The Maverick Manager

Why Indias social intrapreneurs might hold the key to unlocking new socio-economic value in global business.

- Gib Bulloch

Here is a question for the bosses of any large Indian company. Would you hire Tesla’s Elon Musk or Virgin’s Founder, Richard Branson, if their résumés happened to find their way onto your desk? Or, perhaps, closer to home, imagine your response to names like Ajaita Shah, Harish Hande, or Akansha Hazari. Interested? On the face of it, the question seems rhetorical—you would have to be crazy to turn down such entrepreneurial talent. These men and women have not only created huge commercial value for the companies they have founded, but also created value for society and, in Musk’s case, the environment, through his efforts to mainstream the production and use of electric vehicles. These so-called ‘social entrepreneurs’ seek business solutions to societal challenges. No, there is nothing particularly new or novel in that.

But it would be wrong to assume that such socially minded entrepreneurial talent is confined to the world of business startups. Also talented and socially aware, the ‘intrapreneur’ is emerging, from deep ‘within’ some of the world’s largest corporations. These mavericks are two-parts changemaker, one-part troublemaker. They do not ‘do’ status quo. They believe that the best way to achieve social impact at scale, is to start with scale—they seek to influence the course of the parent organisation, from the bottom up and inside out. After all, just a small shift in the direction of a large super-tanker can have massive impact downstream.