Linda Descano created a fulfilling job for herself as Environmental Officer in the investment banking firm of Salomon Brothers, now merged with Smith Barney. In many finance-related fields, the standard job description for an environmental professional is to make sure the print shop is not spewing anything hazardous, and to deal with recycling, energy efficiency and other office management considerations. But Descano recognized that these things would come to nothing if the company were to run aground of major environmental disaster in one of its investments. She saw her job as a way to bring environmental due diligence into the normal process of analyzing a prospective deal. She explains:

Wall Street is a very challenging crowd, and with all the consolidation underway it will only get more challenging. They're critical. They question everything. "Innovation requires very thick skin and very good data to make a point so that it's attractive to my culture," she explains.

Some "intraprises" succeed in ways that give rise to new levels of opportunity. When Nashville judge Penny Harrington created a special court for environmental matters -- from household hazardous waste issues to the gentleman who couldn't seem to keep his roosters properly caged -- it was so successful that she followed it up by creating a domestic violence court. Naval engineer Richard Paradis and several colleagues launched the Navy's Green Building program after sitting in a meeting grappling with the subject, "Why do we have so many good green regulations and so little follow-through compared to the opportunity?" What started out as a model project at Naval headquarters ended up as a national program, which then became a model for other military services and federal agencies.

Of course, innovation has its risks. As the Pinchots write in Intrapreneuring, the First Law of the Intrapreneur is, "Come to work every day willing to be fired." But we have all lived through enough instability to put this in perspective. Often, when taking a risk doesn't lead all the way to the hoped-for conclusion, it leads somewhere more interesting than previously imagined.

For example, Dan Ruben was a health care administrator with a giant H.M.O., Harvard Pilgrim, for years. In his personal life, he participated in a program to help households reduce resource consumption by forming "Eco-Teams," and he realized the same basic vision and strategy could apply to his company. "We had a lot of opportunities for environmental improvement, and I suspected they would carry significant benefits for the bottom line," he said.

Ruben wrote a proposal to create a job for himself as Environmental Affairs Coordinator for the Harvard Pilgrim system of seventy buildings, with 10,000 employees, serving over a million members. Tying the proposal carefully to the HMO's mission -- improving neighborhood health -- he started with a broad scan of opportunities, from water conservation to beach cleanups to employee environmental projects. The company president ok'd the proposal and directed Ruben to focus on saving paper, the most visible change for most of the work force.

Ruben recommended a company intranet, which was implemented. He redesigned the organization's major publication, its physician directory, reducing an unbelievable 110,000,000 printed pages per year to a mere 69,000,000. He spent 1997 evaluating the company's practices and making recommendations for savings. The process brought him widespread recognition. "It was such a high," he reflects. "About every two weeks, somebody would ask me to give a talk, write an article, join a board. I did it all. It was a joy."