Tips for Innovating While Facing Resistance

Justin Craig offers advice to intrapreneurs within the family business.

Let’s now talk about family members who are going to actually innovate or be entrepreneurial outside the family system. They’re going to come up against resistance! They’re investors are going to be cranky, they’re going to be demanding, they’re going to actually ask hard questions, so what’s different? Treat the family members, the investors, as you would a hardened venture capitalist. Don’t be naïve to think that they’re going to give you a leave pass or you know, treat you a little bit differently. That doesn’t make any sense. That’s setting you up for failure. So if you’re a young entrepreneur, or a young innovator within the organization, grab the skill set, understand what it takes, understand the environment that you’re entering into, but also have the mindset, the mindset of a family of different than the mindset of a venture capitalist or investor. We’ve got a long term orientation, we’re planning for the long term here. We’re creating new businesses to complement our existing businesses, we need to be able to do that. So there’s two conversations. There’s the entrepreneur who actually has that mindset but there’s also the incumbent, the person who’s going to invest in it, there’s no reason for he or she to say no, no, no, no, because the entrepreneur is going to go somewhere else, and take that great idea and actually launch it on their own, or give it to somebody else to launch. So actually understand the paradox, we need to continue differently, we need to balance tradition and change. The idea of sending your kids to paradox school. Understanding paradoxes well in advance, understanding the nuances, you’ve got to manage a paradox, you can’t solve it. The sooner you understand those dynamics, the better prepared you’re going to be promoting entrepreneurial ideas and every other idea that’s going to come along that’s going to require you to grow this business, over the long term.