So, you’re an executive inside a media company and you wonder how to encourage the people who report to you “to think like entrepreneurs.” Your success as a manager will be at least partly judged by how many good ideas your department or division delivers upstairs.
I’ve got some advice, based on my time at one of the most creative corporate environments of the ’90s, which when I joined (in late 1995) was called HotWired and by the time I left , two wild years later, was known as Wired Digital.
This extraordinary experiment in raw capitalism was led by Louis Rossetto, the brilliant, eccentric Libertarian entrepreneur, who actually practiced what he preached. Accordingly, I was able to administer a sort of Chaos Theory of management. Here’s how it worked. We told our employees that they could decide how to best perform the jobs we needed from them; and then they were free to develop their own pet projects on our time and dollar.
When they were ready to launch as a Beta product, we provided the server space and IT support to help their effort go live.
Then, we would use our most popular products (WebMonkey, Wired News, etc.) to drive traffic to this new member of the sprawling Wired family of websites. There were failures, of course, but some of the successes — Suck and Beta Lounge — were true Web gems.
That our company exploded long before its time like a shooting star that couldn’t last is a tragedy, but had nothing to do with this internal management philosophy. (That is a story for another day.)
For those in a current position that allows some discretionary investment in your employees’ dreams, I highly recommend this method. After all, not all entrepreneurs emerge from their garages, fueled by the VC capital that falls like manna from Sand Hill Road.
Rather, some of them may be sitting just a few desks away…
