Why corporate intrapreneurship dies in PowerPoint — and how to revive it
Somewhere between the first business case template and the third stakeholder alignment session, something quietly dies. The idea was good. The energy in the team was real. There was even a moment, in a hallway or a Teams chat, where you could feel things tipping toward “let’s just do it.” And then the machinery took over. Three weeks later, the idea is sitting in a deck, waiting for a steering committee to be rescheduled.
I’ve worked across large corporates, scale-ups, agencies and digital-first organisations, and the pattern is remarkably consistent: the bigger the company, the more endangered the species we used to call the wheeler-dealer. The person who picks up an idea, walks it through five corridors, trades favours, borrows two people for a fortnight, ships a proof of concept, and asks for forgiveness afterwards. That muscle — call it intrapreneurship, call it wheeling and dealing — has gone soft in most organisations I encounter.
It hasn’t disappeared because people stopped being clever. It has disappeared because we built an operating model that makes it costlier to act than to wait.
In many organisations, very few people will pitch a raw idea and simply run with it. That is not laziness. It is rational behaviour. We have spent two decades teaching teams that ideas must be checked against a strategic framework, validated against a data set, costed in a business case, approved at two leadership levels, and aligned with at least three adjacent roadmaps. By the time a proposal clears the slalom, it has been smoothed into something safe, generic and slightly late. The cost of that slalom shows up at the top of organisations too: a McKinsey survey of more than 1,200 executives across 91 countries found that they spend roughly 37% of their time making decisions, and consider more than 60% of that time ineffective. The machinery isn’t only slow; it leaks energy at every level.
Data is part of the problem, even though it shouldn’t be. Used well, data is a flashlight. Used defensively, it becomes a wall. “We don’t have a signal yet.” “The numbers don’t justify a test.” “Let’s revisit when we have more evidence.” An Oracle study of business leaders found that 72% admitted the sheer volume of data — and their lack of trust in it — had, at some point, prevented them from making any decision at all. Most large organisations don’t lack data anymore; they lack the courage to act with the imperfect data they already have. Strategy decks have started to play the same role as those dashboards: instead of giving direction, they give people something to hide behind.
The frustrating part is that in every company, deep inside operational teams, there are ideas that would outperform half the strategic priorities on the slide. People who actually sit with customers, fulfilment partners, suppliers and frontline tools see the gaps daily. They know exactly which friction to remove, which assortment to test, which conversation to have with a partner. But they rarely get those ideas onto a roadmap.
Sometimes that is a question of clout — they are simply too junior in the hierarchy to be heard. More often, it is a question of language. They don’t yet know how to frame an idea so it lands in the strategic vocabulary the company uses. Without that translation layer, the idea bounces. And as it keeps bouncing, the person stops bringing it up.
There is another current under all of this, and I think we don’t talk about it enough. Many younger colleagues — and, frankly, plenty of older ones who have adjusted to the new rhythm — are simply no longer used to working loose and in person. Their working week is shaped by data dashboards, AI tools, an inbox that never empties, and an agenda packed with meetings, a large share of which add limited real value. The Harvard Business Review’s much-quoted survey of senior managers put numbers on the intuition: 71% said meetings were unproductive and inefficient, and 65% said meetings kept them from doing their own work. The picture has not improved since. Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Index found that knowledge workers are now interrupted by a meeting, message or notification roughly every two minutes, spend about 57% of their time communicating and only 43% creating, and that nearly half say their work feels chaotic and fragmented.
I’m not making a generational complaint — and the stereotype that Gen Z prefers to disappear into a home office doesn’t survive contact with the data. Recent workforce research finds that only around a quarter of Gen Z employees actually want a fully remote role; most prefer hybrid setups, and they consistently tell researchers they want more in-person feedback, mentorship and visible career paths. The problem isn’t that younger colleagues don’t value working together. It’s that the system we put around them rewards visibility, alignment and meeting hygiene, and does not reward the slightly chaotic act of grabbing two colleagues, sketching something on a whiteboard, and walking down the corridor to find the person who can unblock it.
What’s interesting is that when you sit down with these same colleagues one-on-one, they will name the problem themselves. They complain about the absence of innovation. They miss the freedom to just do. They are irritated by the obligation to wrap every initiative in a deck and run it through two layers of leadership. The appetite is there. The system around it isn’t.
The mechanic itself isn’t complicated. In my experience, you usually need one person with enough clout — formal or informal — who will pick up an idea, give it attention and push it through, sometimes outside the regular governance. That is the unlock. The change-management literature backs the intuition: research summarised by Prosci and others has consistently identified an active, visible executive sponsor as the single biggest predictor of whether a change initiative actually delivers its intended outcomes.
But “pushing it through” almost always requires something from other teams. They have to colour outside the lines for a moment. They have to bend a priority, free up a person for a week, lend an asset, shift a budget line. You are asking for flexibility, and flexibility has a cost. So something has to go the other way: a future favour, a shared win, public credit, a piece of work you’ll take on for them. Wheeling and dealing is, at its core, a market in trust.
When it works, the payoff is disproportionate. You don’t just get a new feature, a new partnership or a new flow. You get an intense, cross-team collaboration that didn’t exist a month ago. You get a small, sometimes disruptive change in how people work together. And, crucially, you get a story. The team that did it tells the team next door, and the next idea travels a little faster. That is how culture changes from the bottom up — slowly and steadily, with the occasional sharp acceleration.
The last piece, and the one I feel most strongly about, is presence. In a corporate environment, wheeling and dealing genuinely needs physical contact. You have to pitch an idea while looking someone in the eye, especially when you need something from them, and especially when the idea diverges from business as usual. You have to feel the energy that, hopefully, comes loose in that conversation. You have to read whether the other person is leaning in or politely waiting for you to finish.
That signal is almost impossible to get over a calendar invite and a shared deck. It barely survives a video call. The intuition now has hard evidence behind it. A 2023 study in Nature analysing 20 million research papers and four million patents found that as the geographic distance between collaborators grew, the probability that their work produced a genuinely disruptive idea fell by roughly a quarter — on-site teams were significantly more likely to focus on the conceptual work where breakthroughs happen, while remote ones drifted toward technical execution. A separate Stanford experiment by Brucks and Levav found that in-person teams generated 15-20% more ideas than otherwise comparable virtual ones, because video calls narrow the cognitive frame in which people search for solutions. Wheeling and dealing lives in the corridor, the coffee corner, the unscheduled fifteen minutes after a meeting everyone agrees was useless. Leaders who want intrapreneurship back have to make space for those moments — and, just as importantly, be present in them themselves.
To senior leaders: protect the wheeler-dealers in your organisation. Give them air cover when they colour outside the lines for the right reasons. Reward the proof of concept, not just the perfectly aligned plan. Be reachable in corridors, not only in meeting rooms.
To everyone else: stop waiting for the roadmap. Pick the idea you’ve been quietly carrying for the last six months, find the one person with the clout to help, and go knock on their door. Bring something to trade. Be willing to give as much as you ask. Then ship something — small, imperfect, real.
The art of wheeling and dealing isn’t lost. It has just been left in the corridor, waiting for someone to pick it up again.
Sources & further reading
Cake / multiple sources. “Gen Z workforce statistics.” Consolidated data on Gen Z workplace preferences, hybrid work and in-person collaboration.