The Paradox of Corporate Entrepreneurship

Post-Enron principles for encouraging creativity without crossing the line.
http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/8276?pg=0
Author: Birkinshaw, Julian
Source: Strategy + Business
Year: 2003

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Abstract:

The collapse of the Enron Corporation has had enormous ramifications, not just for its shareholders, suppliers, and other creditors, but also for management theory. The company was widely celebrated for its ambitious, innovative, and seemingly successful management model — the balance of loose and tight management, the use of stretch goals, the system for attracting and retaining aggressive and creative people, and, in the center, the encouragement of internal entrepreneurship as the engine of growth and change. Now that Enron has collapsed, are we required to write off the idea that companies should encourage entrepreneurship, stretch goals, and risk taking, on the grounds that they will ultimately lead to disaster? Must we accept the logic of journalist Malcolm Gladwell, who, assaying Enron's demise, asked rhetorically in The New Yorker magazine, “What if Enron failed not in spite of its talent mind-set but because of it? What if smart people are overrated?”