The Corporate Intrepreneur’s Reading List
Literary ammo to help your team win in a traditional corporate culture
In the trenches
Start-up teams often talk about their time together “in the trenches” — a bellicose way of describing a work environment where resources are constrained, goals are lofty, the pace is fast, and folks outside the company are explaining why the start-up will never work out. Still, these teams trudge on, army crawling their way inch by inch under combative fire from the other side.
This resistance is not unique to the traditional entrepreneur — it is also felt by intrepreneurs and other teams working to promote innovation and new ventures within large organizations.
Sure — constraints are quite different. Resources might be less constrained, the pace may be slower, and running out of money most often just means transitioning to another internal team.
But while traditional entrepreneurs face an outside-market questioning their worth, intrepreneurs face the additional challenge of an inside-market questioning the same thing.
Stakeholders within traditional, large organizations are taught and incentivized to optimize current business models, to exploit current knowledge, and to seek reliability via standard definitions of proof.
This is not a bad thing — an existing business needs to generate income in order to fund exploration — but it is inherently at odds with the goal of the intrepreneur, who seeks new knowledge, asks what could be, and favors finding the right thing over doing it the right way.
Because of these tensions, traditional corporate stakeholders — derisively labeled the “corporate immune system” — often are questioning the why, the how, and the what of intrepeneur teams.
This battle can be both exhausting and unproductive. Constantly explaining why you’re doing what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and what you’re actually working on doesn’t leave much time for actual experimentation and creation.
Sure, it’s part of the job and the challenge that excites these individuals. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want tools to make things a bit easier.
I have found the following three books incredibly helpful in advancing my view of innovation within large companies, understanding different mindsets that foster and inhibit innovation, and developing a perspective on the role of a team in building new things.
I highly recommend that any intrepreneur read the following three books in the following order:
- The Business of Design by Roger Martin
Read this book first — it’s a quick one and there’s a substantial case study section at the end that I’d deem optional.
The value of this book is that it articulately calls out how we are traditionally incentivized and taught how to think (analytically) and how most businesses today favor reliability over validity. Martin contends that most businesses are dominated by declarative logic — logic of what should be or is — versus abductive reasoning, the logic of what might be. Abductive reasoning is what drives intuitive sparks that leap across the gap separating the world as it is from the world as it might be.
He argues that design thinkers embrace this type of reasoning — which is often not based on traditional forms of proof and logic and which scares the hell out of traditional business people because it is often not supported by consistent or reliable data.
This book helped me put a vocabulary to the behaviors I noticed inside of a large company and more easily call out that there were certain times when non-traditional thinking needed to be prioritized over our traditional approaches.
2. Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal
This book tells the story of General McChrystal’s personal career experience building and leading teams within the military. It largely focuses on how the the traditional military organization, hierarchy, and communication structure was forced to change in recent decades due to advancements in technology and information saturation.
Though this book is not coined a business book, it shares some incredible lessons about the role of a team and leadership in an environment full of complex, meaty, and ambiguous problems.
3. Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
Ignore the tagline. It undersells this book as a gimmicky productivity play.
This book is much more than that and an incredible tool to help your team and leadership rethink our standard views of planning, transparency, and adapting to change.
While it is advocating for the adoption of the agile scrum framework, lessons can be taken from this book for any type of team trying to get something done.
On at least a weekly basis, I continue to reference Sutherland’s discussion of our “planning hubris” as humans and the discomfort, but benefit, of extreme transparency in team work activities.
My assignment for you
- Read these books in order.
- Buy 4 copies of each book after you read it and ask that your team members and leadership read them as well. Even better, drop a copy of the book on your VP’s desk with a sticky note “Hey, just finished this. I think you may find this interesting.” In my experience the right leader won’t take that as passive aggressive, but rather as an invitation to learn something new and engage in discussion with you.
I could talk about these books all day — I intend on writing summaries of each — so I’d love to chat if you have any questions.
Good luck in those trenches.
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Luke is the Principal of Paper Ventures (www.paperventures.com), a digital product shop focused on new venture creation, development, and launch. He helps early-stage entrepreneurs take a pragmatic, iterative, and human approach to the design, prototyping, and development of forward looking visions.
Get in touch @ luke [at] paperventures [dot] com.
