Changing Your Company from the Inside Out: A Guide for Social Intrapreneurs

MAKE YOUR COMPANY A FORCE FOR GOOD

You’re ambitious. You’re not afraid to take risks. You want to bring about positive social change. And while your peers have left a trail of failed start-ups in their wake, you want to initiate change from within an established company, where you can have a more far-reaching, even global impact.

Welcome to the club—you’re a social intrapreneur.

But even with your enviable skill set, your unwavering social conscience, and your determination to change the world, your path to success is filled with challenges. So how do you get started and maintain your momentum?

Changing Your Company from the Inside Out provides the tools to empower you to jump-start initiatives that matter to you—and that should matter to your company. Drawing on lessons from social movements as well as on the work of successful intrapreneurs, Gerald Davis and Christopher White provide you with a guide for creating positive social change from within your own organization.

You’ll learn how to answer four key questions:
• When is the right time for change? Learn how to read your organization’s climate.
• Why is this a compelling change? Use language and stories to connect your initiative to your organization’s mission, strategy, and values.
• Who will make this innovation possible? Identify the decision makers you need to persuade and the potential resisters you need to steer around.
• How can you mobilize your supporters to collaborate on your innovation? Use the online and offline tools and platforms that best support your initiative.

This book is a road map for intrapreneurs seeking to reshape their companies into drivers of positive change. If you want to spearhead social innovation from within your company, use this book as your guide.

Gerald F. Davis is the Wilbur K. Pierpont Collegiate Professor of Management at the Ross School of Business and Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is Managed by the Markets: How Finance Re-Shaped America, which won the Academy of Management’s George R. Terry Book Award for Outstanding Contribution to Management Knowledge in 2010.

Christopher J. White is Managing Director of the Center for Positive Organizations and adjunct faculty in Management & Organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Chris has been leading and consulting to purpose-driven organizations spanning the corporate, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors for more than fifteen years.