If you Google, “How to be an intrapreneur,” Google will respond, “Did you mean, “How to be an entrepreneur.” In writing up notes for this blog post, Microsoft Word 2007 flagged the word, “intrapreneur” as a spelling error; TextEdit on my Mac actually changed “intrapreneurship” to “entrepreneurship” in an unwanted attempt to help me. Intrapreneurship is still not well-known, which is unfortunate because millions of people can likely benefit from learning about intrapreneurship and applying intrapreneurial concepts into their career management.

While popular culture hasn’t caught up yet, the word “intrapreneur” has been in dictionaries since the 1990’s. I like Wiktionary’s definition:  “the practice of applying entrepreneurial skills and approaches within an established company; being creative with ideas and procedures.” Intrapreneurship is a wonderful way for innovative progress to occur in a speedier way than it would otherwise happen in more traditional environments.

The advantage of intrapreneurship is that the intrapreneur has the benefit of all the financial support and resources of a large organization. The challenge for the intrapreneur is that business objectives must be met while continuing to navigate the structure and complications inherent within any large organization. (Some writers argue that intrapreneurs can ignore the corporate structure when working to achieve their business goals, but I think that is naïve).

So if you want to behave in an intrapreneurial way, here’s how to proceed:

1. Choose a project to launch and implement. The project should have clearly defined objectives and metrics via which you will define success. This project should be congruent with the overall mission and values of the organization that employs you and should be clearly beneficial to your employer if you succeed.

2. At minimum, make sure you have buy-in from your immediate manager and try to find out if your manager’s manager is in agreement with your goals and proposed strategies to achieve them. Also consider your surrounding colleagues who might be necessary and instrumental in assisting you. Think about how you will persuade them about the value of your project and how you will convince them to be helpful to you or at least stay out of your way if they are not directly involved.

3. Check your ego. If what you really want is to operate unfettered by organizational complexity and you resent any involvement by any corporate employee in what you are doing, ditch intrapreneurship and go start your own company, stat. (Then you’ll get to deal with other types of complexity, but that is a different blog topic).

4. Honestly assess your strengths and find colleagues to complement them. The ideal team is made up of people with a variety of strengths. If you don’t have the luxury of a large team to assist you, then create a plan for how the work will get done given that you are not going to be able to exclusively play to your strengths.

5. Implement. Know that you may fail, and honestly discuss this possibility with the powers-that-be that gave you permission to proceed with your venture.

6. If you succeed, your team might be integrated into the larger organization. This can be experienced as bittersweet for the intrapreneur, so be prepared for some feelings of loss.

7. Choose your next business goals and start again.

My previous blog post focused on the reasons why an entrepreneur is likely to need patience. This post introduces three entrepreneurs who aren’t naturally patient by temperament but who intentionally learned patience as a business and life skill. I will also suggest a three step process to learn patience.

Andrew Cagnetta, CEO of Transworld Business Brokers, recalls, “Patience came tough to me as a New Jersey Italian American young entrepreneur. I thought I would be financially independent at 25. Now that I am 45 and not financially independent by my definition (although successful by others), I have learned that real business success is a marathon, not a sprint. Change in degrees requires patience. You have to let repetition and education ferment/mellow like a good wine.”

In 2008, Greg Stallkamp launched Holos Fitness, a social networking Web site focused on a physically active lifestyle. Before starting his new company, Mr. Stallkamp worked in the fast-paced world of finance and investment banking. In his finance career, patience was not required. But in his new venture, Mr. Stallkamp learned that there were often times when technical staff could not be rushed to finish projects if they were going to do their jobs well. Mr. Stallkamp found himself impatiently waiting for results and becoming upset about his perception that his company was growing more slowly than he would like.

Out of necessity, Mr. Stallkamp taught himself to multitask rather than hound his employees to hurry up. While Holos Fitness employees are working to meet deadlines, Mr. Stallkamp focuses on leadership and strategic design. He says, “It is a small compromise and one that still requires a great deal of patience. However, it has helped me adjust to an entirely new way of doing business.”

Tina Paparone, co-founder of children’s gift company, BeMe, says that before she became an entrepreneur in 2009, she equated patience with being lazy or boring. After she co-launched BeMe, Ms. Paparone tried to use pushy and overbearing business tactics that worked well for her in the past, but she quickly realized that these strategies were not working well at BeMe. Ms. Paparone forced herself to slow down and practice patience, commenting, “I still believe that if you build it, they will come, but it might take awhile… by accepting I cannot control everything, I have actually re-established control of my own environment.”

Are you motivated to learn patience? If so, here is how to do it:

1.  Accept the necessity of patience in work and other spheres of life. Until you make it a conscious goal to be patient, you are less likely to achieve it.

2.   Find a mindfulness/stress management strategy that works well for you. Experiment with exercise, meditation, yoga, journaling, etc. Doing this helps you to have a longer fuse, making it much easier to feel patient during challenging circumstances.

3.   Be patient about learning to be patient. You probably won’t go from chronic impatience to blissful patience overnight. Instead, your journey will likely be one of ups and downs, successes and failures. As long as the overall trend is toward increasing patience over time, consider it a victory!

Echoing one of Ms. Paparone’s favorite quotes:

“He that can have patience can have what he will.”
Benjamin Franklin

“Patience and fortitude conquer all things.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Some people think that entrepreneurs launch their own businesses because founders of companies are too impatient to tolerate slow-moving bureaucracies or the tortoise-like process of climbing the corporate ladder, rung by rung. Both of these things may be true, but does this mean that entrepreneurs need not worry about cultivating patience because impatience is a virtue in fast-paced start-up environments? I say, “Absolutely not,” and there is ample evidence to back me up.

Steve Ballmer of Microsoft told Fast Company magazine that products and businesses all go through three phases:  Vision, patience, and final execution. He observed that people enjoy the vision and final execution phases, but that most people are very uncomfortable with the patience phase.

Perhaps because of urban legend surrounding overnight successes, entrepreneurs hope to go from zero to 60 mph as quickly as possible. But in reality, “overnight success” takes years, 7-10 to be exact. Paul Buchheit, creator and lead developer of Gmail, blogged about the 7.5 years it took Gmail to evolve from a product that many people thought was a doomed dud to a product with a 40% growth rate from 2008 to 2009.

“Guitar Hero,” the video game that was the first in history to reach $1 billion in North American sales, was 10 years in the making by developers Harmonix and RedOctane. Serial artistic entrepreneur Lisa Canning described the 10 years as, “A decade of learning that ingenuity comes in two flavors: the kind where you invent mind-blowing technology (that was the easy part for two guys with master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and the kind where you build a legitimate business around it.”

A co-founder of stackoverflow.com, Jeff Atwood, wrote:

I have zero expectation or even desire for overnight success. What I am planning is several years of grinding through constant, steady improvement. This business plan isn’t much different from my career development plan:  success takes years. And when I say years, I really mean it! Not as some cliched regurgitation of “work smarter, not harder.” I’m talking actual calendar years. You know, of the 12 months, 365 days variety. You will literally have to spend multiple years of your life grinding away at this stuff, waking up every day and doing it over and over, practicing and gathering feedback each day to continually get better. It might be unpleasant at times and even downright un-fun occasionally, but it’s necessary.

There are studies indicating 10 years is a meaningful unit of time. Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his best-selling book, Outliers, that the key to success in any field (including business, science, sports, and music) has less to do with talent than is commonly believed. Instead, success comes from practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years. Mr. Gladwell called this the “10,000 hour rule.”

Are you convinced that patience is necessary but you are feeling daunted by the requirement? My next blog post will explore strategies for cultivating patience in a “hurry up” world.

Recently I asked a group of entrepreneurs to tell me what causes them stress in running their businesses. Many of their responses centered around having too much to do and not enough hours in the day to get it all done. Some business owners described a feeling of constant anxiety about the tasks that are left undone because of time constraints, and some business owners admitted to feelings of severe burnout because they keep trying to do everything no matter how unsustainably challenging their workload is.

When pressed about why they don’t delegate some of the work, entrepreneurs give a variety of reasons. Here are the top reasons given for reluctance to delegate and some discussion about those reasons. You will find that I am a big fan of delegation and learning how to do it well.

1.  ”It would take so long to teach someone how to do some of my job, it is easier to just do everything myself.”

It is true that it would require an initial investment of time to teach someone how to do some of the more routine aspects of running your business. But there are a lot of extremely smart people in the world and many of them know how to use accounting software, create or maintain a Web site, respond to simple inquiries from clients, scan or file paperwork, run errands, etc. Once this person is up-to-speed, you can save hours per week by not doing these tasks yourself.

2. “I would love to delegate but I can’t afford to do so.”

In making this financial decision, you really need to weigh the opportunity cost of doing everything yourself vs. creating more time to do the important work of strategic visioning for your business, marketing to land more work, delivering awesome results so that clients want to book more business with you or customers want to buy more products from you, or simply having more time for self-care so that you don’t begin to break down under the strain of an unmanageable workload. Can you afford to neglect the functional areas of your business that are the most important? Can you afford to become too exhausted to continue?

3. “I tried delegating once and it didn’t work well.”

This excuse makes the assumption that if something doesn’t happen the first time, it isn’t worth doing. But how many things in life are accomplished on the first try? You can identify which part of delegation was ineffective and change that part to do it better the next time. Learning how to delegate effectively is a skill that requires practice. Each time you try, make it a learning experience and be assured that as your skill grows, you are getting closer to becoming competent at delegation.

4. “I am afraid that if I delegate something, it won’t get done the way I want.”

Effective delegation requires that you are able to specify the outcome you desire and to check in with the person doing the work so that he/she doesn’t get too far off track before you redirect in the right direction. Schedule frequent check ins in the beginning when someone doesn’t yet know your style and consider it an investment in the future. After you establish that you and the worker are in sync about expectations, you won’t have to track milestone progress so carefully.

5. “I’m afraid I will hire someone and then realize I made a mistake and be stuck with the person.”

Many entrepreneurs find that it is easier if their first hire is an independent contractor / freelancer rather than a permanent employee. This way, you can evaluate for a trial period if there is a good match between what the freelancer offers and what you need. Make sure to follow the IRS guidelines about hiring an independent contractor, including the rules about allowing the freelancer to have control and independence about how he/she accomplishes his/her tasks as long as the output matches your expectations.

6. “I don’t know where to find freelancers.”

There are lots of resources now to find talented individuals to hire. HireMyMom.com, ELance.com, Guru.com, and oDesk.com are just a few of them. If you would rather investigate resources closer to home, contact the career services office of a local university and find out how to post a job to hire a student.

Once you taste the freedom that effective delegation brings, you will be so glad you learned how to do it. Then the only task left to do is to figure out the best ways to use all that time you have freed up!