Corporations, entrepreneurs don’t always mix

I am so misunderstood.

I just can’t believe it, but several of you responded to my last column and accused me of having a slightly anti-corporate bias. A devoted reader, Ki Johnson, wrote me and said: “Your last two articles have a slight anti-corporate tone in terms of employment, anyway. You need to clarify this for us whether or not you are in fact anti-corporation.”

She goes on to say that many corporations that try to encourage entrepreneurship within their organizations through a concept known as “intrepreneurship.” The idea is that someone could be an entrepreneur within a company. Ki asks, “Wouldn’t this encourage someone in an organization with an entrepreneurial spirit to take on the task at hand without all the administrative pieces of starting and running a business?”

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This is a great thought; however, it just cannot be. As I explained in my last column, entrepreneurs don’t like control, and sooner or later any genuine entrepreneur trying to survive in a corporation crashes into organizational control and accountability. (Note: Personally, I have always been suspicious and uncomfortable with the concept of accountability, but more about that in a future column).

The word intrepreneur, in my opinion, is a one-word oxymoron. It’s like some dude putting on a cowboy hat and driving a pick-up truck. But, if he isn’t a cowboy, then he simply can never be real. He can come close, but he will always be a drugstore cowboy. The notion of intrepreneurship ultimately means that someone will have control over the intrepreneur and therein lies the rub. The concept of intrepreneurship ends, usually disastrously.

As I think about it, the problem is, how do I explain the consciousness of an entrepreneur’s world to non-entrepreneurs? If you are not an entrepreneur, you probably won’t understand most of what I write about in this column. On the other hand, if you are an entrepreneur, everything I say seems to make perfect sense; it is self-evident.

Nevertheless, because entrepreneurs are charming, interesting, and get things done, people outside our environment try to understand us and think they can be like us. Like the drugstore cowboy, they can come close, but it just can’t happen completely.

Just as entrepreneurs don’t like control, corporations don’t like people who can’t be controlled. Now therein lies an enigma. Specifically, most entrepreneurs that I know would like to be more like corporations, and vice versa. In my case, I am in awe of the corporation’s ability to harness large amounts of resources and successfully manage them to accomplish tasks and projects. I wish I knew how to do that. Large-scale management is something that is foreign to me as well as most entrepreneurs.

The characteristics of the successful corporation are very different from the characteristics of a successful entrepreneurial company. Yet, both have envy of each other. The entrepreneur tries hard to learn from the corporation, but it just doesn’t happen. In the history of business, very few entrepreneurs have made the successful transition from being an entrepreneur to working within a large corporation. Bill Gates is probably the most singular exception that I am aware of.

On the other hand, the corporation admires many of the attributes of the entrepreneurial company. They like their ability to make quick decisions, to operate in a vacuum, and the ever-present passion and spirit ingrained in most young startup companies. Consequently, that is why corporations created the concept referred to by Ki Johnson as “intrepreneurship.” But, because of the control and accountability issues, it never really worked.

So what we’re left with is a mutual parasitic relationship between the intrepreneur and the corporation. Just like in nature, if one dies, then so does the other. Corporations, for example, are great markets for entrepreneurs and provide exit strategies in terms of selling the company or merging their ventures to management. Obviously, corporations provide early training and, for example, in my case, I wouldn’t trade anything for my experience in two great corporations: PepsiCo and Texas Instruments. The things that I learned there have stood me well over the years. That’s why I always urge students who wish to be entrepreneurs, to go to work for a large corporation. Understanding the corporation and being part of it for as long as you can tolerate the structure is invaluable experience that will provide a great base for future entrepreneurial success.

Corporations also provide many new venture opportunities for young entrepreneurs. There are many things that happen in most corporations that they don’t wish to deal with. I think my former employer, Texas Instruments, must have spawned at least 10,000 successful entrepreneurial companies over the years. Most all of these were based on products and ideas learned at Texas Instruments–products and ideas that were either too small for Texas Instruments, or something it was not interested in.

For example, Texas Instruments did not think there was a large enough market for a transportable computer. A colleague and friend of mine, Rod Canion, disagreed and left with the company’s permission to form Compaq computers.

On the other hand, the corporation recognizes that entrepreneurs create most new markets and are the acorn that will eventually grow into the giant corporate oak tree.

Corporations also know that entrepreneurs are job creators and thus are the initial fuel of the great American economy. So there is a great symbiotic relationship between the corporation and the entrepreneur. One cannot exist without the other; yet, most importantly, one cannot be the other.

In conclusion, I am not anti-corporation. I admire what corporations do. I just realize that most entrepreneurs don’t fit and can’t fit. I tried it and found that it just doesn’t work or me. Still I admire the brute force of large corporations and their ability to throw enough resources at a problem until it gets solved. I wish I could be more like them, but it just simply cannot be. Honestly, I just love corporations. Some of my best friends are corporate executives.

Brooks Mitchell, a Fort Collins resident, is a professor of management at the University of Wyoming. Mitchell is also founder and owner of Snowfly Incentives Inc. Contact him at bmitchell@snowfly.com