Intrapreneurship is often a directive from those who lack entrepreneurship. It’s a mindset that wants entrepreneurial outcomes without entrepreneurial risk.
Big companies love to talk about growth. They host strategy offsites, hang posters with words like “agility” and “bold thinking,” and launch intrapreneurship programs that promise to unleash entrepreneurial spirit within the ranks.
But more often than not, these programs feel like asking someone to race with the handbrake half on. You want the speed of a startup, but not the mess. The ambition of a founder, but with governance slides. You hand employees the keys to a powerful vehicle, but keep them on a short leash, providing only a few litres of fuel with them. This is what happens when entrepreneurship is mimicked rather than practiced.
And here’s the truth: companies don’t stall because they lack horsepower. They stall because they’re too afraid or artificially prohibited themselves to shift gears. Let’s explore how well-intentioned management becomes a brake system for growth.
Big companies are incredible machines. They have scale, resources, data, and talent. In theory, they’re built for the open road—engines that can handle long distances and complex terrain. But in practice, most are driving circles inside the confines of a parking garage, carefully avoiding any bumps on the bumper.
Why? Because the logic of the business (grow, evolve, stay competitive) is constantly at odds with the logic of the calendar (hit quarterly targets, reduce variance, avoid surprises). It’s like trying to win a cross-country rally race while being scored by your fuel efficiency every 15 minutes.
The processes are designed for control, not discovery. Budgets are allocated a year in advance. Strategic plans are often recycled with minor tweaks. And any deviation from the plan triggers alarms—escalations, re-forecasting, and often, paralysis.
This creates a strange dynamic: everyone agrees the company needs to move fast—but no one is allowed to steer too far from the approved route. Risk isn’t rewarded. Initiative is treated with suspicion unless it’s backed by a multi-tab spreadsheet and a steering committee.
The result is a culture of cautious driving, and this is how potential gets mismanaged. You’re sitting in a high-performance vehicle, capable of taking bold new routes, yet, the car stays on familiar roads. Every turn is modeled. Every bump is analysed. There’s a map, but no sense of adventure.
And here’s the kicker: the longer you drive this way, the more the system starts to feel normal. The parking garage becomes your world. Efficiency becomes a substitute for progress.
And when you finally realise the need to pivot, you might discover the exits are blocked. Ambitions and planning are not potential based anymore. The goal is to show some steady growth over the years. Real growth is missing because the management aims at good enough, not at what is achievable.
Playing not to lose leads to mediocrity. Being good enough is the enemy of great.
Many mature organisations optimise for consistency over adaptation. Instead of chasing what's possible, they manage what's already working—protecting legacy products, defending market share, and squeezing a few more percentage points out of the existing engine. The stakes and the risks are too high, because being 1% wrong might cost you millions or even billions. So steady progress is in favor.
When the organisation settles into a kind of strategic cruise control—maintaining speed, staying in lane, meeting expectations–it feels safe, predictable, even smart.
But here’s the danger: cruise control doesn’t work when the road bends. And in business, the road is always bending.
Not adapting in time isn’t just a strategic risk—it’s cultural. People start to self-censor. They pitch safer ideas. They stop imagining the bold, the unreasonable, the new. The whole company starts thinking in terms of incremental upgrades rather than transformational leaps.
Soon, you’ve got a team of smart, ambitious people—idling. Not because they lack drive, but because the system taught them that staying in their lane is safer than exploring the unknown.
After a while, being just good enough results in missing the real growth, because the company does not aim for what’s possible. Even in an extreme situation of external push, in case of an economic crisis or shrinking market, companies often stop investing in the future, however, the same market share is worth less in a smaller market, and you cannot achieve more on a smaller base.
If there’s one rule that governs both nature and business, it’s this: adaptation isn’t optional—it’s survival.
Though there is one role in every company that focuses on the working status quo: the chief financial officer (CFO). They are the people of efficiency and the present, not the development and the future. The Deloitte “CFO Signals” report partly tracks the risk aversion of CFOs over time. In the early 2020s, only 27-29% of CFOs said this was a good time to take greater risks. At the same time, a new study from AlixPartners found that 98% of CEOs and senior execs said they needed to “overhaul” their businesses within the next three years. There is a simultaneous pressure to both stay the course and completely change everything.
Yet, markets evolve like ecosystems. New competitors emerge like invasive species. Customer behavior shifts like climate. And technology lays down fresh roadways while digging up the old ones.
Still, many large companies behave as though the environment will bend to their existing models. They double down on what worked yesterday, assuming the same playbook will hold. But in this new landscape, that’s like driving with a map from ten years ago, ignoring the detours and dead ends.
Kodak didn’t lack resources. Blockbuster didn’t lack market share. Nokia didn’t lack engineers. They simply couldn’t adapt fast enough to changes that were already visible—because the internal systems rewarded protecting the past more than preparing for the future.
The business landscape isn’t a straight highway. It’s a winding road that changes from time to time. Those companies go far who keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on what’s coming next.
Data is for the past; the future is imagined.
In mature operations, data reigns supreme. Decisions are justified with dashboards, roadmaps are built on past performance, and strategy reviews start with a stack of KPIs and charts. It creates the illusion of control—like having a perfectly calibrated GPS.
But here’s the problem: data only tells you where you’ve been. It’s the rearview mirror. Useful for understanding what happened—but useless for seeing what’s ahead.
Yet too many companies try to drive the future while staring at yesterday’s indicators. They optimise past routes instead of plotting new ones.
The truth is, the road ahead doesn’t exist in the data. It exists in your imagination.
In his article, ‘Dare we imagine a better future?’, Martin Weigel says:
“Ian Leslie is right to caution us that ‘We exaggerate the permanence of the moment we’re in, and under-estimate the possibility of change.’
But the fact of the matter is that The Future is not a fixed outcome that’s destined to happen. And our role is not to passively go along (happily or unhappily) for the ride, or to try and predict where we are going. The Future is simply a range of possibilities.
[…]
The future needs imagination because it’s the only way we can engage with the future. We need imagination because while the past can be understood (and repeated, adapted, and iterated) through analysis, the future cannot be analysed. It can only ever be engaged through the imagination - the mental process of speculating beyond probability and what is possible to see what does not exist.”
Joseph Voros, a futurist, explains how to interpret the different versions of the future. We can differentiate potential, preposterous, possible, plausible, probable, preferable and projected futures. To create what can be created, you need to connect the dots via strategic thinking.
Breakthroughs don’t emerge from models. They emerge from questions. From intuition. From daring to chase an idea that hasn’t been benchmarked yet. That’s why visionaries lead with belief, not evidence. They imagine the route before they have directions.
Of course, data has its place. It tells you how fast you’re going. Whether you're veering off track. Whether you’ve improved. But the windshield is imagination. And if no one’s looking through it, you’re just driving fast… into a wall.
How to turn onto roads that haven’t been paved yet?
If you want your people to think like entrepreneurs, stop treating them like passengers.
Too many companies organise “innovation theaters” with hackathons and idea boxes that don't go anywhere. The handbrake is still on. You cannot just tell people to innovate, you can only invite them. Adaptability requires innovation that requires empowerment.
To unlock real growth, you need to unlock the entrepreneurial potential by providing
It can even be a separated new open lane on the road—a space where people can explore, test, and even crash safely. A space where ideas can be pursued because they might work, not just because they’re guaranteed to.
As Seth Godin puts it: “If failure is not an option, then neither is success.”
Adaptation is not a one-time pivot. It’s a muscle you should use regularly. It requires building a culture that is used to trials, developing new methods and challenging the status quo.
So make sure you have the personnel who want to take the wheel, and let them drive. Because the best talent wants to make the map, not just follow it. And if you don’t create those roads for them inside the company? They’ll go build their own car somewhere else.
To go fast or far, you need the willingness to release the handbrake.
