Adrian Klein: Intrapreneurship Starts with a Problem and Leads to a Result

Adrian Klein is an entrepreneur, manager, and psychotherapist with more than 27 years of experience in management and business, as well as over five years of experience in psychotherapy. His professional journey has centered around people, organizations, and the challenges that arise when things have to work in the real world. He has worked across management, business development, production, commercial relations, and process optimization. Today, he combines this experience with his background in psychology and psychotherapy.

One of his areas of interest is what happens inside organizations when highly competent people end up spending too much energy solving problems that, in many cases, are not actually where they appear to be.

In his current work, Adrian works with entrepreneurs, managers, and professionals who carry significant responsibility and want to achieve better results without paying for them through constant overwork.

What have been the most important stages of your professional journey, and what do you believe contributed most significantly to your evolution so far?

Looking back, I don’t think there is a single stage that explains my professional journey. Rather, each stage forced me to learn something I would need later on.

My early years in management taught me that an organization never works exactly the way it looks on paper. You can have clear procedures, organizational charts, and objectives, but the final outcome depends on people, the relationships between them, the way they make decisions, and, above all, the things that remain unspoken.

My entrepreneurial experience taught me to look at reality very quickly. When you have a problem in a company you run, you don’t really have the luxury of explaining it endlessly. You have to understand what is happening and do something about it.

Another important moment was the change in perspective that my training in psychotherapy brought me. I began to see much more clearly how strongly psychological factors influence professional decisions—not only at an individual level, but also within teams and organizations.

I believe one of the decisive factors in my evolution has been precisely the combination of these two worlds. I have had enough business experience not to look at people and their problems separately from results, but also enough experience in psychology to understand that sometimes the problem that appears in business actually has a different source.

Which professional projects, results, or achievements do you consider most representative of your work, and what impact have they had?

I wouldn’t reduce my most important results to a list of numbers or job titles. For me, the most representative situations are those in which I have managed to take a complicated problem and turn it into a simpler way of working.

Over the years, I have worked with organizations facing operational bottlenecks, communication problems, overworked employees, or decisions that were repeatedly postponed because no one was able to see the bigger picture.

In these situations, my role was often to step into the problem, separate what was important from what was simply noise, and work with the people involved to build a solution that could actually be implemented.

In my consulting work, I have seen situations where, once certain internal bottlenecks were removed, people were able to remain calmer, work more efficiently, and produce better results without increasing their workload proportionally.

For me, that is an important result: not simply achieving more, but understanding why so much effort was previously required to achieve that result.

Have you taken initiatives that went beyond the responsibilities of your formal role?

Yes. In fact, I believe this is one of the things that has defined me professionally.

In many of the roles I have held, I noticed that formal responsibility and real responsibility are not always the same thing.

If you see a problem that affects the company’s results but say, “That’s not my responsibility,” the organization may continue operating exactly as before. If, however, you take the initiative, you start looking for a solution.

I have done this in a variety of contexts, from operational and commercial issues to processes that could be simplified or automated.

A recent example is my consulting work with a company where I was initially brought in to address a specific problem. As I came to understand the company better, we began identifying other areas where information, decision-making, and execution were not sufficiently connected.

This led to ideas for automation, dashboards, automated information extraction from documents, and a better structure for responsibilities.

What was necessary to turn the idea into a result? First and foremost, not falling in love with the idea. You need to check whether the problem actually exists, whether the solution is feasible, and whether the people who will have to use it can integrate it into their work.

For me, intrapreneurship is less about “I had an idea” and more about “I saw a problem, I took it seriously, and I carried it through to a result.”

How important is freedom of initiative within an organization?

It is essential, but freedom of initiative without a framework can very quickly turn into chaos.

People need to know that they can say, “I think we could do this better,” without immediately being asked whether they have permission to think.

At the same time, an organization needs to be able to distinguish between initiative and simply wanting to change things. Not every good idea is necessarily a good idea for the company, and people also need to take responsibility for testing their ideas.

I believe a company can support intrapreneurship in three very simple ways.

First, through access to information. You cannot solve a problem you cannot see.

Second, through decision-making space. If every step requires approval from three levels of management, people will eventually stop taking initiative.

And third, through a culture in which an initiative that doesn’t work is not automatically treated as a personal failure.

I believe entrepreneurial people within an organization are particularly valuable because they do not automatically accept “that’s how we’ve always done it” as an argument.

Looking ahead to the next few years, what are your professional goals, and what message would you share with people who want to grow?

Over the next few years, I want to develop further the area where business experience, management, and psychology intersect.

I am particularly interested in people who have already reached a good point professionally but have begun to realize that their success is coming at too high a cost in terms of energy, time, or personal life.

I want to continue working with people who carry real responsibility and who do not need to be motivated to work harder. Most of the time, that is exactly what they already know how to do very well. What they need is to understand what prevents them from functioning more simply and efficiently.

And to those who want to grow professionally, I would say: don’t wait for someone to give you permission to contribute.

If you see a problem, try to understand it.

If you have an idea, test it.

If it doesn’t work, learn something from it.

And, above all, don’t confuse professional value with the amount of effort you put in. Sometimes, the next level doesn’t come from doing more, but from seeing more clearly what is actually worth doing.