Potential Obstacles

• Command-and-control leadership style.
• Hesitation to rethink how people work.
• Fear of losing control by management and central functions.
• Centralized decision-making.
• Excessive fear of taking risks.

Actions That Help Overcome These Obstacles

Building an entrepreneurial work culture starts with enabling people and teams, then expanding to a cross-organizational dimension.

Capabilities: Deployment

• Deploy digital capabilities for people to share information, ideas and know-how directly. For example through blogs, wikis and the capability to comment on other people’s content.
• At the same time, or shortly after, deploy collaborative technologies such as an enterprise social network and the capability to create communities. These should be available across the whole organization.

Practices: Openness

• Establish a policy that communities will be open by default, and closed only if absolutely necessary for security reasons.
• Start and spread working out loud practices, by developing internal examples or bringing in an external consultant to build awareness and share techniques.

Leadership: Autonomy

• Introduce methods that let individuals and teams self-manage their own work. Ensure freedom in a context of accountability.
• Implement distributed decision-making, again in a context of accountability.

Culture: External awareness and interactions

At both the senior manager level and operational level, develop ways to increase awareness and contacts with the external world.

• Depending on the sector of activity, consider working directly with start-ups, invite thought-leaders to challenge management practices, bring in peers in other organizations who can share their challenges, approaches and successes with you.

Photo credit: Russell Collins, www.Beyond.fr.