Don't expect your organization to adopt a new strategy uniformly. Apply the 'Crossing the Chasm' model internally: identify early adopters to champion the change, then methodically win over the early majority and laggards. This manages expectations and improves strategic alignment across the company.

To be an effective intrapreneur in a bureaucracy, don't pitch your project as a separate, tangential effort. Instead, research the existing goals of potential partners and frame your initiative as a tool to help them achieve their objectives more efficiently, making you an ally rather than a burden.

To overcome corporate inertia and fear of failure, middle managers should form a "coalition of the willing" with a few coworkers. They can build a simple prototype on their own time and then present the tangible result to leadership, opening doors for more resources.

If everyone in the company instantly understands and agrees with your launch message, it might be too safe. A great launch reframes the market, which should provoke some initial internal skepticism. This indicates the message is bold enough to break through external noise.

When Jeff Braverman proposed a new, labor-intensive packaging service, his father and uncle refused due to the effort required. To overcome their resistance, he not only showed them the math proving its profitability but also took on the manual labor himself. This demonstrated his commitment and proved the concept's viability through his own actions.

When facing internal resistance to a big idea, the tendency is to make the idea smaller and safer. The better approach is to protect the ambitious vision but shrink the steps to validate it, using small, targeted experiments to build evidence and momentum.

Within a large corporation, an intrapreneur's success hinges on validating their idea with potential clients. Since internal investment is a zero-sum game, demonstrating market knowledge and a clear path to customer validation is crucial for convincing leadership to fund your project over competing priorities.

As a junior IC at Instagram, Adrian was told leadership had "bigger fish to fry" than his A/B testing idea. He built a scrappy, functional prototype anyway, recruiting a PM for air cover. This bottoms-up initiative proved its value and ultimately led to his first senior promotion.

Middle managers often feel threatened by new ideas from their teams and become innovation blockers. A pragmatic solution shared by one executive is for frontline employees to bypass this layer and seek approval for experiments directly from senior leadership, who are often more receptive.