Everyday Entrepreneurship
The Groundwork of Entrepreneurial Initiative
In 2004, I arrived in Poland after getting married in London and left behind a city which taught me a lot about myself in a couple of years. My plan was to come back to Brazil with my wife, restart my career from where I paused but fate had other plans. The city of Wrocław felt like a vibrant place, shaped by a recent history of rebuilding and a past in a country that disappeared from the map three times, and came back stronger every time. The Berlin Wall had only fallen fifteen years earlier, the market in Central and Eastern Europe was a work in progress, with systems still settling and things moving at a slower pace.
At that time, finding a job in my field was a game with rigged cards. Hierarchies were strict, and the skills I had mattered less than the networks I would have to build, and that alone would take years to happen. That was the beginning of a new way of thinking that I hadn’t learned about in business school or startup blogs, the kind that hard-working immigrants learn by necessity when arriving from their home country to another. Sometimes people embark on that kind of adventure as a matter of necessity; they emigrate because of wars or the dream of a better life. One of my best friends had her father come from Portugal to Brazil with nothing more than a worn-out suitcase and his dreams. Since he emigrated, he had to learn earlier to find opportunities, taking the initiative to create, organize, and manage a small business. Years later, he had a big family, and his business was prosperous. My case was different; my wife and I simply decided to stay closer to her family during a health treatment, a temporary arrangement.
My plans of moving back to England or Brazil had to face the test of time, a language barrier, and the impossibility of finding anything in digital marketing; nevertheless, I had to emulate the behaviour of so many other immigrants and make entrepreneurship a new way of thinking.
The Quiet Force of Everyday Leadership
In those early years, social mobility was just an idea that would decades later change the way talent acquisition, workforce diversity, and overall economic productivity for big companies. Which is another way to say that there was no red carpet for a foreigner looking for a job, which already became clear when I lived in England, and even more in the old continent.
Entrepreneurship shared across functions works somehow in the same way, calling for action against adverse circumstances. For instance, when the new century started, Technology providers and Business Process Outsourcing recognized it was time to change things that were common practice over the last decade, and start to develop solutions that would explicitly drive and measure business outcomes, co–co-creating solutions with emerging technology and giving teams a competitive advantage. That means people would learn new skills through training so they could get a competitive edge, develop professionally, and get ready for future roles. When people step in unknown territory, sometimes they are driven by the promise of what’s ahead, sometimes what is moving them forward are the things they consciously leave behind.
In my case, I had a Polish wife, a house, and a caring family that adopted me from day one. Other expats told me stories of people leaving poor villages to become PhDs, and others told me about countries invaded, houses bombed. Not always uplifting stories, sometimes shocking narratives from people just trying to survive and live with dignity. There was a middle-aged man from South Africa who came with his wife and daughters, in a time of political upheaval and instability in his country. A friend from Portugal came from Porto to become a musician, and had to find other jobs to pay his bills. The city was crowded with students coming on exchange programs, all of us had different backgrounds and objectives, whatever the case, we had to learn day by day how to find solutions, think differently, and adapt. We used to meet at the Green Rooster pub, and for those who decided to live here, there was a strong network and a culture of trust and collaboration between us, because of shared experiences.
This entrepreneurial mindset is also so alive with Poles, who never gave up after seeing their country invaded, split, bombed, and turned to rubble. Between 1772 and 1918, there was no sovereign state; their diaspora started with an estimated number of 4 million displaced, 10 million between 1950 to 1989, and 12 million, including descendants, in 2024. That’s a 40% ratio over the current population, showing how they became immigrants in other lands like the United Kingdom, France, the U.S., Brazil, Germany, and Canada. Perhaps that adaptability passed generation after generation is so ingrained in digital transformation, with complex projects and the adoption of new ways of working with Shared Services and Outsourcing. Whether inside a legacy organization or an emerging business service center, the logic remains the same, because meaningful change begins with someone noticing what’s broken and caring enough to fix it, even without being asked.
Poland in 2004 was still finding its rhythm inside the global economy, shared services were expanding, and outsourcing was gaining momentum. New technologies were already beginning to underpin operations across borders, and much of the process infrastructure was evolving, step by step. New Roles were being defined, while boundaries could sometimes become rigid, and there was less space for informal influence. The process of identifying business opportunities, assessing the risks, and starting a new path became key in volatile times, when professionals asking to contribute are not only those with the most seniority, but people capable of finding their way out of the woods with the sharpest sense of timing. I am talking about individuals who know when to step in, how to ask the right questions, and make work smoother, faster, and more coherent.
This exact posture would become the baseline for what global business services now seek in their teams, where people who can think laterally and act without excessive oversight. They should be problem solvers even when no playbook exists, while the future of work shifts constantly, like a moving target.
Running with the Wolves
In May 2022, I walked onto a brightly lit stage at the Wolves Summit, a leading tech conference in Central and Eastern Europe. The event had attracted startups, venture capitalists, corporate leaders, and innovators from around the region and beyond. I was invited to moderate two panels, about Gen Z and Diversity. Between sessions, I learnt more about Snowflake, a cloud data warehousing company that transformed an emerging technology into a market leader. Since 2012 they raised multiple rounds of VCs which believed in their promise of an innovative platform until they became one of the largest software IPOs in history in 2020. Around the world, entrepreneurs like Uber, AirBnB, Slack, they all started with VCs highlighting how keeping the right pace and combining entrepreneurial vision can reshape entire industries and ecosystems. Standing under the spotlight, I reflected about my first winter in Poland and the contrast over the years. According to the ABSL 2025 Business Services Sector report, Wrocław now hosts 258 business services centers employing 70,300 people, around 14.4% of Poland’s total sector workforce of 489,000.
The city is strongly specialized in high-value, knowledge-intensive services, and a decreasing share of back-office functions. That highlights its strategic importance within Poland’s 2.3 million-strong business services industry. Nearly 20% of Poland’s business services workforce are foreigners, mainly from Ukraine, India, and Belarus. Wrocław plays a major role in this international talent pool, supporting a wide array of languages, reflecting the sector’s linguistic diversity and global reach.
Process is Where Value Gets Built
Entrepreneurship inside systems is not about taking over, but tuning in the right frequency. There’s a moment when idea gaps can be easily identified between policy and practice, and how bridging them becomes key. In business services, that often means noticing the friction others have come to accept, maybe a delay in approvals or a redundant report. Perhaps an awkward customer handoff or an escalation. These may not seem like places where innovation happens, but that’s exactly where they are. People focus on emerging technologies nowadays, but having bullet-proof processes should come first; otherwise you will just accelerate all that mess.
What I saw over time was that professionals who brought entrepreneurial energy into their teams were often the ones who improved process performance the most, not by inventing something new, but by refining what existed. The misfits, the square pegs on round holes that questioned inherited habits, without fear of judgment. They are probably the crazy ones who prototyped solutions, simplified flows that had become tangled through years of compromise, and found new ways to thrive. That’s the kind of people who did not wait for authority, acting because they understood that systems improve when someone chooses to care.
Leadership and Change from within
The work of a true Leader starts long before, not when the angels are singing and there’s a marching band to celebrate all achievements, but with the nuts and bolts of everyday problems. That’s starting when someone rewrites a training document to make it clearer, or creates a new channel to reduce internal email load. When someone on the Team asks why three layers of sign-off are still needed for a process that has not changed in years. Entrepreneurship without a title is a bet on potential before validation arrives, and something that starts with every individual in an organization. That’s a way of working that says value is not defined by scope alone, but by sensitivity to systems and the courage of people to shift them, one choice at a time.
Wrocław, the city where the Wolves Summit took place in 2022, is the same city where I once struggled to find work. It has become a hub for innovation, entrepreneurship, and global business services. It has reinvented itself by creating its own blueprint that blends history with possibility and tradition with reinvention. That is what entrepreneurship looks like in real systems. Not as a flash of genius, but as the slow architecture of trust, improvement, and emergence. It is the energy that once lived in quiet contributions, now recognized in panels and platforms. And it is the process through which both people and places evolve into something new.
Entrepreneurial Thinking as Process Strategy
The age of Technological wonders still relies on Process improvements, and they don’t start with mandates. That’s something requiring attention and a sense of entrepreneurship when people stand up, not because they are craving for a promotion, but because they believe in transforming without disrupting, observing with discipline, having the courage and ability to take action, sometimes even without being in the spotlight. That’s the kind of posture that matters even more today, in a landscape shaped by global complexity. Business leaders could benefit from recognizing that their systems evolve not because of innovation labs, Black Belts, or C-level initiatives, but when the people maintaining the processes, regardless of rank, are quick to spot inefficiencies, demand clarity, and persist even when companies are riddled with ambiguity.
Cities and companies that thrive are those that architect environments where initiative is not only permitted but expected, where informal influence refines the formal system, and where individuals learn to move from friction to fluency day by day. That form of embedded entrepreneurship is not measured in job titles or pitch decks, but in the daily cadence of process improvement and cultural renewal. To gain more insights from our SSO Network, please join us for our upcoming Process Mining and Intelligence Virtual Summit.