Surfing waves and intrapreneurship

I’m not a surfer, so the following is based on my perception of surfing. I believe it can be a useful analogy for intrapreneurship. Intrapreneurship is the practice of creating new businesses or initiatives, but within an existing business. For example, creating Alexa within Amazon.

Surfers don’t spend most of their time riding waves. Instead, they spend their time carefully observing, trying to find the next wave.

Like surfers, intrapreneurs don’t create market shifts. Rather, they are incredibly skilled at recognizing secular trends and riding them. They have a superhuman ability to recognize changes in the market before they happen. They also must have a rare collection of skills to mobilize their organizations quickly enough to capture the opportunity. In this game, timing is everything. Being too late is fatal.

Successful intrapreneurs must be master communicators. Change is scary. Secular change is often contrarian and non-intuitive. The ability to communicate direction change in a way that inspires the team and creates clarity instead of fear and ambiguity is very, very hard in practice. Your narrative needs to be simple enough for everyone on the team to understand and repeat, yet accurate enough to give clear direction.

If communicating direction change wasn’t hard enough, you also need to instill the team with the confidence that you can successfully execute on the opportunity. You have to build an execution strategy that is so well thought out you can visualize the path to success in your mind’s eye. If you can’t picture the path to success yourself, you will have a difficult time leading a team to success.

Intrapreneurs have an additional challenge that entrepreneurs don’t have which is the need to identify opportunities that align with your company’s larger strategy. As someone who has done both, this extra degree of difficulty is why I’m drawn to intrapreneurship over entrepreneurship.

Perhaps one of the hardest challenges for the intrapreneurs is being able to successfully recognize when an opportunity has run its course and it’s time to move the team onto something new. It’s hard to leave something you invested years building. Everything new initiative, if successful, reaches a point of diminishing returns. Knowing when and how to move a team is one of the most undercelebrated challenges for leaders.