Companies often say they want entrepreneurs. I am not convinced they always do.
What many organisations really want is someone who thinks differently, challenges accepted wisdom and brings fresh ideas. What they often do not want is the disruption that genuine entrepreneurial behaviour inevitably brings. There is an important difference.
I have seen experienced entrepreneurs join large organisations with every expectation of transforming the business. They arrived with energy, conviction and a record of building successful ventures. They had been recruited precisely because they were “entrepreneurial”.
Within a year, many had left. Not because they lacked ability, and not because the organisation rejected them, but because the organisation rejected the level of change that genuine entrepreneurship requires.
Large organisations and entrepreneurial businesses succeed for very different reasons. Entrepreneurs create opportunity where none exists. They move quickly, make imperfect decisions, challenge convention and accept uncertainty as the price of progress. Large organisations create value through consistency. They manage risk, standardise processes, build governance and optimise what already works. Their strength is not speed. It is reliability.
Neither model is better. They are simply different, and the difficulty begins when one is mistaken for the other.
Recruiting a successful entrepreneur into a mature multinational does not automatically create an entrepreneurial organisation. More often, it creates frustration on both sides. The entrepreneur sees unnecessary process, excessive consultation and decisions that take too long. In one case I know well, a newly appointed commercial director spent three months trying to get a pricing change approved that he would have made in an afternoon in his own business, and concluded the company was simply not serious about change. The organisation, meanwhile, sees impatience, disregard for established ways of working and unnecessary disruption.
Both are correct. Both are behaving exactly as they have learned to succeed.
The organisation concludes that the entrepreneur is “not a cultural fit.” The entrepreneur concludes that the organisation is incapable of change. In reality, neither diagnosis is entirely accurate. The organisation was built to deliver predictable performance at scale. The entrepreneur was shaped by an environment where speed, adaptability and individual judgement determined success. Those operating systems are fundamentally different.
This is why I become uneasy whenever I hear a board announce that it wants “someone entrepreneurial.” What does that actually mean? Someone who challenges assumptions and questions authority, or simply someone with more energy than the current leadership team? Those are very different people, and too often organisations recruit entrepreneurs when what they really need are executives capable of introducing entrepreneurial thinking without destabilising the business.
Equally, there are organisations that genuinely need radical change. If that is the case, the board must recognise that appointing an entrepreneur is only the beginning. The organisation itself must be prepared to change its structures, its decision making, its measures of success, its tolerance for failure and its speed of execution. Without those changes, the entrepreneur has almost no chance of succeeding.
This may explain why many large companies have found another route to innovation. Rather than attempting to transplant entrepreneurial behaviour into an organisation built for consistency, they acquire entrepreneurial businesses. They learn, they observe, and they absorb selected ideas, technologies and ways of working. Some are integrated. Others remain deliberately independent. Either way, entrepreneurship is introduced in an environment where it already exists, rather than expecting one individual to transform an entire culture.
Perhaps boards should ask a different question. Not “do we need an entrepreneur”, but “is our organisation genuinely ready for one.” The success of an entrepreneurial leader depends as much on the organisation they enter as on the individual themselves.
Recruiting an entrepreneur into an organisation that is not prepared to embrace entrepreneurial behaviour is rather like planting a tropical tree in frozen ground. The problem is rarely the tree. It is the environment.
That may be the most important lesson of all. Organisations do not fail because they recruit entrepreneurs. They fail because they recruit entrepreneurs into systems that were never designed to let entrepreneurship flourish.
by Andrew Kris, Borderless Founding Partner
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