Page 165 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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158 THE PRACTICE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

time-burden on senior people. No senior executive should therefore be
expected to sit down more than three times a year for a long afternoon
or evening with a group of perhaps twenty-five or thirty juniors. But the
sessions should be maintained systematically. They are an excellent
vehicle for upward communications, the best means to enable juniors,
and especially professionals, to look up from their narrow specialties
and see the whole enterprise. They enable juniors to understand what
top management is concerned with, and why. In turn, they give the sen-
iors badly needed insight into the values, vision, and concerns of their
younger colleagues. Above all, these sessions are one of the most effec-
tive ways to instill entrepreneurial vision throughout the company.
This practice has one built-in requirement. Those who suggest
anything new, or even a change in the way things are being done,
whether in respect to product or process, to market or service, should
be expected to go to work. They should be asked to submit, within a
reasonable period, a working paper to the presiding senior and to their
colleagues in the session, in which they try to develop their idea.
What would it look like if converted into reality? What in turn does
reality have to look like for the idea to make sense? What are the
assumptions regarding customers and markets, and so on. How much
work is needed how much money and how many people … and how
much time? And what results might be expected?
Again, the yield of entrepreneurial ideas from all this may not be
its most important product—though in many organizations the yield
has been consistently high. The most valuable achievement may well
be entrepreneurial vision, receptivity to innovation, and “greed for
new things” throughout the entire organization.

IV

MEASURING INNOVATIVE PERFORMANCE

For a business to be receptive to entrepreneurship, innovative per-
formance must be included among the measures by which that busi-
ness controls itself. Only if we assess the entrepreneurial perform-
ance of a business will entrepreneurship become action. Human
beings tend to behave as they are expected to.
In the normal assessments of a business, innovative performance is
conspicuous by its absence. Yet it is not particularly difficult to build