Marcos Hashimoto

Most organizations are looking for new ways to increase competitiveness, but very few of the are willing to give up their institutionalized structures, well-tuned to keep the machine working with efficiency. The corporate world is designed to avoid changes. Changes represent threats to existing process and the status quo. How to solve this dilemma?

Many companies try to foster a culture toward innovation with idea banks and great reward systems, but that doesn’t work in most of the cases. Based on 12 years of research with more than 500 companies in Brazil, I learned what the most innovative companies have in common. Entrepreneurial leaders. The managerial level is the key to balance a culture of flexibility and the need to keep efficiency. By recognizing, nurturing and compensating talented intrapreneurs, these mid to top-level managers promote the entrepreneurial mindset on their entire team. The objectives of this talk are:

• To understand the difference between leaders and entrepreneurial leaders
• To shed a new look to their team’s skills, to find the odd, the weird, the different and use the hidden talents
• To learn how to balance the typical bureaucracy of large organizations to the flexibility required for their teams to come up with disruptive thinking ideas.