The business-within-a-business paradigm does not mean passive order-taking! Internal entrepreneurs can (indeed, must) be proactive.

Here's a quick list of the things internal entrepreneurs can do proactively, without disempowering customers or sacrificing customer focus:

• Marketing: Internal entrepreneurs can market the strategic value of their products and services. This is not meant to be self-serving. Marketing is intended to lift clients' awareness of the possibilities so as to engender more creative use of their products and services.

• Sales: An internal service provider's account representatives can proactively knock on doors and offer to talk to clients about their challenges. Hopefully, this dialog will identify strategic opportunities to use of the organization's products and services. This is "sales" in the best sense of the profession -- not pushing products, but partnering with clients to help them solve their problems. The result of this consultative selling is clear functional requirements that are directly linked to clients' perceived needs -- strategic opportunities with potentially blockbuster payoffs.

• Offer alternatives: In response to clients' requirements, the organization's engineers can proactively offer alternative solutions -- as in Chevrolet, Cadillac, and Rolls-Royce (their "what," your "how"). In this way, they can make clients aware of better ways to address their needs than the new gizmo advertised in that airline magazine.

• Help smart buyers: The account representatives can help clients analyze these alternatives in the context of clients' (not their own) values. This isn't a matter of making a recommendation (as if "we know what's best for you"). Rather, it's a consultative process that says, "If speed is most important to you, pick alternative A; but if life-cycle costs are more important, select B."

• Product innovation: Of course, internal entrepreneurs can, and must, keep their product lines up to date. Entrepreneurs don't wait for clients to tell them to study new technologies and vendor products, or explore new services. They proactively innovate. Think of this as putting new products on the shelf (making them available to clients), but only taking them off the shelf (actually deploying them) when clients have agreed to buy them.

• Infrastructure: Internal service providers must proactively maintain and evolve their infrastructure. The word "infrastructure" means assets owned by the organization for the purpose of selling services to clients. Vendors don't ask their customers' permission before they buy new manufacturing equipment. They proactively acquire whatever infrastructure is needed to satisfy clients' demands for their products and services. Internal service providers make these investment decisions based on market needs -- that is, input from the customer community as a whole. Nonetheless, they unilaterally decide what infrastructure they must buy to satisfy their markets.

• Coordinate enterprise decisions: Internal service providers can also be proactive about facilitating enterprisewide decisions such as policies, standards, and HR policies related to the careers of decentralized professionals in their fields. Of course, these decisions must be made by the community of relevant stakeholders, not unilaterally by corporate staff. But internal entrepreneurs can proactively put forward the issues and coordinate the appropriate stakeholders on behalf of the enterprise.