April 5, 2023

Before Seth Godin’s famous marketing book, Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, hit the market, we were first treated to the concept of the purple cow in a short 1895 poem by Gelett Burgess: 

I never saw a purple cow, 

I never hope to see one; 

But I can tell you, anyhow, 

I’d rather see than be one. 

A fair point—being a purple cow means standing out and having people take notice of you. But this can also be a good thing. Godin falls on the positive side of the purple cow and recommends that businesses need to both identify their purple cow and then go all in with promoting it. The purple cow is the differentiator—after all, who wouldn’t stop at the side of the road to take a picture of something so extraordinary? Businesses that take the time to identify and then promote their purple cow are businesses that will be visible in a day and age when traditional methods of marketing have failed. 

While this is applicable to businesses in all industries, it is perhaps even more applicable to independent schools. In a day and age driven by choice, the way in which we promote our schools matters. And this means taking a few pages from the business world. These pages are best boiled down to three areas: innovation, marketing, and growth. And the order of those matters—without innovation, there is nothing to market, and without marketing, there can be no growth. Therefore, as schools, we should focus on innovation to carry us into the future. 

This focus on innovation, however, can be a dangerous slope. Rather than suggest we invest in 3D printers, ChatGPT, or cutting-edge assessments, perhaps it would be better to return to the business world for inspiration. The business world has been abuzz, for a while now, with the concept of the “intrapreneur.” The word, first introduced by husband-and-wife team Gifford Pinochet III and Elizabeth Pinochet in 1985, brought together the disruptive notion of the entrepreneur alongside the career-path corporate climber to suggest a hybrid employee who would bring an entrepreneurial mindset to a typical business setting. Their book is aptly titled, Intrapreneuring: Why You Don’t Have to Leave the Corporation to Become an Entrepreneur. Since then, businesses have been working diligently to uncover the secret of creating and then retaining an intrapreneurial mindset within their cultures. Those that have been successful have gone on to dominate industries and change the world. 

The intrapreneurial mindset is one of solution-driven problem solving, disciplined effort toward goal setting, and thinking outside the box with creative ideation. It is a mindset focused on success and growth. Imagine, then, the impact this idea of intrapreneurship would have within independent schools. Consider the impact not just on our students but even on our faculty. A school, quite literally, filled with people developing an intrapreneurial mindset. This school would be unstoppable—fueled with imagination and passion, this school would forge ahead into the uncertainties of the future pausing just long enough to show off its deep purple color. 

Why, then, are our school administrations so afraid of this concept? Why do we actively fight against this kind of culture? The typical administration in the typical independent school, while they admire and perhaps even desire an atmosphere of intrapreneurship, sends both overt and covert messaging to prevent it from blossoming. This is a tricky situation indeed because the messaging administrators send will either cause a culture of intrapreneurship to grow and thrive or to wither and die. And that messaging takes many forms. 

Consider, for example, the school whose administrative team announces the desire to foster an intrapreneurial spirit and then promptly denies all requests for funding innovative programming. Consider the school that limits the freedom of teachers who want to try new things, or that creates unnecessary obstacles for faculty who want to change assessment methods. Consider the school that spends valuable in-service time chasing the newest educational trends and then forcing these methods on overworked teachers. Consider the school that limits the autonomy of educators in order to prevent a potential failure.

This is the problem with glossing over the real issue in favor of stamping a label, like “intrapreneurship,” on our schools. The real issue runs far deeper than an innovative program or outdated assessments. The real problem is that our culture, at its core, does not encourage intrapreneurs to grow and thrive. The real problem is that our schools are run by traditional educators, not entrepreneurs. 

Let’s turn our attention, briefly, to the issue of meetings. Meetings are often the bane of our existence—from administrative meetings to faculty meetings to parent meetings to board meetings to in-service. Part of the reason we experience such frustration with meetings is that we are keenly aware of our time. Our time, often accurately cited as our most valuable finite resource, is limited, and we regularly find ourselves with more to do than can comfortably be done in the allotted time (note that I’m ignoring the glaring issue with time management many school administrators face). How often do we come to a meeting armed with our laptop so we can at least make up for the inane requirement by accomplishing “real work”? 

Examine how an entrepreneur thinks about a meeting. An entrepreneur—someone who is personally invested in all aspects of his business—would consider a meeting not just as a use of time but also as a use of money. They would total up the salaries of everyone in the room and divide the number by 2,000 (roughly the number of working hours in a year). Then they would take that number and multiply it by the number of hours of the meeting and figure out just how much that meeting is costing her. Then they would crush that meeting with as much value-add as possible. Oh, and they would also make sure that only the necessary people were present. 

Look at how this breaks down over a two-day in-service with a typical faculty. First, there are one hundred people present for the in-service and the average salary is $50,000. This means that every hour of in-service costs the school $2,500. That’s $20,000 a day and a total of $40,000 for the two days. That’s before the cost of the speaker, copies of the speaker’s books, and lunch. And that doesn’t even consider the opportunity cost of that money when considering the overall investment in the future of the school. In other words, if administrators do not think like entrepreneurs, how can their faculty (and then their students) be asked to do so? 

The fact is, schools would benefit from their administrators, their faculty, and their staff thinking like entrepreneurs. Consider the amazing outcomes from a group of people who, with an intrapreneurial spirit, ideate and create and solve rather than identify and gripe and complain. 

The value-add one single individual with an entrepreneurial mindset can have on an organization is exponential. An entire organization filled with would-be priceless—purple cows. 

There is a path to get there, and it involves an intensity and focus on teaching the entrepreneurial mindset to those who will be teaching our students. This mindset can be condensed to four primary core values—armed with these four tools, our “intrapreneurs” will innovate from within in ways that could never have happened from without. The first of these values is a growth mindset. Stanford University professor Carol Dweck, the leading researcher on mindset and the psychology of success, has championed this concept. Schools must foster the environment of a growth mindset for the faculty, giving them the tools and resources to move from a fixed mindset, what Dweck calls “the tyranny of now,” into a growth mindset, or “the power of yet.”  

A growth mindset lays the foundation of what it means to think like an entrepreneur, and it also paves the way for the development of grit. In her famous work on grit, psychologist Angela Duckworth defines the word as “passion and perseverance for long-term goals.” Imagine a classroom filled with students who are gritty and embrace adversity—now imagine your entire teaching staff thinks and acts this way. A pipe dream? Not at all—a mindset. A mindset that continues with the third core value, redefining failure. Self-made billionaire and founder of Spanx, Sara Blakely, gets into this topic in her Masterclass on entrepreneurship. True failure, she explains, is not trying in the first place. When we live out an entrepreneurial mindset, it means we are willing to take risks, and this makes the traditional idea of failure a normal and expected part of progress.  

When we have worked to develop our growth mindset, when we have normalized the improvement of our grit, and when we have worked to redefine failure, then we are ready to jump headfirst into opportunity-seeking. Entrepreneurs, at their core, are problem solvers, and this is one of the things that makes them so valuable to organizations. Most organizations, and by extension, schools, have far more complainers than doers and would benefit greatly from a culture that acts out Stephen Covey’s first habit of “be proactive” rather than slipping into a reactive state. This proactivity is the outgrowth of the entrepreneurial mindset that sees a problem as an opportunity.  

I’ve heard many administrators say, with all sincerity, “our teachers are our greatest asset.” It’s time to act on this—let’s re-imagine our professional development and work diligently to facilitate learning for our teachers around growth mindset, grit, redefining failure, and opportunity-seeking. Let’s strive for a culture where intrapreneurship thrives, where problems become opportunities, where hard work is rewarded, and growth is encouraged. This will be painful at first—it means we will have to give more freedom than we currently give, allow more autonomy than we may be comfortable with, and provide additional resources that may be tight. This means we will have to make decisions, endure sacrifices, and generate funding. But that’s because it also means we are committing to a larger why.  

When we say we are fostering an environment of intrapreneurship, we are committing to a why that is bigger than innovative education or flashy programming. We are committing to supporting our faculty as they move into a growth mindset and develop grit. We are encouraging them to fail because it means they are seeking opportunities. We are investing in them because we believe if we are ever to teach our students to think like entrepreneurs, then it must start with those in charge of the instruction. Mindset is bigger than a lesson or a unit or class—it is a way of life that will return dividends for years to come. 

It is, in effect, a purple cow.