Launch p3: Leadership Storytelling
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
Bernard Shaw certainly knew something about communication. Innovation requires strong communication, from articulating your idea to building alliances to testing and validating your hypothesis to convincing people to buy your product. The above quote is insightful, whether you’re an entrepreneur trying to start a company or an intrapreneur trying to create value within a larger organization. There are detractors and competitors everywhere that will try to snuff out your spark, so it’s critical to know who to talk to and how to address their interests. There are many similarities between the two, but there are critical differences, and I will try to address some of those entre-/intra-preneurial particulars here.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this writing, my career has been a winding path across the intra- and entre-preneurial path. I’d love to claim that it has all been by enlightened design, but the reality is that much of it was learned on the job. I have spanned the healthcare spectrum, from early discovery in the Human Genome Project to biotech to medtech to digital health and all the way downstream to point of care and population health. Along the way I have bounced back and forth the entre-intra divide, creating companies in the open market, a digital innovation lab in an 85 year old public company, a research program in a 400 year old university, and even a research consortium that has spread to over 50 countries.
At the root of each of those was the essential belief that I was doing something good. If you’re going to dedicate a sizable portion of your time to solving a problem, then make sure that it’s truly an important one – one that is urgent, immediate, pervasive, and one that people are willing to pay money to relieve. Make sure that it inspires people and that it’s tangible enough that they can envision a future that will be better if you succeed. Ideally, it’s inspiring enough that people will want to help (and maybe join) your journey as supporters, advisors, employees, customers, or investors.
Your messaging will be critical. Don’t worry, it won’t be perfect at first. You will learn. The story will evolve. As you talk to people you will discover new ways of conveying meaning and value. Know your audience! Listen!!! You will develop different flavors of that story depending on who you are talking to because the perception of value is different from where you stand. Are they a potential customer? Are they an investor? Are they the parent company’s CEO? Are they the parent company’s CTO who thinks that innovation is working like a charm in his department? Is it the head of sales who needs to picture how your vision will excite her staff and bring in more revenue? Is it the head of products who is threatened by your existence? You get the point. You will want to build allies that can speak for you in good times and bad times – there will be bad times. Not everyone will be an ally, but if you message right and network appropriately then maybe the best that you can hope for is to prevent anybody from being an outright enemy that will look for ways to kill you for telling your truth.
Your message should be part visionary and part practical. It should convey imagery but it should also be believable, both by itself and also in conjunction with you, who would be the presumptive person to deliver on that vision. Again, your story will evolve. It won’t be perfect at first, but you should craft it carefully at each step because all that you have in the beginning is that story. Your job isn’t just to get people excited, your job is to also keep people excited as time wears on their attention. When you share your story, pay attention and look for responses, body language, and queues that can help you refine it. Don’t expect people to tell you what the right solution is, but they can help you validate the need (that whole bit about Ford and “faster horses”). Be prepared to tell in simple and emotive terms something that might be inherently technical and complex behind the scenes. Include learnings and mini-wins that will bolster your message. Don’t forget to convey the connection to the broader mission. Why should the universe care?
Elements of a Good Story
Through the years I have used elements of everything that I described in previous sections to push my agenda forward. Every situation was different, but there are commonalities as seen on Figure 5. This isn’t foolproof, because there are always exceptions, but generally this has been my experience.
Figure 5. Similarities and differences between intra- and entre-preneurship.
There are progressive sublayers of Venn diagrams because my intrapreneurial experience from starting a digital innovation lab was different from starting a genomics research program but, as we previously discussed, the best equipped apex predators have multiple innovation types tuned to their innovation strategies, and they wield them in accordance with the present circumstance.
Create metrics for success, both for your internal navigation but also to show progress to your stakeholders. Results can take many forms, such as market studies, supporting evidence, prototypes, alliances, products, sales, memberships, media attention, etc. Some of these might be precursors or mini-successes to your overall objective. Track your progress. Measure it, and be as honest with yourself as possible. There will be many fires that you’ll need to put out. Start with the big ones, but don’t ignore the little ones that could rage out of control. You are fighting for survival. At every step the market, or your boss, will be evaluating you for fitness. You need to be the fittest person in the room. You won’t always be right, but you need to be fit enough to figure out a path forward even when you make mistakes.
Know your strengths and weaknesses. If you aren’t technical, but your venture has deep technical components then maybe you need a cofounder. Know your sources of power. Build expert power quickly if you want to convince people. Embody your mission to build moral power and to keep detractors at bay. Secure legitimate power by getting executive buy-in early. Work on your referent power and build alliances to cast a wide net of good will. Don’t forget about the critical elements of reward power that will excite and retain key stakeholders.
It’s important to be confident and have a healthy ego, but be humble and authentic. You need to sell yourself in every meeting but there are exquisitely refined ways of doing it and obnoxiously brute ways too. You will need favors. You will need encouragement. Make yourself likable. Make people want to see you succeed. You can’t do this alone, so build your army. The best leaders inspire people to march with them. Invest in people. Don’t be an asshole. There will be plenty of obstacles, so don’t create new ones unnecessarily. Act as-if but have some boundaries. Don’t go challenging apex predators out of the gate because until you succeed you are most definitely not one – at best you’re a snack. Choose your battles and build for a protracted war, but execute with urgency. Time is not on your side.
Lead With Strength
In the previous paragraph I said something about not being an asshole. I did so in the general sense, but the reality is that if you launch into this journey you will be fighting for survival. You may have one shot at goal, and if you do have a good start then you need to do whatever is necessary to make it succeed. There will be many personalities, and many politics. You will need to know who to trust and who to appease. Sometimes you might just have to be an asshole to certain people that stand in your way or slow you down, and sometimes you may have to do it in public. There’s a Chinese proverb that says that you have to “kill the chicken to teach the monkey a lesson”. Savage though it may be, you may need to make a stand and send a message. Again, this is nature and, for as likable as you may be, you’ll need to earn this. You will develop your style based on your personality, but when you watch tigers hunting you can tell that they are 100% committed once they make a move. Sure, they scope out the land and take time to identify their prey, but once they’re in, they’re in. There’s no hedging. You eat what you kill. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily consider the tiger an asshole, per se, but he’s also no pussy cat. Pussy cats don’t survive in the jungle. Know when to be a tiger and when to be a pussy cat. Just don’t be an asshole all of the time! Tigers don’t go around killing unnecessarily. They only do so when they need to.
Be clear about the forces acting upon your success, both in favor and against. If you’re on your own then are there market dynamics that favor a new solution? What are the alternatives to your idea? What are switching costs? Are there macroeconomic trends that might prevent you from raising a round of financing or closing clients? Do you need outside financing to get started? If you’re an intrapreneur then why should management favor your idea over the numerous other opportunities vying for their attention? Is the company struggling with the innovator’s dilemma? Do you have a way to address that dilemma in a way that projects a rosy long-term future, while also addressing pressures from quarterly financial returns? Do you go for that moonshot, or do you put together an innovation portfolio that solves for short-term wins while you build momentum toward the longer-term wins? Etc. Etc. Etc… You need to become intimately aware of all of these questions, forces, and winds influencing your journey. Even though the list of forces changes with every step, you should be aware of them as much as possible in order to set yourself for success. Luck will play a factor, but try to avoid leaving things to chance alone.
There will be a lot to do and, whether you’re operating as an intra- or an entre- preneur, you will have to wear many hats — and so will your team, so make sure to build one that’s prepared for the battle. Unless I know with high-confidence what we are building, I generally don’t hire ultra-specialists unless they’re willing to get dirty with the rest of the team. Think of yourselves as a special ops team, where each person brings a set of specialized skills, but everybody can step into any position when bullets fly. You need to trust each other, and they need to trust you (that part about not being an asshole).
Be a leader. Leading isn’t just about coming up with ideas, setting strategy, or managing people. True leaders inspire. Your job is to build a super fast and powerful rocket that can go anywhere, and although there is much to the African proverb “if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”, I don’t fully agree with this. Sure, as you build the rocket and start warming the engine it feels damn slow, but if you build it right it’s mindblowing how quickly an awesome team can go! But, as you crank the speed from 1-to-10, there is a critical x-factor that will enable an awesome team to go up to 11: Leadership. It’s your job to paint the vision. It’s your job to make sure that the pieces all align. It’s your job to shape the narrative. I love the idea behind the book Switch that separates the rider (mind), the elephant (heart), and path (direction). Although the book is about creating persistent change, I feel that the same applies to leading teams. You need to inspire the elephant, convince the rider, and present a path that unleashes their combined power. If you can pull that off then I feel that you can go both faster and further than you might have imagined possible.
