The business icon talks about empowering employees to break the rules.
I am incredibly lucky to be able to live in the British Virgin Islands,
one of the most beautiful spots on the planet. My family's home is on
Necker Island, which is both our home and a luxury resort. Here, I'm
much more likely to do my thinking in an office hammock rather than an
office chair.
Seeing guests exploring the beach reminded me that one of the first charming things visitors to the BVIs see are signs in the airport arrivals area that designate the immigration channels. Unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, here the signs read "Belongers" and "Non-Belongers," rather than "Residents" and "Nonresidents."
Seeing guests exploring the beach reminded me that one of the first charming things visitors to the BVIs see are signs in the airport arrivals area that designate the immigration channels. Unlike the rest of the English-speaking world, here the signs read "Belongers" and "Non-Belongers," rather than "Residents" and "Nonresidents."
Since I became a resident, I've come to find the term "belonger"
amazingly powerful. When a nation embraces its own as "belonging here"
as opposed to just living there, it breeds a different form of loyalty.
It reminds us that this is where we belong, and so our efforts are not
just on our own behalf, but also to benefit the community.
This made me think about how such little, seemingly semantic, details
apply in the business world: What if companies had belongers rather
than employees? Does what we call each other make a difference in other
contexts?
Many millions of people proudly claim the title "entrepreneur." On
the other hand, a title that hasn't gotten nearly the amount of
attention it deserves is entrepreneur's little brother, "intrapreneur":
"an employee who is given freedom and financial support to create new
products, services and systems, who does not have to follow the
company's usual routines or protocols." While it's true that every
company needs an entrepreneur to get it under way, healthy growth
requires a smattering of intrapreneurs who drive new projects and
explore new and unexpected directions for business development.
Virgin could never have grown into the group of more than 200
companies it is now, were it not for a steady stream of intrapreneurs
who looked for and developed opportunities, often leading efforts that
went against the grain.
One example that springs to mind was at Virgin Atlantic, about 10
years ago. None of the big expensive seat design firms seemed able to
solve the design problems posed by our specifications for our Upper
Class cabin, but a young designer, Joe Ferry, volunteered (insistently)
to give the project a go.
We set him loose, and the herringbone-configured private sleeper
suites that resulted from his "outside the box" creativity put us years
ahead of the pack and made for millions of very happy horizontal fliers.
How to unleash the power of intrapreneurs like Joe? The key is to
enable them to pursue their vision. But people don't always think of
leaders within a company – the managers, executives, and the chief
executive officer – as people who enable others. As I learned back when I
was starting up Student magazine, "The chief executive officer of a
major corporation might only make a couple of decisions a year, but
those decisions can affect the lives of millions." What a terrible way
to run a company!
So, since this seems to be true throughout the business world,
clearly it's time for a major shake-up in the nomenclature of business.
What if CEO stood for "chief enabling officer"? What if that CEO's
primary role were to nurture a breed of intrapreneurs who would grow
into tomorrow's entrepreneurs?
We inadvertently developed this role at Virgin by virtue of the fact that when we've chosen to jump into a business about which we have little or no real knowledge, we've had to enable a few carefully selected people who do know which end is up.
We inadvertently developed this role at Virgin by virtue of the fact that when we've chosen to jump into a business about which we have little or no real knowledge, we've had to enable a few carefully selected people who do know which end is up.
When Virgin moved into the mobile phone industry we had no
experience, so we looked for our rivals' best managers, hired them away,
took off their ties and gave them the freedom to set up their own
ventures within the Virgin Group. Tom Alexander in the U.K., Dan
Schulman in the U.S. and Andrew Black in Canada have all done this with
great success, aggressively taking Virgin companies in new and
unexpected directions.
Perhaps the greatest thing about this form of enabled
intrapreneurship is that often everyone becomes so immersed in what
they're doing that they feel like they own their companies. They don't
feel like employees working for someone else, they feel much more like
... well, I think the only word to describe it is "belongers."
