Quote by Rita Gunther McGrath

“The most important behavior on your part involves dedicating a disproportionate share of your own time, attention, and discretionary resources to creating new business models. Existing businesses, and the leaders in charge of them, face little difficulty in articulating their needs, building a case for their support, and attracting people. Entrepreneurial initiatives, on the other hand, are usually seen as marginal or unimportant in their early stages. Unless you personally allocate to them disproportionate attention, disproportionate resources, and disproportionate talent, they will get squeezed by the existing business to the extent that they never have a chance to take off. Your challenge is to provide counterpressure to the inertial forces that lead your people to constantly attend to the demands of today’s business. [...] By disproportionate resources, we mean budget, access to operating capacity or operating assets, and, most vitally, the very best people. Ironically, these are the very resources that are highly desired by managers of the existing business, who are apt to hotly contest any other claim on them. Like the payment of disproportionate attention, the disproportionate allocation of resources to new business models has its costs. Every dollar and every hour of operations capacity allocated disproportionately to entrepreneurial initiatives is money and time denied the existing business. Disproportionate allocation must be a deliberate process, with commitment of resources being visibly recognized as a matter of strategic choice, not a struggle between long- and short-term goals. [...] Finally, you must be prepared for your organization’s top talent to work on entrepreneurial initiatives. This can create a painful dilemma. When top talent works on an entrepreneurial initiative, the current business is weakened accordingly. However, if only mediocre talent is assigned to the difficult task of new business development, the ventures are doomed. Furthermore, allowing ventures to be run by mediocre people sends an even stronger signal to the rest of the business about your real priorities. The smart people in the firm will recognize that business development is not truly a priority for you, and they will organize their own priorities accordingly. The message: If you don’t walk the talk, only the dumb people will listen.”

Quote by Rita Gunther McGrath