The Sky’s the Limit

WestJet employees learn many important skills: how to tell good jokes, manage stock options and start new companies

Sep 1, 2008  

by Anthony A. Davis

Some companies have it; some don’t. Call it an entrepreneurial fizz, a can-do attitude that bubbles up through a workforce, infecting a company’s employees and spurring them to fire up their own business ventures.

Microsoft and Google, which both created numerous millionaire employees through stock option offers, famously spawned legions of people who have gone on to launch their own startups. You never hear anyone talk about Wal-Mart that way.

Here in Canada, one company that exudes entrepreneurial spirit like the contrails from a 737 jet is – who else? – WestJet. That’s a boast few observers would make about WestJet’s bitter rival, Air Canada. So what gives? Why does one company crank out entrepreneurs inside its workforce the way another cranks out geriatric greeters?

It would be too easy, and wrong, to boil it all down to cash. The engineers, software developers and even office administrators who first joined Microsoft and Google in their wobbly startup years took on the big risk of working for stock options and lower salaries in lieu of the much higher industry standard salaries they might have earned at established companies. In a sense, those employees were already exhibiting a nascent entrepreneurial spirit just by doing so. And that was something an upstart Microsoft and Google were looking for. But, as fate would have it, those Microsoft and Google boys and girls did very well, thank you. It is said that since Microsoft was founded in 1975, its stock option plan has created more than 10,000 millionaires among its employee ranks. That’s by far the biggest crop of millionaires that any company has ever produced.

Google breeds entrepreneurs at the same alarming rate. It does so in part by allowing its 19,000 employees to spend 20% of their time (one day a week) developing their own projects. If Google likes an employee’s project and hopes to acquire it for itself one day, the company will further fund his or her entrepreneurial work.

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