by Margaret Heffernan - Friday, 7th September 2007 -

“We can’t hire him – he’s too corporate.” I remember this being said in my company after we interviewed Will, a Harvard MBA whose experience had been exclusively in large corporations.

Will had come from a big company with a big salary and big title. In applying for the job he’d signalled that he was willing to forego some of the salary. But his questions pointed to real unease: how did we know that we would be successful?

How long would our success take? And what guarantees could we give? As a start-up business, we could make him few promises.

No one thought he could fit into a firm where change was constant and structure something we only dreamed about. Worse, everyone feared that Will would care too much about rules and procedures. He would want structure when we needed flexibility.

Corporate executives are routinely portrayed as the opposite of entrepreneurs. Execs want to play safe, with plenty of perks, cash and status; entrepreneurs want to break rules, eat pizza and take big risks in pursuit of big rewards. The two are so spectacularly polarised that it’s often believed that never the twain shall meet.

But I hired Will – he was smart, thorough and rigorous. We needed that.
When we had to reposition the business, it was his questions that made the new positioning stronger and more coherent.

He didn’t, as it turned out, mind travelling economy, but the prospect of discomfort meant that he asked more searching questions about how essential each trip was. Will also had a highly ordered mental model of how a business should work.

While many colleagues teased him about his lack of spontaneity, we all respected his strategic focus.

This cross-fertilisation works for individual careers as well as companies. A few months ago I visited a mind-blowingly good chocolate company called Chococo. I’m not a chocolate fiend – but after tasting Claire Burnett’s chocolates I could be.

In under four years Chococo has won 15 international fine food awards.  Where did she get her training for this? From Shell, Disney and Procter & Gamble – among the world’s least entrepreneurial companies.

They didn’t teach her anything about chocolate, of course. They taught her about market positioning, about doing things in the right order, about profit and loss and, as it turned out, loads about how – and how not –to interact with the public.

Claire did something that everyone could learn from: she got big firms to complete her business education and pay her at the same time.

She doesn’t have an MBA – she doesn’t need one. Working in some of the world’s largest and most visible corporations, she learned hundreds of commercial lessons, ranging from how to assess a highly competitive marketplace to how to tell the difference between fads and meaningful trends.

I don’t think the polarisation between corporates and entrepreneurs has any validity these days – if it ever did. Entrepreneurs bring a tremendous amount to organisations that can become set in their ways.

Gerry Robinson’s entrepreneurial zeal is a constant challenge: why not try something new? Why wait until you have all the information? Do it now!

Any new business soon learns that one of the most critical growth factors is the professional capacity of its people. Don’t be hidebound: go out and hire someone not at all like you – today.