Entrepreneurial “Vocation”

A successful company can occasionally lose touch with its founding entrepreneurial vocation. Reasons for these corporate wanderings in the wilderness range as much from success as from failure. Some of these periods of vocational drift go under the label of “diversification,” others parade as “stock buy backs” to preserve shareholder interests.  

Whatever the reasons, examples are all too plentiful. David Christiansen (The Innovator’s Dilemma), Intel’s Andy Grove (Only the Paranoid Survive), and departing-CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Lew Platt (“Whatever made you successful in the past, won’t in the future”), each speak of experiences and explanations for what can happen to successful companies that lose their way. We also see this vocational drift among more than one of our client companies. These wanderings may be more widespread than any of us would care to admit and some of them can be lethal to the company. (I have experienced this drift myself as a managing partner of a small consulting firm that after two decades was unable to rediscover its founding vocation).

The first challenge for any company is to have its management anticipate—or at least recognize—the problem. But once the problem has been recognized, what can a company do to recover or renew its entrepreneurial sense of purpose and “calling”? 

Look to the company’s past, present and future. To find where fresh entrepreneurial opportunity resides, not only to fuel future growth, but also to renew the company’s sense of purpose, we need to look and think back, deep and out (not far and wide).

Think Back.  Your company’s entrepreneurial vocation will resonate with the original value proposition—and subsequent ones—that propelled the company in the past and gave it a sense of purpose beyond “shareholder interests.” Ask what the company’s societal more than financial purpose might really be (Peter Drucker). But don’t stop here.

Look Deep.  Understand which company competencies are core—those few unique combinations of skills that manifest themselves in the end-benefits your products or services provide end-users. Know what your company’s “knitting” is, yet avoid the visionless advice of sticking to it (AKA “strategic fit”). And don’t stop here either.

Look Out.  Develop a chronic curiosity about the routines and rituals of current and potential end-users, especially how they are changing. Products and services are meaningless unless they provide some social benefit to those who use them in the context of some routine or ritual.

No one of these perspectives alone is sufficient. However, a creative combination of all three views just may help leadership recover and renew its company’s entrepreneurial vocation and help “redraw” the boundaries of the opportunity space that calls us into the future.

This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in September 1999. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 460-1313.