GIFFORD PINCHOT

Each team in your organization can become a separate service and profit center, part of a free intraprise system.

In organizations, most work is directed to serving internal customers. How do we get internal service providers to become more innovative, efficient, and customer-focused? The primary answer is to give their internal customers a choice among internal intrapreneurial suppliers.

In the future, most employees will work in internal service intraprises. However, line organizations will still be in control because they will have the budget. As customers of the internal service intraprises, they will get what they need to achieve their mission.

When in charge of their own internal profit centers, service intrapreneurs will gravitate to where they have the highest value. Through customer feedback, they will learn how to meet their customers' real needs faster, better, and cheaper. The results will be breakthroughs in innovation and productivity.

To launch a Free Intraprise System, follow nine steps: 1) Create quick-and-easy systems for setting up intraprises to serve internal customers; 2) Establish ways for registering joint ownership of intraprises so team members can own shares in them; 3) Formulate intraproperty rights and empower the justice system to make sure no one ignores them; 4) Create an intracapital bank to clear transfer payments and serve as a depository for intracapital; 5) Allow every intraprise to establish an account, deposit receipts, and write “checks” to others—and solve the associated accounting problems; 6) Set up a system for registering agreements and contracts, making sure everyone treats internal promises with great respect, by keeping commitments; 7) Design a process for rapidly establishing a body of internal “commercial law” with simple and fast procedures to create a low-friction internal economy; 8) Put in place a fast and efficient internal justice system, with fair courts and judges, to which disputes between buyers and sellers can be taken; 9) Promote worker ownership to increase cross-system cooperation.

Intrapreneurs face difficult challenges: fixed or declining budgets, increasing demands for their services, and rising standards of quality and environmental responsibility. To succeed, they have to become more efficient and effective. This means finding ways to cut through bureaucracy and to get the work done—work that is used by both internal and external customers.

If you have the job of finding ways to achieve breakthrough performance, I suggest you use intrapreneurial “enterprise teams” to provide internal services with more flair. Treat line officers who use internal services as customers and provide them with choice among alternative internal vendors of those services.

Each team can become a profit center. Going from employee to intrapreneur is quite a challenge, but within most companies and government agencies, I find no lack of intrapreneurial spirit. Within a few weeks of completing their training, most enterprise teams are booked months in advance. Many line officers welcome the chance to use internal providers who genuinely see them as customers. They can reduce costs because they don't need to employ someone full-time to do a job that can be done, as needed, by an enterprise team.

This prescription for innovation, reduced bureaucracy, increased productivity, and customer responsiveness is ready for widespread implementation. EE

Gifford Pinchot is co-chairman of Pinchot & Co. This article is adapted from Intrapreneuring in Action: A Manual of Business Innovation, by Gifford Pinchot and Ron Pellman, (Berrett Koehler). 209-780-2800.

Excellence in Action: Revitalize your internal service providers by creating enterprise teams and turning your employees into “intrapreneurs”.