RoundMap® : Framework 2 Vectors

 

Foundations for Ethical Prosperity: Harmonizing Equitable Profit Distribution with Responsible Growth

Within the RoundMap framework, Equitable Profit Distribution and Responsible Growth are pivotal vectors guiding businesses toward ethical prosperity. While profit is necessary, equitable profit distribution is crucial for long-term success. Meanwhile, growth is envisioned as a process of purposeful distinction, where we actively amplify positive and mitigate negative impacts. 

This approach to growth, aligning purposeful distinction with market demands and prioritizing quality over quantity, underpins our commitment to ethical, equitable, and sustainable business practices

Fostering Equitable Profit Distribution

Equitable Distribution of Profit is a core principle that guides the fair and balanced allocation of financial gains, extending beyond shareholder returns to benefit a more comprehensive array of stakeholders, including employees, customers, and the community. This approach underscores a commitment to collaborative empowerment and sustainable growth. 

By sharing profits equitably, businesses aim to reinforce the interconnected success of their ecosystem, aligning financial practices with their values of innovation, systems thinking, and sustainability. This strategy is not just a financial choice but a reflection of their ethos, ensuring that as the business prospers, so does the broader community and environment.

Responsible Growth Rooted In Purposeful Distinction

Purposeful Distinction in Growth represents a commitment to creating profound, significant, and uniquely outstanding change. It’s about achieving results that stand apart in effectiveness, sustainability, and positive influence. This approach goes beyond conventional metrics of success, focusing instead on the depth, quality, and uniqueness of the impact we create. 

Purposeful Distinction is characterized by innovative solutions, transformative outcomes, and a legacy of positive change that resonates within the community and industry. It embodies our dedication to making a difference and doing so exceptionally and unmistakably aligned with our core values of systems thinking, collaborative empowerment, and holistic transformation. 

In pursuing Purposeful Distinction, we aim to set new standards in how we contribute to society, demonstrating that success is not just about what we achieve but how distinctively and meaningfully we achieve it.

Equitable Profit Distribution

As a critical component of the RoundMap framework, the Business Model Matrix provides a nuanced approach to understanding and developing effective business models. This matrix is crucial in mastering the Profit-vector, which focuses on how a business can profitably create, deliver, and capture value.

Let’s delve into the essentials of the Business Model Matrix to explain the concept of the Profit-vector:

• Four Value Orchestration Direction:
  
  • Product Centricity: Focuses on superior product development and innovation.
  • Customer Centricity: Centers around creating exceptional and personalized customer experiences.
  • Resource Centricity: Focuses on offering resources as a service while maximizing their utilization.
  • Platform Centricity: Builds on creating platforms that facilitate user interactions and transactions.
• Four Value Positions:
  
  • Operational Excellence: Emphasizes efficiency, streamlined operations, and cost leadership.
  • Product Leadership: Prioritizes product innovation and is a market leader in product development.
  • Customer Intimacy: Focuses on bonding intimately with customers and understanding their needs.
  • Network Orchestration: Building and enhancing value through interactive stakeholder networks.
• Interplay of Strategies and Disciplines:
  
  • The Business Model Matrix suggests that any of these four value disciplines can be effectively integrated into the four business strategies. This interplay offers diverse strategic combinations, allowing businesses to tailor their approach to their strengths, market position, and objectives.
• Strategic Alignment for the Profit-Vector:
  
  • By aligning these value disciplines with the chosen business strategy, organizations can effectively navigate the Profit-vector. This alignment is critical to creating, delivering, and capturing value to maximize profitability and competitive advantage.

By considering these aspects, businesses can develop a comprehensive approach that balances innovation, customer needs, resource utilization, and platform dynamics to create profitable and sustainable business models. This alignment is crucial for navigating today’s complex business environments and achieving long-term success.

Responsible Growth

Growth is more than just numbers; it’s about excellence, resilience, planetary boundaries, adaptability, and the foresight to meet future demands. This is where the Business Vitality Matrix comes into play. It challenges us to be ready for change, resilient in the face of adversity, and continuously evolve to fulfill today’s needs and tomorrow’s aspirations. This matrix is the blueprint of our readiness to adapt, survive, and flourish – no matter what the future holds.

It’s crucial to understand that growth is not just about expansion; it’s about making deliberate, strategic choices based on the current maturity and market dynamics of your business:

• Strategic Expansion: This choice is about scaling up. But it’s not just about growing bigger; it’s about growing smarter. It involves enhancing your operational excellence and product-market fit or tapping into new markets and opportunities.
• Strategic Recalibration: Sometimes, the key to growth is realignment. This involves revisiting and adjusting your business model to meet evolving market demands and customer needs. It’s about staying relevant and resilient in a changing landscape.
• Strategic Agility: In a fast-paced world, being agile is crucial. This choice focuses on your business’s ability to adapt to market changes and innovate quickly. It’s about being flexible and responsive, ready to pivot when necessary.
• Strategic Optimization: When growth seems to plateau, it’s time to optimize. This involves refining and improving your current operations and offerings, focusing on quality over quantity. It’s about doing better things, not just doing things better.

Aligning Strengths: The Path to Collective Success

The journey to success is a confluence of aligning our strengths across both matrices. By mastering our business model for profitability and nurturing our ability to grow and adapt, we set ourselves on a path that’s not just about surviving but thriving. In this alignment, business vitality keeps us on track, focused, and perpetually moving forward. 

Incorporating Positive Inquiry further enhances this path, enabling us to uncover and leverage our collective strengths, imagine new growth opportunities, and co-create a profitable but also vibrant and sustainable future.

Embrace the Journey

As we chart our course through these positive, equitable, and sustainable twin vectors of business, let’s commit to aligning our strengths, refining our models, and seizing growth opportunities. This path isn’t just about survival. It is about crafting a legacy of innovation, resilience, and collective success. Let’s uncover and harness our full potential, envisioning new horizons of prosperity and impact. Join us on this transformative journey to redefine success and thrive together in a rapidly evolving business landscape.

We are drowning in information while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

Edward O. Wilson

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Intrapreneur: 14 Surprising Skills Needed For Success

 

Have you ever thought of yourself as an intrapreneur? Most people haven’t, but it could be just the right way to go if you already have the right mindset.

• Do you see always look for how things can be done better/faster?
• Are you could at getting things done, making change happen?
• Do you love learning new things while at work?
• Are you always looking for new challenges at work?

If you answered “yes” to these then you are probably the sort of person who could nurture and grow their intrapreneurial skills.

Most organizations don’t need any more ideas, they already have too many and simply don’t have the time to invest in all of them.

What most organizations need is people that pinpoint ideas that are worth investment and then make them happen.

But before we go too far, let’s pause and just consider why companies need intrapreneurs.

Why Intrapreneurship is so important?

Over the years, competition has become more fierce. Every market now is up for grabs and often competitors are disruptive startups. Take Uber which started off as a ride-sharing company but has now moved into logistics. As a result, many organizations have to adapt to environmental changes.

Change now is faster than ever. The global economy is being transformed by digital business models that are rapidly evolving as new technologies change markets e.g. unbundling value chains.

Research shows that organizations that embrace intrapreneurship are more competitive. Because of this entrepreneurial employees have been sought after by many leading global corporates.

What Is An Intrapreneur?

An intrapreneur is a person within an organization that generates ideas, secures resources, and backing from key stakeholders to create new products, services, or new ventures.

What is an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs bring new ideas to a market. An entrepreneur is an individual who has an idea, creates a product or service, launches it, and then manages the business and works to grow it. 

An intrapreneur is employed by an organization and has the support of stakeholders to create new products, services, or business units.

They have to work within the boundaries, rules, and interests of the organization. This means that some ideas might not fit with the overall strategy and direction of the organization.

Four Definitions of an Intrapreneur

1. Dictionary Definition

An employee of a large corporation who is given freedom and financial support to create new products, services, systems, etc., and does not have to follow the corporation’s usual routines or protocols.

Dictionary

2. Pinchot’s’ Definition

Intrapreneurs are the yeast that makes the bread rise. If you want more innovation the only way to get it done is to identify, develop, trust and empower your intrapreneurs. An organization must know how to select, manage and create the environment for intrapreneurs for them to thrive.

Gifford Pinchot

3. Dictionary Definition

Intrapreneurship is about bottom-up, proactive work-related initiatives of individual employees. More specifically, intrapreneurship at the individual level involves networking behavior, out of the box thinking, initiative, taking charge, championing, and some degree of risk-taking. Therefore, intrapreneurs are the driving forces behind product development or improvement and/or market penetration.

Source: The Influence of Transformational Leadership and Organization Identification on Intrapreneurship

4. Academic Definition

An intrapreneur is an employee who recognizes opportunities and develops innovations from within an existing hierarchy.

Source: The intrapreneur and innovation in creative firms

Intrapreneur vs Entrepreneur

Intrapreneurs vs Entrepreneurs

The primary difference between an entrepreneur and an intrapreneur is that an intrapreneur doesn’t have the level of risk that an entrepreneur has. In fact, research has shown repeatedly that risk aversion is the primary difference between Intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs. 1

Being innovative and entrepreneurial within an organization though isn’t always easy. Most organizations are risk-averse and prefer to improve things rather than change them completely.

Being able to pitch your ideas, gain traction with senior managers and backing from others requires you to be tenacious, persuasive, and generally good at networking.

That’s why being an intrapreneur before you take the leap to run your business can be the ideal way to chart your future. You can gain lots of vital skills and experience which are all relevant when you finally step out on your own.

Additionally, you will have credibility with potential backers, banks, and potential co-founders.

Intrapreneurship From the Top Down

Intrapreneurship doesn’t thrive in every business. You have to nurture the right culture, leadership skills and behaviors.

Intrapreneurship needs to be led from the top and recognition given to the fact that is driven by individuals who want to be intrapreneurial. Leaders can’t simply nominate an individual to be entrepreneurial, it has to align with their beliefs, values, and behaviors.

If you want to create a thriving intrapreneurial culture and team you need to have the following in place:

Empowerment

Empowerment [Mfn]Menzel HC, Aaltio I, Ulijn JM (2007) On The Way To Creativity: Engineers As Intrapreneurs In Organizations.[/Mfn] have the mechanisms that allow people to be accountable but have the freedom to make decisions. Innovation requires teams to explore ideas, develop prototypes (that might not work), and take risks

Authentic leadership

Authentic Leadership works on the principle that a leader can prove their legitimacy by nurturing sincere relationships with their subordinates and giving importance to their input. Authentic leaders don’t waste precious time unnecessarily worrying over temporary setbacks, or less than stellar results in the previous quarter. Their focus is always long-term.  Authentic leaders are honest, trustworthy, and lead through brokering resources and knowledge with other leaders across the organization.

Organizational support

Support 2goes beyond encouragement and manifests itself in practical ways. Organizations that provide access to resources prevent initiatives from stalling. It’s vital that leadership understands that teams test, learn and adapt through failure.

Management support

Innovation at any stage is about solving problems and overcoming challenges. Management support 3comes in many forms but coaching and mentoring are critical in helping an intrapreneurial team optimize their performance. Working in an intrapreneurial team is fast-paced and necessitates responsive coaching and mentoring programs.

Resources

Not enough resources and the new venture will not succeed 4. A surprising result is though that too many resources can stifle creativity and the ingenuity of the intrapreneurial team.

Middle management

In organizations, intrapreneurs need backing and buy-in from many different areas. Supportive middle management reduces barriers and resistance from other managers who might see a new venture or initiative as a threat to their work in the future 5.

The Top characteristics of Successful intrapreneurs

There has been lots of research into intrapreneurship that’s uncovered some interesting traits. If you want to thrive as an intrapreneur you can actively learn to foster these skills and behaviors.

1: Creativity

Being creative and generating ideas can be fun. First of all, commercial creativity requires boundaries, it means creativity has a goal, direction, and desired outcome. Secondly, organizations need people who can apply creativity. In other words, creative thinking that helps to resolve problems.

Outstanding intrapreneurs are creative and understand how to rapidly sift through ideas and identify those with high commercial potential.

2: Curious

Why? Who? How? There are lots of questions that need answering as you go from idea to implementation. Being curious about how things work, the customer, the market and just generally having a thirst for learning are essential ingredients for success.

3: Tenacious

Roadblocks and setbacks are frequent during the early stages of a startup. That’s why tenacity is needed. Tenacious people remain focused, work through problems, and persevere through any setbacks. New ventures require teams to be tough and adaptive.

4: Proactive

Like entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship in a corporate setting demands people to make things happen, drive the plan, and actively seek support or resources ahead of time. Thinking ahead avoids bottlenecks and problems.

5: Healthy

Although people are often romantically attracted to the idea of being involved in a startup, the reality is that it is not for the faint-hearted. Long hours, sprints, stress, and overcoming failure are part of the day job.

Stressed out people are unproductive and are at risk of developing mental health issues. Being physically and mentally fit and having a well-balanced health regime provides an outlet for any stress points.

6: Influencing Skills

Corporates are designed to exploit opportunities by being excellent at executing and improving. Improving processes, systems, and products are knows as incremental innovation. New ventures, products, and services though require a different approach and mindset.

Innovators need to explore opportunities and then influence and gain buy-in from a range of stakeholders. Being able to influence not only people internally but also potential partners (often new to the organization) are crucial particularly during the early stages.

7: Brokering

Research 6 hs shown that employees with brokering competencies are able to combine knowledge with organizational knowledge, social capital and networking skills.

As a result, they are able to create momentum for new ventures by enlisting support and resources across the organization.

8: Self-belief

Those with new ideas and ways of working will come across their fair share of naysayers and pessimists. Intrapreneurial people believe in their own vision and capabilities to achieve their goals.

9: Altruistic

Research shows that the best entrepreneurial teams have people with emotional intelligence and that are altruistic in nature. Each person balances their own goals and motivations with those of others. This caring and sharing approach achieves higher levels of trust and reduces conflict.

10: Socratic

Socratic thinking calls for a lack of arrogance about what people know and to shift to what they don’t know. If someone has too many filters and believes about how things work they will not be open to the new or novel.

Recognizing that they will not have all the answers is part of the process of dealing with an evolving set of problems and opportunities.

11: Resilient

Resilience is about being tough. Resilience is the ability to keep going after another failure, refusal, or setback. Resilience maintains momentum, even when you can’t the finish line. isn’t yet in sight.

12: Networked

Corporate innovators have to network inside and outside the organization. In turn, helps this builds a network of partners and collaborators. It’s not just about money and resources though. Having a broad network offers access to valuable knowledge that can unlock a problem or link to someone who can help.

13: Ambiguity

The nature of more disruptive or radical innovation is that there is no right single answer or exact map. Much of the entrepreneurial process involves testing, iterative cycling through prototypes etc. The road is uncharted and there is no plan that survives the first few encounters with customers (Steve Blank). People that like routines, regularity will find dealing with an uncertain and ambiguous will find it uncomfortable working in this type of environment.

14: Productive

A common trait between successful intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs is that they don’t waste time. A sense of urgency is needed and of course, productivity to achieve the results. Productive people use the right tools, avoid distractions, and continually assess and prioritize what’s important.

How to identify intrapreneurs within your organization

Intrapreneurs are not necessarily idea-generators but have the capacity to turn ideas into significant results to stimulate innovation and foster growth in organizations. 

Besides the characteristics above there are other ways to identify potential intrapreneurs. You can start within your organization by identifying these four qualities:

1. Project work – employees that initiate new projects are often seeking new challenges and demonstrate many of the skills necessary for being an intrapreneur. Look for people who have a pedigree in starting and delivering projects. Project management itself isn’t the primary driver here, it is the enthusiasm, passion and drive to start something and see it through to completion.
2. Lifelong Learners – in my work I find budding intrapreneurs also have a lust for learning and taking on board new ideas, skills and want to broaden their horizons. Look for people that are pushing themselves further though either internal training or external courses.
3. Curious Questioners – do you come across people that ask good questions – sharp focused and interesting questions about the organization, customers, or how something works. Formulating good questions is an art but also demonstrates a high level of curiosity and analysis.
4. Working Style – often you will find people that adjust the tools they use and god against what every else does. They look to set up a workflow and process that is tailored to them. Similarly, these same people might actually propose to change things, offer up new ways of working, and challenge the status quo.

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