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Archives for October 2008

The Snapping Dog of Recession Is Good News for Mentors

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Over the last three months, searches for mentoring, support and advice have increased by 116%, according to business directory Yell.com.  (Source)

The worrying thing about this is that so many people leave it until the snapping dog of recession is snapping at their heels to seek support.  Often by then it is just too late to do much about it.

However many entrepreneurs feel that tough times give them the licence to make tough decisions that they have avoided making in better times.  This too is a worrying pattern.

The surge is perhaps counter intuitive.  You would think that people would be pulling in their horns and investing less in external support.  So perhaps what they are accessing is free mentoring and support.

Economic Gardening or Economic Hunting?

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Economic Gardening and Economic Hunting are two very different approaches to developing an enterprise culture.

An economic gardening approach sets out to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by investing in local people and their talents, cultures, passions and skills.  It is an endogenous “arising from within” approach to community and economic development.  The starting point for economic gardening says that ‘in this community we have all that we need to build a vibrant and sustainable future’.  It may need careful nurturing to help it thrive but the seeds of our future success are already sown.

The key tools of economic gardening include:

  • building open and accessible networks for potential and current entrepreneurs that foster the exchange of ides and collaboration
  • signposting to existing and continually improving support  services that help local people on their enterprise journey
  • locally available, convivial and very low (preferably no) cost coaching support to help local people to nurture their dreams and aspirations and to believe in their ability to develop them
  • access to commercial finance for local people with investment ready business ideas
  • support services that recognise that everyone has the potential to become more enterprising and don’t just work with those that are already entrepreneurial.

This contrasts with economic hunting which sets to create jobs and entrepreneurial activity by attracting investment and employment into a community from outside.  The starting point here is one that says ‘our community is deficient.  We lack the entrepreneurs to create employment so we have to attract them from elsewhere.  Then perhaps some of the entrepreneurial pixie dust will rub of onto local people.  And if it doesn’t, well at least we will have attracted entrepreneurs who will provide them with jobs.’  This is an exogeneous approach to community and economic development.

The key tools of economic hunting include:

  • the creation of facilities and resources to attract companies or ‘creative class’ members to set up their homes and businesses in our community (NB usually these resources are beyond the means of many local people to access).  If you are in a facility that serves a ‘much better cup of coffee at a higher price’ than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, or if many local people are priced out of your facility, then there is a strong chance that it is the product of economic hunting rather than gardening.
  • the development of inward investment teams and budgets to enable local authorities and regional development agencies to negotiate ‘sweetened’ deals for employers to locate in their communities
  • support services that focus almost exclusively on the ‘already entrepreneurial’ as those who have the potential to create wealth and employment for the rest of us.

Historically most of the investment has gone into economic hunting strategies.

There has been a rise in interest (if not yet investment) in economic gardening.  I see no fundamental reason why the two can’t co-exist in the same community, but they are not always comfortable bed fellows.  Economic hunting usually means changing things to make them convivial to outsiders (better coffee, better carpets and sexy furniture).  Economic gardening means making things really convivial to local people, affordable, local and accessible.

Often community based enterprise development programmes struggle to help local people to access the business support infrastructure that was designed as an economic hunting tool.  It is not designed to be convivial to local people, but to that special breed of entrepreneur from out of town who will pay £3.40 for a posh coffee and £20 an hour to hire a meeting room.  More often than not such facilities fail to win in either of these two market places.

So which tribe do you belong to?  The hunters or the gardeners?

Busy Times!

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Apologies for the lack of blog posts just lately!  So much has been happening:

  • a new mediation training package designed to help you decide whether mediation is right for your organisation
  • a major piece of in-house management development with the Leeds College of Music
  • developing a new programme for Rodney Housing Association in Liverpool
  • providing training to managers in Harrogate Borough Council on effective delegation

as well as several other pieces of work around management, enterprise and entrepreneurship.

In the business of hope

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Our work with enterprise clients is usually about helping them to make and take a decision to change some aspect of:

  • what they do,
  • how they think,
  • how they run their business or
  • their business plans.

In essence we are helping them to take decisions that are ‘hopeful’. The decisions, if acted upon, hold the potential (not guaranteed) to make things better.

‘Hope’ is the essence of the enterprise professionals offer. Hope is a belief in a positive outcome related to events and circumstances in one’s life. Hope is the feeling that what is wanted can be had.

Yet in my experience many enterprise professionals are pragmatists and realists – sometimes uncomfortable when talking about ‘hope’.  After all, “hope is not a plan”.  They encourage their clients to be ‘realistic’ – in essence to be less hopeful and optimistic – about what they might be able to achieve.

Yet hope and optimism provide the basic motive force for human endeavour.  The generate the commitment that makes progress possible.  When we diminish hope and optimism we are diminishing our chances of creating a more enterprising culture.