#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Can we please agree that there is no such thing as a corporate entrepreneur?

The term corporate entrepreneur devalues what real entrepreneurs do, and it creates a haze of hokum around people trying to innovate in large companies that sets them up to fail.

There is an ocean of difference between people innovating or designing new offerings inside a large company, and actual entrepreneurs. On one shore of the ocean is certainty — the steady paycheck, the options vesting, status, the cushiness of a corporate campus — and on the other is the possibility of incredible wealth. Fly-your-own-plane-to-your-own-private-island-level wealth. And in between the two shores are a million ways to fail, to sink without a trace.

I have now interviewed hundreds of actual entrepreneurs — including founders of Amazon, Apple, Biogen, Boston Scientific, iRobot, Netflix, PayPal, and YouTube — as well as new venture and innovation leaders in large companies like Disney, Target, Toyota, and Coca-Cola.

Five things differentiate the former from the latter:

Via David Hain

In 2012 a curious person on the web—likely an enthusiastic entrepreneur—asked a simple question on Quora: Does a startup need an HR person? This was in the infancy of the current boom—or bust—we’re now in; Now-defunct shopping website Fab had just raised $117 million; Pinterest landed $100 million, Box raised $125 million, and Square got $200 million.

 

Startups at the time were figuring out how to ride this wave, so it’s unsurprising that the first and most popular answer provided was this: "No, you don’t need an HR person."

 

Things have changed since then. For one, many believe the startup boom may be coming to an end, what with the rate of venture funding—along with many valuations—ramping downward. Startups are also being forced to grapple with their internal cultural problems; big companies like Twitter, Google, and Apple are being asked to divulge their internal demographics thanks to widespread calls for a more open and transparent work culture. But even with an insular industry seeing slightly more public dialog about its intrinsic biases and inequalities, startups still have difficulty figuring out how to maintain and cultivate their workforce. And this aversion to HR may explain some part of that.

Via The Learning Factor

The core of every successful effort involves vision, problem-solving, planning and execution. This is the Leadership Fractal. Those that get ahead do it over and over again, getting better each time.