http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/harvardbusiness?sid=H6bbfed647ef3af60ce7455b94ab53f24 The Danger of Part-Time Business Builders
By Scott Anthony
How many entrepreneurs do you think consider their venture to be a hobby? That is, their venture is one of a long list of things they are working on? Probably not too many — especially not many successful ones. Yet, that's how many companies treat their new growth businesses.
How so? Many companies ask people to be part-time business builders. Consider companies that form "innovation teams" where members are expected to work on several businesses concurrently. Or companies that ask people to fit business-building efforts into their "spare" time.
It's possible to be a valuable part-time contributor to a project. And it's possible to play a vital role in an innovation effort that closely adheres to a company's core business model.
But building a truly new business can't be a part-time endeavor. There are simply too many challenges that require constant attention. Remember, most start up businesses fail, and that's with diligent, minute-by-minute attention from the founding team.
At best, setting up growth initiatives in a fractionalized manner slows innovation substantially. At worst, this setup leads companies to veer in the wrong direction as part-time business builders implicitly slide back into known models that conform to the base business rather than explore the disruptive frontier.
Leaders sometimes think this is a rewards problem. They will note how an entrepreneur who owns a startup business will just work harder because they are positioned to capture all of the economic returns. I think that's partially true. But the reality is that there is a big difference between waking up in the morning thinking only about a new business and waking up in the morning thinking about a range of different things, regardless of the rewards.
It might seem hard to have scarce resources focus fully on a single opportunity. But the reality is, this single focus is by far the best approach to build a disruptive growth business. And it doesn't have to be a resource drain if you keep teams lean and focused (more on this in a future post when I talk about "Penrosian slack") and make reasonably quick decisions about shutting down, re-vectoring or accelerating businesses.
Building a new business is hard enough as it is. Don't make it harder by asking people to be part-time business builders.
