There is an immense power in paying attention to your personal DNA code, and following your passions, talents, and interests. As Gary Vaynerchuk points out in his book Crush It, if you do that, there is a good chance you will eventually find a way to monetize it, which provides the opening to start a new business venture.
Cashing in on your passion may be a be pretty obvious lesson for the entrepreneurial crowd, but one that is hard learned in big companies trying to innovate and get customers through logic versus raw emotion. Let’s see, it would make sense for us to “try to change the game over here” or “have a line extension of an existing business over there.”
The point is that, without a passionate champion to drive the entrepreneurial idea for a different product or different service, it’s never even going to get past the formal budgeting process, let alone make it to market.
Therein lies the rub, passionate champions tend to be seen as a subversive threat to big companies, something equivalent to the Commies coming over the hill in the days of the Cold War.
The idea of management is to take an existing business with a well-established standard product and service in a market and make the operations stable, predictable, controllable. It makes sense….up until the point where the business needs game-changing innovation to grow.
It is then that organizations start acting irrationally. “Watch it, here comes a passionate champion with a crazy entrepreneurial idea. We better crush them like a bug before they multiply.”
The challenge for CEOs is to transform “passionate entrepreneurship and rational management from a “either/or” to a “both/and” proposition. Easy to say, hard to do. I will blog further on just how that can be accomplished.
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