Mobilize People to Support Your Intrapreneurial Idea

Well as I think about my own entrepreneurial journey, and then being a part of a larger company, AOL got large and then we merged it with Time Warner and had 90,000 employees. Now I’m the Chairmen of the Smithsonian Institution which has 7,000 employees, 19 different museums, all of these different research operations. It gets harder to be nimble, agile, innovative as you get to more scale. But you have to constantly focus on where things are going. Where the puck is going, not where puck is, and figure out how to mobilize other people to believe in your idea and support your idea. Innovation, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship is a team sport. It’s not about you, it’s about the team you assemble around that idea to really give it life, give it scale. And the last lesson I have learned is an African proverb, which is; if you want to go quickly, you can go alone. But if you want to go far, you must go together. How do you bring people along, how do you establish a collaboration partnership, so it’s not just about you. It’ a much broader network supporting your idea and making that idea come true.