Can Large Organizations Be Entrepreneurial?

Within business, two approaches to creating value are clashing: Entrepreneurship is at odds with bureaucracy. Successes like Uber and Airbnb make it seem that entrepreneurship is winning, but the facts say otherwise. Often, entrepreneurship and bureaucracy can be “symbiotic.” For instance, start-ups need bureaucratic systems to produce good products efficiently. Yet as businesses grow, they may lose their spark. Thus, companies that were once “creative destroyers” stagnate, and new innovators replace them. Some people think that ambitious start-ups “cull” the slowest, weakest organizations from the market. Instead, when innovation threatens large, slow companies, they respond by teaming up with other stagnant firms...