a strong connection with the group to succeed, which he does not have! Little does it matter that he makes 10 million euros in TO, on the La Poste scale he has to make twenty times more.
3. Give unequivocal signs of acknowledgement to manager entrepreneurs
This is done in words, but rarely in practice. Acting as a manager entrepreneur involves taking risks, operating at a tangent to the company’s organisational borders. It is a more slippery slope than staying in linear mode and obeying "his master’s voice". De Gaulle remarked that in peacetime decorated generals proved to be very mediocre war chiefs. They had not been decorated along entrepreneurial criteria and their examples discouraged young enterprising colonels. How many General Pattons would you agree to manage and value? Isn’t your company at war?
4. Encourage diversity of thought
New ideas are rarely easy to understand. They are clumsily formulated, they go against existing paradigms, it is easy to kill them off, as parodied in the Renault advertising campaign “it’ll never work”. The new idea is grit in an oyster. It is only after a lot of hard work, with high risk of failure, that it will become the pearl you are looking for. The manager entrepreneur gets under the company’s skin. This is also our role, as P-Val Conseil consultants. There are many paths to strengthening this diversity of thought: hiring varied profiles, inviting the outside world into your company (as Jack Welch did at the GE University in Crotonville), organising vertical exchanges in the company through a bottom-up communication process.
In conclusion about these paths, you cannot and should not seek to develop on your own the spirit of enterprise in your organisation. Your challenge is much greater: give your colleagues the desire and means to develop their added value as entrepreneurs. P-VAL can help you in very practical ways to speed up this transformation.