This is session nine. I want to talk to you about how to be creative when you're working for a large company. Truth is, chances are many of you will work for a large organization. You might even decide to work for government. City government. Local government. State government. Federal government. There's a lot of room for creativity, especially in government, that really does need creative ideas. But it's a little different to be an Intrapreneur. To be a creative originator of ideas in a large organization. How do you do this? I'd like to talk to about a book, kind of an old book, it's by Gifford Pinchot, called Intrapreneuring. Why you don't have to leave the corporation to become an Intrapreneur? And Gifford Pinchot is still the best book on this subject, I think. He defines Intrapreneurship as acting like an entrepreneur within a mature organization. Let me tell you the 10 commandments that Pinchot provides. The 10 things you need to do, to be an Intrapreneur. And then I'll give you a really interesting case study about an Intrapreneur in Hewlett-Packard, HP named Chuck House. Before I do that, later or perhaps earlier [COUGH] we have shown you or will show you a small clip interviewing my co author Arie Ruttenberg explaining why big organizations have such trouble in being creative and innovative. They all pay lip service to innovation. But big companies don't do it very well. That's why they pay billions of dollars to buy start-up companies just to buy their ideas. Why do they need to do that? Why can't they come up with ideas on their own? And the answer is that big companies are by nature conservative. They don't take risks, they don't bet the whole company. Because the CEO who bets the company on a risky idea of course can lose the job. So start ups have nothing to lose. They're new companies and to compete they have to have wild ideas. Big companies can just cruise along using pretty much the same old stuff more or less. Not always true, but it's true in part. So can you bring new ideas to a big company, inside the company. Here are the ten commandments very quickly. Come to work willing to be fired. [LAUGH] Not many of us are willing to follow that idea. But sometimes when you have radical ideas it can be damaging to your career. Circumvent orders that stop your dream. I'll tell you a story in a moment about how an engineer at HP. Chuck House defied a direct order by the head of the company, the founder David Packard. Do any job needed. You need to learn to create prototypes and do the things you need to advance your idea. Can't just write it on paper. Find people to help you, can't do it alone. Find people who believe in your idea and want to join your team. Work with the very best people. In a big organization you can find the people that are creative. And that can really help you and find out who they are. Build your network within the company. Work underground as long as you can. If you expose your idea too early, it will be born prematurely, it won't succeed. The team that designed the Macintosh computer for Apple, they kind of worked underground, they showed their idea it was cancelled. It was cancelled on three occasions by senior management, they believed in it, they continued to work on it. And Macintosh of course, eventually was a huge success. Control your destiny. I'm not quite sure what that means. But I think it means take control of your project and make sure that you run it. Ask forgiveness rather than get permission. Try things and then show them to people instead of asking them, may I do this? Be true to your goals, have a vision. But be realistic about how you achieve them. Perhaps the most important of all, that I truly believe in, honor your sponsors. People who help you, who are joining in your project, give them credit. Sometimes you may even have to take your baby idea and put it up for adoption. Let somebody senior kind of claim the idea as his own or her own. Sometimes you have to do that to get the idea to move along. And if you believe in the idea, sometimes you may be willing, maybe have to, give it up for adoption. So very quickly, here's the story of Chuck House as an Intrapreneur. Chuck House was 26 years old, he had been HP for just a few years, he was very junior. He observed that people were using HP oscilloscopes. Oscilloscopes, they're devices that take an electrical signal and show it on a screen, and we've seen those. And he found that people were using them to actually use them as monitors for computers. An interesting case of observation. We talked about this earlier. He thought this could be a really big market. Now HP had a technology at the time that electronically focused a cathode ray tube. So you didn't need these big cathode ray tube with guns that fired at a screen, and that way, created the image on the screen. So he tried to build a prototype monitor. They ran a project for the federal aviation administration. Didn't work, it was a failure. House believed in the idea. He built a large prototype monitor. [COUGH] Tore out the front seat of his Volkswagen, stuffed it in the car, and then went out to do market research. Showing this thing [COUGH] to customers. And this was against the rules at HP, because HP's rule was you never show a prototype to a customer until you have an absolutely beautiful finished product. And he found there's real great demand. If we make these monitors, people are going to buy them. Came back to his lab, and the annual product review they Packard, founder of the company along with William Hewlett, Hewlett Packard, they Packard visited the lab, looked at this device that Chuck House had made and gave a direct order. Next year, I don't want to see that project in the lab. In other words, cancel it. Well, Chuck House obeyed the order. House said, if we put this thing into production, it won't be in the lab. That sounds like a fatal decision. It was produced, it was an instant hit in the marketplace many units were sold. And eventually Chuck House won an award as an innovator for HP by defying a direct order from the founder of the company. This is a rather extreme case for Intrapreneurship. How many of us would have the courage to implement our creative ideas, endanger our career by directly defying the founder of the company. So wherever you are, this is the message. Wherever you are in government, city government, local government, state government large organizations, nonprofit, academia, universities, wherever you are. You can be creative. You can be an innovator. And sometimes in a big organization, it takes a great deal of skill and courage in order to do this successfully. Because the bigger the organization, the more conservative and anti-radical idea it tends to be. That ends session nine, we have one more session. Please come back, I think you will find it interesting.
