It is like on your Birthday. You have a wish.

Entrepreneurship is not only important for creating a business or developing new products and services but also to keep an organisation healthy and in progress inside. In this context it is called 'entrepreneurial management' or 'intrapreneurship'. Kuratko and Hodgetts (1995: 95) define it as 'entrepreneurial activities that perceive organisational sanction and resource commitments for the purpose of innovative results'. They also state that an organisation aspiring to motivate intrapreneurship must replace the old authoritarian management style by networking, 'people style of management characterised by horizontal coordination and support' (ibid: 103).

You unwrap the paper from the present and it is absolutely not the thing you desired.

Usually it is not easy for companies to get rid of old thinking and structures, especially for bigger companies where the top-down management used to work well for years. N. Sykes from Warwick Business School explained in a lecture about 'Envisioning Enterprise' (held at University of Lincoln 24th March 2004) that hierarchy is everywhere, it is nearly 'encoded in us'. The 'all seeing eye of Horus' controls everything. You work under or above someone else, you are controlled or you control, usually both. This culture must be changed if a company wants to enable intrapreneurship. It is a process of learning and unlearning although learning in this case does not mean 'the detection and correction of errors' (Vollmer 2003). Organisations are complex systems; the quick fix of a detected error will cause subsequent problems in another part of the system. Hofstede stated that 'there are no universal solutions to organisation and management problems (2001: 373). A quick fix is the wrong way to do things. Detecting that a company lacks intrapreneurship and trying to correct this by 'establishing' it does not work. Organisational culture develops over many years and adapting this culture to new ways of doing things cannot be imposed from above.

Large companies often lack communication between the layers of management and consequently that knowledge is not shared. Managers concentrate on measurable items like efficiency and calculability. The stories you hear in these companies are cynical, it seems that they have reached a status quo in their development. The culture is too much focused on polarities like: people - things, long-term - short-term or principle - convenience. The whole range in between the poles is neglected.

Back to the shop... start a negotiation with the shop owner...

There are no sketchbooks for real life problems, or not a very good one. The company must change in a learning organisation, but how? Where to start? Every company is unique, so a unique solution process must be designed for situation to improve it. Theoretical 'fit-in-all' guidelines provide a start but not an end to the improvement process.

You have exchanged your present and now you have what you really wanted.

Intrapreneurship can flourish in an environment where people work next to each other, where managers have people between them, not under them. N. Sykes (2004) showed in his lecture a video about geese. And as this is storytelling, I will tell you the story of the geese and then you decide if companies can learn from them.

The flying geese have a shared objective; in a company you should share vision. The geese recognise roles and talents and change the leadership when the circumstances demand it or when a new talent is needed. There is no 'CEO' goose that always flies at the head of the formation. Instead the leading goose is exchanged when it needs rest and it accepts to fly in another position within the formation. They have an encouragement culture 'honk honk' and not a discouragement one.