Rick Wallace describes being assigned to focus on a single project within a large company and how that assignment became a turning point in his career. He explores the challenges and opportunities of building an entrepreneurial environment inside a bigger organization.
Chapters
We used to sell one per fab. And the idea was, how could you sell multiple? And everybody knew it was a good idea. And I was running a pretty good sized organization at the time. And my boss comes to me and says, I want you to focus on this inline option. And I said, well, I got a team doing that. I think it's great. He goes, no, you don't understand. I think you should focus on it. I said, right, it's part of our responsibility. Mine. No, no, you should quit doing everything else you're doing and only do this. And it didn't feel like a choice at the time. That was my deal and I was frightened. I'd been at the company, my career was going well, but my view was now I had a chance to kind of blow it. If in fact this didn't work, I would have failed. Nobody likes to fail. On the other hand, I had to work on it. There was nothing left to do. I had no other constraints. And they threw one other one at me. They said, don't worry about the budget. So you take away the two constraints, people typically have time and money and you don't have any excuses left. And for me, and we've done this again and again inside the company is how do you get people to focus? How do you create an entrepreneurial environment inside of a big company? One of the things you do is you take people that are high potential, high performance and say, this is all you're going to do and we're going to incentivize you. I mean, you're going to get, you'll win if this wins, but that's your job and we're going to take away your excuses. It worked for me. We were successful and drove this. And if I look back on my career and how I've been fortunate in my career, it was, that was the tipping point for me, was being assigned to that job, which at the time felt phenomenally risky. But my point is, even inside of big companies there are these opportunities and what you really want. And to work without a net to burn the ships. Pick your analogy, pick your metaphor. But I think for me it was the opportunity. Just this is what you've got to do, is you've got to drive revenue.
