The fate of Bill Ruh shows how organizational politics and inertia can undermine ventures like GE Digital. Whatever the merits of Predix as an innovation, it was these challenges that contributed to the demise of Ruh's venture. There is nothing unusual about what happened at GE. Corporate Explorers should expect to face many of the same pressures and have a plan to manage them. New corporate ventures are dependent on the core business for investment and need access to its assets to succeed. Managing these dependencies is, a prerequisite for success. Corporate Explorers are both innovators and leaders of change. The success of one is dependent on the other; that is why we call it a double helix. The role of change leader and innovation leader are as tightly intertwined as the double helix molecules of our DNA. Focus on innovation, without managing change, then the new venture will be at risk. Corporate Explorers need a plan for how to explore the business opportunity and another for managing the relationship with the core business. This chapter focuses on the plan for being a change leader, the next three are dedicated to innovation, though throughout we will highlight how Corporate Explorers are managing both roles simultaneously.

There are three main dependencies a Corporate Explorer needs to manage. The corporation is an investor. They get to define expectations, release funding, and evaluate progress. Unlike an entrepreneur's relationship with a venture capitalist, CEOs and CFOs that fund new ventures may know relatively little about how to evaluate the performance of a business operating in high uncertainty. This makes the Corporate Explorer a teacher, showing senior executives how to engage with data and insights from experiments and manage to progress milestones. They need a clear narrative that communicates the opportunity the new venture sees and why they are well positioned to convert it. They should be storytellers able to develop a memorable narrative that communicates the purpose behind the new venture. This compelling story engages key stakeholders, is easy to remember, and broad-based enough that it can flex with the pivots that any new venture must make over time. It provides the consistent thread that senior executives can follow between periodic review meetings. Corporate Explorers must also be a reputation manager, ensuring that the informal story about the venture is positive. It is easy for a rumor or pseudo-fact to undermine confidence in what the business is doing. Key to this is a Corporate Explorer who is a role model for evidence-based decision-making.

A second dependency is that the Corporate Explorer wants access to the Core business assets (customers, technology, etc.) that it needs to scale. Developing an internal ecosystem around the new venture can significantly improve the Corporate Explorer's ability to do this successfully. They need to enroll sponsors, allies, advocates, and ambassadors to enable access to the business, neutralize opposition, and broaden understanding of the venture. It helps if Corporate Explorers are insiders with a deep well of social capital from which to draw inside the organization. External hires can succeed if they have leaders on their team with organizational insight and personal connections.

The third dependency runs the other way. The corporation is dependent on the Corporate Explorer to be a pathfinder for how it will transform over time. The case for investing in corporate ventures is only partially based on financial returns. They are also a way to learn about market and technological disruption, test new business models and develop emerging capabilities. New ventures represent a potential future organization. They are about establishing new working practices that may violate the assumptions of old business models as much as they are about testing a commercial proposition. Corporate Explorers need to be aware of the taboos they are breaking and managing any allergic reactions proactively. We will start with this last dependency, as it sets a context for the others.

Future Organization

One of the most striking things about startups versus established corporates is the organizational culture. Several years ago, we arranged a visit for a New York corporate client to several successful Silicon Valley startups. At Box.com, Dan Levin, the company's COO greeted our client CEO by sliding down a huge slide into the reception area. This one amusing moment encapsulated the difference between the slow, deliberative corporate culture and the emergent startup one. Corporate Explorers have the job of bringing this vibrancy into the organization, pushing outside the established ways of working, and opening new possibilities for the whole company often when not wanted or appreciated. Cherrisk is not just a consumer insurance offering, it is also building a low-cost infrastructure for customer support and claims handling. IBM Life Sciences was a pioneer for the company's strategy of industry specific value propositions. It challenged who IBM hired, how they behaved, even how they dressed. Crossing the building in IBM Somers from the Computer Server division to the Life Sciences group was like stepping into another world. Bondili challenged Deloitte's model for professional services; indeed, Pixel challenged what is means to deliver professional services. It started as an additive to traditional consulting and became revolutionary.

There are also consequences for not adopting the model of the Future Organization. GE Digital tried to teach the company to value data as much as engineering in developing solutions for their manufacturing customers. Now, having been slow to learn that lesson, GE is behind firms that have been able to adapt. They learned that if you change the strategy and do not change how you execute then everything becomes slower and more difficult – and you are likely to end up with the strategy you started with and were trying to change. You cannot put the Corporate Explorer in the next office and then expect to execute the way you always have. A new venture will always require new capabilities, new processes, and new behaviors. It is an incubator for a way of working that may, in time, become highly relevant to the future of the core business.

In the past 10 years, many new ventures have helped teach corporations how to adopt the practices of digital product management. As data on customer behavior has become ubiquitous, so companies have had to learn how to make decisions using these insights. Several years ago, we worked with a textbook publisher that wanted to create a new online “adaptive-learning” product that would offer content based on the needs of the individual student. This involved adopting the trinity of digital product management: use case, experiment, and data. The use case is the customer's problem as they define it, using their words. The experiment is a disciplined effort to evaluate alternative solutions to satisfying the use case. These data are empirical evidence from the behavior of customers when they engage with the product online. If the data show that a product is getting sufficient user engagement as anticipated, then this is evidence that the experiment is satisfying the use case.

For the publisher, this approach was a radical change in the traditional workflow of market research, product development, and launch. Now, product features were tested real-time with cohorts of customers (e.g., A/B testing) to determine if they had the desired impact on behavior, and so the offering developed iteratively. This shift in practices began in the new adaptive-learning product group, but soon spread beyond, teaching the core business how to work with data to learn about customer preferences. The company learned to adopt the language and operating principles of the digital era, so helping it to integrate new ventures, like the adaptive learning product, but also digitally native talent and startup acquisitions. The new venture taught the core business about the organization of the future.

These digital work practices reset how people should behave as well, making this a cultural shift. Making decisions based on the use case–experiment-data trinity, means valuing evidence, rather than gut instinct or the loudest voice in the room. It makes product management a more objective discipline. That may seem obviously desirable, but for organizations used to making decisions through strong hierarchies or committees of experts, it was a challenge to the way things were done around there. The Corporate Explorer at the publisher company had to learn to hold the line on making data-driven decisions even when the team wanted to move ahead without evidence. He was resetting the culture by role-modeling a new set of behaviors. He learned he had to be somewhat rigid about this rule to change the legacy mindset that his team had brought with them from the book publishing business. It is important to be very explicit about these shifts within the new venture: there are new working practices (e.g., the digital trinity), standards of behavior are new (decisions based on data, not hierarchy), new capabilities are required (data analytics), and leadership (holding the line on using evidence).

At IBM, the Emerging Business Opportunity program started with an educational program about how to run a new corporate venture. We have replicated this approach elsewhere and we find it helps Corporate Explorers reset on working practices, culture, and leadership. It is also a great moment for building alignment within the internal ecosystem by including people from the core business in the education. It also becomes a showcase for the new venture's story – the compelling narrative that provides the rationale for its existence.

Storytellers

In the early 2000s, as IBM executed its strategy to differentiate its ThinkPad product from competitors in the rapidly commoditizing personal computer market, a single story started to make the rounds inside the company. It told of the day that a customer had challenged an IBM salesperson to prove that their ThinkPads were as robust as they claimed. IBM had designed their latest generation products with an airbag that inflated when the internal sensor detected that the laptop had been dropped. This protected the hard disc drive from damage and, along with other features, helped to prevent accidental damage. The salesperson proposed a test in which the ThinkPad and several competitor machines would all be dropped from four feet onto the concrete of the company parking lot. The amused customer agreed and was astonished to find that at the end of the test, only the IBM machine would turn on. The others were irreparably broken and the case that buying a robust IBM would have a much better lifetime return on investment than a Dell or HP was proven. The story of this episode spread rapidly throughout IBM, helping to communicate the strategy and provide confidence to the team that it could work.

A well told story like this can communicate information, evidence, and values at the same time, in a way that PowerPoint charts cannot. It creates the context for why a product is valuable to the customer – an IBM laptop is more expensive, but it lasts longer than cheaper alternatives, so the need for fewer repairs makes it less expensive in the long run. This way of communicating is especially valuable to the Corporate Explorer who needs to give substance to a vision that may seem abstract or insubstantial. One Corporate Explorer, for instance, was developing an innovative medical device to treat diabetes using an approach beyond the company's core business. He converted the first successful trial of the device into a carefully designed story about the struggle of a man living with diabetes whose life had been transformed. The story gave specific information about the clinical trial outcomes, but it also provided a human story that people inside the organization could relate to and would retell to others with pride. Telling people how they are saving human lives is a great was to rally them to the cause.

A good story has a few key elements that are easy enough to assemble. There is a structure, message, subtext, protagonist, and compelling image or memorable analogy. A simple structure works well (though, there are sophisticated story structures like fables for communicating complex ideas):¹

• Customer problem – a real-life experience that vividly explains the need the innovation is meeting, such as Sara Carvalho wanting a hot shower after a long hike in Peru and realizing that none was available or the diabetes patient trying to live a normal life.
• Customer context – something about why this is such a difficult problem, such as the lack of a stable electricity supply to heat the water or the challenges of living with diabetes, as well as the emotional responses of the target users.
• Innovation solution – how the solution resolves these pain points and creates an emotional or business impact for customers.

Constructing a story with a subtext helps to neutralize objections, without having to be too explicit. For example, the Corporate Explorer telling the diabetes story was within a company that already had extensive products used in healthcare. The subtext for the story was that the new venture was opening a green field market, and that there was no point of competition with the core business. The Corporate Explorer emphasized the lack of overlap to help dampen any concerns about overlaps, while also inspiring colleagues with what might become possible. A story with vivid imagery enables stakeholders to visualize the impact of the innovation. It engages our capacity for visual learning, imprinting the key message in our minds.

Krisztian Kurtisz's pitch story for Cherrisk set up the traditional insurance industry as the story's protagonist. He highlighted how a very high percentage of insurance company revenues went to sustain a bureaucracy from which customers derived no benefit. He used an image with a traditional office building side by side with the team of two that he proposed for Cherrisk. The illustration of the large office building dwarfed the size of the one needed to support Cherrisk. The similarity between the office building and the UNIQA Tower on the Danube canal in Vienna was not lost to his audience. His subtext was clear. The Cherrisk-like business model could do more with a lot less. Kevin Carlin at Analog Devices went one step further with visualizing the venture narrative. He created a short video of a customer trialing his venture's condition-based monitoring solution in a metal press machine on a car production line. The technology can detect the sound of the click of two panels as they join and tell the difference between a good click and one that will cause a fault, so jamming up the production line.²

The story needs to be specific enough to engage the audience and broad enough to allow the venture to pivot without needing to sell a new story to stakeholders. One of our clients created a cyber security venture focused on small businesses. The ambition was to provide an integrated service including consulting, software, and training. However, they told a story about how cyber security training could help educate a market confused by the topic of online vulnerabilities. When the training product failed, they lost their funding, unable to fall back on a story that enabled them to pivot to a new possibility in the same market. One view of entrepreneurial storytelling is, “the more specific a narrative is, the more likely it is to turn out to be wrong.”³ Instead of boxing themselves in with a specific set of commitments, an entrepreneur or Corporate Explorer should develop a broad narrative that connects people to the value proposition, without communicating product features and functionality.

Reed Hastings at Netflix started with DVDs by mail, even though the goal from the start was online streaming to the home, as is implied by the name.⁴ The name neatly encapsulated both offerings with a concept of easy consumer access to entertainment content, so it was easier to manage the pivot to online when it came.⁵ When they start, Corporate Explorers have a vision, not a finished business proposal. If Kurtisz describes precisely who Cherrisk will serve, with what offering, and at what price from day one in his story, then that leaves no room for learning. He needs to be able to flex his story to accommodate what the team learns about what customers want.

The great value in using stories is that they have the potential to go viral by having people retell the story inside the organization. This communicates the purpose of the new venture without the Corporate Explorer needing to act. This approach uses the informal organization or social network within a company to carry the message. A social network is simply a way to describe the relationships between people within the organization – who talks to whom, about what, who starts rumors, who has most influence, and who has the ear of those with formal decision-making authority. Who knows if the IBM ThinkPad story is even true? If it is retold many thousands of times, then the message is received by those that need to know it. That is the value of a good story.

Social Network Leader

Corporate Explorers know the stakeholders and have a compelling story. They need to activate these assets to build supporters in the social network or internal ecosystem of the company. They need a broad coalition of allies, advocates, ambassadors, and angels to help drive the venture forward from both within and outside the organization (see Table 11.1).

An ally is someone whose support a Corporate Explorer needs. The most important allies are core business unit leaders, though they may also be keen technical or sales leaders who are gatekeepers for key parts of the business. The largest P&L owners in a corporation wield significant power and influence. They are often perceived as the villains in the innovation story, preferring to focus on driving profit than investing for the future. If the new venture encroaches on market territory that core business unit leaders see as their own, then this creates obvious tensions. This can cause them to be competitive, skeptical, or even opposed to the new venture's existence. It is easy to interpret business unit leaders as irrational or emotional, defending turf or silos. Corporate Explorers need to start from the premise that such opposition is rational. Only then, can they design an approach to enlist their leaders as allies. A core business manager may agree with the case for a new venture; they understand the need to deliver both a healthy profit stream and create options for future growth. They also have the goal of generating revenue and profit to the corporation. A new venture may assist them with this, but often the payoff is too far in the future or too small to matter. Managers that oppose the new ventures are, from their vantage point, making a rational choice to optimize business performance. It is difficult to hold both ideas simultaneously. Thus, engaging them proactively with the new venture story and repeatedly reengaging to provide updates, no matter how uncomfortable such meetings might be, is key to success.

One strategy for this is to co-opt senior leaders into the new venture. Audi Business Innovation (ABI) in Munich Germany is the luxury-car maker’s explore business unit. ABI's Corporate Explorer, Bettina Bernhardt, created Audi's innovative mobility offerings like Silvercar in the United States and BITS in Southern Germany. These ventures created options for Audi to respond to the emergence of ride share services like Uber. Audi made ABI a separate entity so that it had freedom to operate outside the company's highly restrictive legal and employment rules. The unit's separate location, working practices, and identity, helped ABI move faster. Bernhardt has Audi's senior management sit on boards for each of the unit's new ventures. They are intimately connected to the development of the new business entities and develop a sense of ownership for them. This enabled Bernhardt to co-opt her senior Audi colleagues into the new venture.⁶

Advocates are at the next layer of the organization. They are the friends across the organization who can help make things happen when you need them. Carol Kovac formalized this relationship into an extended team for IBM Life Sciences. These were friends of the business. Some had an agreement from their own line manager to support the new venture, and others were working off the clock to help it succeed. Kovac used them to organize the detailed architecture behind her team's use of IBM's core business assets. They were able to help plan the use of resources, get the best people working on projects for the Life Sciences unit, and manage any problems that arose. This work helped Kovac minimize friction with the core business and ensure that when she had a request from a senior leader, she had done her advance work to plan its execution with the team.

Ambassadors are friends of the new venture who you recruit to help make your case to those core business leaders you have not been able to recruit as allies. Kovac had a long history with IBM. She was able to arrange informal meetings with colleagues in units where she knew an issue might emerge that would derail progress. She was able to brief them on what was happening and encourage them to speak up in meetings to fill in some of the background. Corporate Explorers need ambassadors to erode rumors that foster ill will. A few well-selected facts can support the logic behind a new venture's actions, the method behind what might seem like madness to a stable, operating business.

An angel or sponsor has the organizational authority to secure funding for the new venture. Corporate Explorers get started in two ways. Some – like Carol Kovac at IBM or Balaji Bondili at Deloitte – are enrolled by a corporate innovation or growth initiative; others – like Krisztian Kurtisz – develop an idea and seek organizational support. These are different starting points. Kovac and Bondili had an open invitation to propose a new business. Whereas recruiting an angel from scratch can be a long process. You need help from allies in senior leadership to help prepare the ground. Krisztian Kurtisz got his opportunity to pitch to the UNIQA management board only after first securing support from his network of allies. In either case, sponsorship is not a given. Corporate Explorers need to recruit the right sponsors as angels and make sure that they know what is expected of them. A sponsor you are given may not have the ability to make the multimillion-dollar commitments that you need, nor help to sustain this over several budget cycles. That is why we call them angels. This needs to be someone you cultivate and can rely on.

The key is forging a connection to the strategic ambition of the leader – what do they most want to get done that they cannot do today? To enroll a more senior leader, this link needs to be vivid in the venture's narrative, so that it is perceived as fulfilling the sponsor's aspirations. We talked about innovation or growth investment boards in Chapter 8. These sorts of mechanisms make the job of recruiting sponsors easier – they have that formal responsibility. However, it can be a mistake to assume that being a sponsor is the same as providing sponsorship. A Corporate Explorer still needs to earn and sustain their active support.

The angel's role, as the name suggests, is more akin to being a venture capitalist, able to assess risk, provide guidance, and support decision-making. The orientation, especially at first, is toward encouraging learning, rather than demanding performance outcomes. When CEOs or other senior people launch a growth initiative, they may not understand how the sponsor differs from line management in the core business. Corporate Explorers need to be ready to teach sponsors what they need from them. They should define the roles and governance approach, and, try to create a regular cadence of engagement with senior leaders, so that there is an opportunity to build the story over time, rather than do review meetings many months apart. The medical-device Corporate Explorer, mentioned earlier, went one step further and recruited an advisory board of external market experts. This had the effect of giving them access to a savvy group of advisers able to guide his actions and provided role models to senior leaders for a different way of engaging. Some Corporate Explorers even build a cadre of angels, so that should one source of support and investment change strategy or jobs, there are others to fall back on.

Insider or Outsider

Many firms that want to pursue an ambidextrous strategy hire an executive from the outside to lead the charge on the new venture. It makes sense that if you are looking for a rule-breaker to disrupt the status quo that you might go outside the firm, perhaps even the industry, to find a Corporate Explorer. It is very common for firms to hire external executives into Corporate Explorer roles. They are looking for a leader with specific market access or business skills that they lack. They may also conclude that their own leaders lack the entrepreneurial spirit to launch a new venture. They want someone with a tolerance for high-risk and an ability to challenge the status quo. Unfortunately, they lack access to the firm's social network.

Several years ago, we interviewed 26 innovation managers and venture leaders from various firms. Most in this group of Corporate Explorers were hired from outside the company. The Explorers believed that this was because they understood the new markets that the company wanted to enter and had an entrepreneurial profile. A credit card company hired a marketing executive that had set up a restaurant chain as a private side venture. They had plentiful resources for developing new ideas, especially if large numbers of employees could get involved. However, the more concrete the new business proposals became, the more hostile of a reaction they provoked. In the end, leaders of existing business units obstructed the Explorers’ progress by either denying them access to resources or openly developing competitive offerings. Two-thirds of these Corporate Explorers left their jobs within three years.⁷

The credit card executive told us how, at first, she attracted a lot of attention; everyone sounded collaborative, and nobody opposed what she was doing. Then, as she started to ask for help, everything changed. None of the previously friendly colleagues wanted to see resources going to the new, unproven business. She described this as “trekking through the Amazon with a butter knife.” Her team became a “rebel alliance,” making a virtue of being different but turning their backs on the relationships they needed. In the end, she failed, the unit closed, and she left the company. Some are even “set up” for this exit. On one occasion, we were helping a large German financial institution set up a new ventures group. We asked how they were doing at selecting a leader for the team. The HR manager told us, “We have decided to hire our innovation manager externally. That way, if it does not work, we have not lost anything.” Externally hired Corporate Explorers are expendable. You explore options for new businesses without truly committing to the change.

The lack of a social network within the company, means these external hires struggle to get things done. External hires start as superstars with insights about new markets or as experts with capabilities that the firm lacks. They can help make things happen. The problem is it is difficult to fight against the firm's inertia. When external hires want to do something new, they get caught in unexpected rules and bureaucracy. Want to connect products to a cloud service? Is it approved by the IT department? Want to sign a contract with an unconventional business partner? We do not have the right contract. Want to experiment with a new business model? What risks will it expose us to? These are all run-of-the-mill barriers facing new venture leaders that tend to be exacerbated when the new leader comes from outside the firm. External hires are at a disadvantage solving these sorts of problems. When a 20-year veteran of a company needs help, they can call in favors, leverage assets that outsiders do not know about, and manage skeptical stakeholders that might otherwise seek to shut the project down. They have a reputation and some level of trust in the organization. They get time to explain failures and what they have learned. Internals have friends that can help, external hires are alone. They also operate in a competitive internal environment.

Hiring the Corporate Explorer internally is not a guarantee of success, though it does improve the odds. It can also signal that the firm is serious. This is not a role for the promising talent of the future. It is a complex and high-stakes task that requires a firm's best leaders. Our research suggests that the best Corporate Explorers are veteran insiders. There is likely some self-selection at work here. Kurtisz chooses to build his business from within UNIQA because he is attached to the company. He is integral to the community and a leader among his peers. Corporate Explorers are “passionate explorers,” but they are also members of a social network. This helps them get things done inside the organization and tap into sources of motivation, a culture, and a community that outsiders may fail to understand. They share the history, folklore, and language of the corporation. If your mission is reinvention, this helps you to manage the antibodies that are ready to reject change.

Can leaders appointed from outside a corporation succeed as Corporate Explorers? Of course we are talking about the odds of success, not the certainty of failure. Victor Kong at the more than 80-year-old entertainment firm Grupo Cisneros was able to shift the company from a reliance on making Spanish-language telenovelas for US Hispanics to being an innovator in digital media advertising across the United States and Latin America.⁸ Another successful outsider is Colin, a California-based UK transplant who built a new $100 million revenue business at a Japanese technology firm. Colin joined the firm via acquisition of a smaller competitor. He then spent three years building his social network inside the corporation, first as the executive responsible for the integration of the two entities, then as a strategy executive in the North America business. Colin believed there were massive opportunities in a wide range of adjacencies for the company. He carefully built a case for launching an innovation capability in the United States to explore these options. Colin's approach was all about relationships and integrating himself into the senior leadership community in the company. His approach paid off when he needed support to grow the new business in an adjacent market. A colleague in Tokyo HQ with whom he had worked closely on the integration had been appointed CEO. Although a relative newcomer, he had the social capital he needed to take the business to the next level.

The externally hired Corporate Explorer can also balance their strengths and weaknesses by recruiting an insider to support them. This is a version of the dynamic duo that lead many successful startups, with an outside leader engaging with customers and investors, and an insider running the operations. Think of Steve Jobs and Tim Cook at Apple, Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google, Jerry Yang and David Filo at Yahoo!⁹ Balancing the senior team between insiders and outsiders can work, but the Corporate Explorer needs to do good due diligence to make sure they hire someone with strong social capital.

Reputation Manager

In our research for this book, we held roundtables with Corporate Explorers from different companies. We asked them what advice they would have for new Corporate Explorers. The overwhelming response was that they need to manage the reputation of the venture very carefully. They each found that selling the initial vision for the venture is relatively easy in comparison to the challenge of sustaining a positive view of what they were doing in the years that followed. No matter how much a CEO or CFO say that they understand a new venture needs time to validate its approach, the reality is harder for them to accept. The time to revenue is much longer than in the core business, and often highly unpredictable. CEOs and CFOs are used to evaluating the performance of a business with the laws of cause and effect: if I take action x (increase marketing, reduce prices), then the outcome will be y (revenue, profit impact). Performance data show a trend line that help them interpret whether a shortfall in one quarter represents a long-term problem or just a temporary blip. In contrast, a Corporate Explorer presents data about whether a hypothesis is confirmed or refuted, there are no trend lines, and cause and effect are much harder to discern because the market and solution are still emerging. For example, a technology firm that we work with has secured a series of customer pilots for a breakthrough analytics services business. This suggested to the CEO that they would convert this into contracts and revenue. The Corporate Explorer must explain that they are still learning what it will take to secure long-term adoption beyond a single technical proof of concept. They do not know if a pilot equals revenue or not.

Corporate Explorers need to teach CEOs and CFOs to believe in these different sorts of data. That makes it important that they are effective role models for evidence-based decision-making. They need to honestly describe what the venture's experiments have told them about the opportunity, what remains unknown, and what they need to test next. If they are perceived as “gaming” the data, then there is a risk that their credibility as an experimenter will be undermined. They have less room to maneuver than managers in the core business who are used to being able to put a “gloss” on their numbers, making things appear more positive than they might truly be. A Corporate Explorer is managing too many uncertainties, there is a much higher chance that they will be wrong, and the consequence of a loss of trust can be fatal to the venture. They need to manage the flow of even the smallest piece of bad news. Bad news delivered quickly is less open to misinterpretation by others. Better to deliver it with context that explains it.

It also helps to generate ministories to sustain the venture's reputation. This could be a milestone achievement, such as a customer win or pilot sign-up, that is, evidence that the venture has solved a customer problem. The more sponsors understand how value is created for customers and captured by the firm, the more comfortable they become with the process of learning. As described earlier, some Corporate Explorers set up external advisory boards so that the customer has a voice in the development of the venture. Engaging senior leaders with the advisory board can provide anecdotal evidence of the impact of the new venture and helps to reinforce a commitment to the vision.

The lifecycle of a new venture starts with a great insight (ideation) and, hopefully, culminates in a revenue-generating business (scaling). These are two moments of optimism and excitement. There is a magnet quality to bold new ideas; people flock around to be a part of them, almost as much as they do a successful, scaled business. Between these two extremes is a long path of hard work, completing the ideation, developing and validating a new business model in incubation, committing to an investment to scale, and then making it happen. A steady diet of ministories provide evidence of progress that helps to keep the long-term ambition of the new venture fresh in the minds of the organization's employees. It sustains support in the social network as the venture moves from ideation to incubation and on to scaling.

Chapter Summary

This chapter answered the question, How does a Corporate Explorer combine the task of developing an innovative business with managing the forces of resistance coming from the core business system?

New ventures teach companies about what the future organization may look like, what capabilities, business models, and ways of working it will need. Corporate Explorers need to keep that connection at the forefront of their communications with the venture's sponsors.

One way they do that is with a compelling narrative about the opportunity the venture is pursuing and the capabilities it is building. Corporate Explorers need to be storytellers, creating memorable anecdotes for people to share across the organization.

The stories help to fuel the internal ecosystem, a network of supporters engaged to help neutralize the silent killers and sustain support from the core business.

These networks are easier to build when you are a veteran company insider with strong social capital to draw on to get things done. Outsiders can succeed, but they need to pay extra attention to building the network.

A Corporate Explorer's reputation is particularly precious. The core business system is always ready to pin the “wild explorer” archetype on them. The key is to manage the flow of information, making sure that bad news is always received with context, not as a part of a damaging rumor.