Small things at big companies

“The new always looks so puny — so unpromising — next to the reality of the massive, on-going business.” — Peter Drucker in Innovation and Entrepreneurship

No matter how big the ambitions are for something, they always start small. But big companies have big expectations. This incongruence makes starting new things at companies particularly challenging.

Some types of these expectations:

• Big companies expect big results. If you’re a start up, a $1B market opportunity looks life changing; if you’re Apple, not so much. This creates a tension where interesting ideas that look small today don’t get funded unless someone is willing to promise big results. The incentive here is to overpromise because if you overpromise, you might get lucky and more or less hit expectations. But if you underpromise, you won’t get funded and you never even get started. So you overpromise because you have to, but overpromising creates pressure to generate results where the opportunities might not yet exist.

• Your teammates have expectations about their jobs. Your ability to define their your role is extremely important within larger companies. If you don’t define what you’re responsible for and what you’re not responsible for, you won’t get anything worthwhile done. But starting something new frequently requires small amounts of a specific types of skills. You don’t need someone to do full time content marketing or partner management, you just need someone to roll up their sleeves and work on a specific project. So on the internal start up, you run into a lot of people saying “that’s not my job” or “I’m sorry, I don’t have time for this.” This is a particular challenge for less common functions where the model is to embed someone in the team (vs. project based or on demand staffing), because if you don’t have enough work to justify at least a quarter of a persons time for the foreseeable, you risk not getting anyone at all. This also shows up in small ways where people push back on owning specific projects almost reflexively — after all, in their last role at the same company this would’ve been someone else’s job and a major part of their success to date has been their ability to define their role.

• Performance assessment. Even if the people you’re working with are willing to do whatever it takes to succeed personally, the institution is going to push back against this. As companies get bigger, they develop career ladders. These ladders define the skills necessary to progress at a given level within a given function and inevitably describe what success looks like in the core business better than whatever new thing you’re working on. This will be a problem both for people on your project, who risk paying a penalty for doing work that isn’t at their level and people considering joining your project and comparing it against the career trajectory offered by other options.

So how do you succeed in spite of this? I can’t claim special expertise, but here’s what I’ve observed to work:

• Understand the incentives. If you understand it, you see it coming, and avoid the worst of it. Some of it you can mitigate with planning and some of it you just have to accept. This is the tax you pay in exchange for not having to build something new while chasing funding and setting up IT systems.

• Reward effort. The people you’re working with are multifaceted. Most people, particularly those in high demand professions, aren’t optimizing purely for the next promotion or personal prestige. If you’re excited about them going outside of expectations to do what’s best for the team, they’re more likely to keep doing it, even in the face of incentives to do otherwise.

• Create a safe haven for experimentation. Progress on new things isn’t linear and people need the space to mistakes. It’s much easier to do this without needing to create the artifice of consistent results. So make that space where you can. If you’re more junior, this might look like a side project outside of your formal OKRs. As you get more senior, give your people the space to dabble around in areas that have the potential to be productive without demanding that they show results.

• Even better, have a plan to create the artifice of consistent results. Teams and leaders that are really cooking are actively experimenting with one part of their portfolio while banking results with another part of their portfolio. By doing this, they’re able to shield the experiments from the need to produce results right away and can use the lessons they’ve learned to drive the next set of results.