Corporate Explorer

7Explore Organization

The mythology of the startup garage weighs heavily on Corporate Explorers as they set up an explore organization. There is the iconic garage on Addison Street in Palo Alto where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built the first HP instrument; the inspiring photos of the garage in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote the original code for Microsoft; or the one at Steve Jobs’ parent's house in California where he, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, built the first Apple computer. It tells us about the commitment, hard work, and independence needed to be an entrepreneur. Our first instinct is to set the new venture free in a garage to make things happen. This is how Matt Prince, CEO at Cloudflare, a US-based web infrastructure and security company, talks about his growth ventures. He deliberately locates a new team outside the corporate headquarters, even in a different city, with the explicit mission to invent something new without concern for its impact on the existing business. Prince is advocating a dual strategy that separates activities that support the core business – focused on optimizing an existing product line – from the explore – that has a remit to create the new.

New ventures need this separation. Several years ago, we had the privilege of working with Qi Lu at Microsoft as he and his team executed an extraordinary pivot from Office for desktop to Office 365 online. One team had the Office 365 responsibilities with the drumbeat ...