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Archives for February 2010

The Leash Fetish

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  • Unleashing talent
  • Unleashing creativity
  • Unleashing potential
  • Unleashing enterprise
  • Unleashing entrepreneurship

These aspirations I see nearly every day of my working life.  There is always something or someone to be ‘unleashed’.

But, where is the leash meister?  The evil one who holds us back?

Most systems of parenting, education and employment are designed to establish control, compliance, conformity and predictability.

Perhaps there are some systemic changes that we might make so that the challenge of unleashing is consigned to the history books?

But the real challenge is to recognise that with the transition to adulthood the leash IS off.  

We are free to choose and to act.  But like a dog that has been chained up for too long – when unleashed many of us have little desire to go beyond our former boundaries.

We ‘know’ our place and we stick to it.

The role of the enterprise educator is not to teach about business.  Nor is it to parade in front of students waving tenners inciting them to grab it!  Nor to put on yet another inspirational conference with a secret millionaire, dragon, apprentice or teenage entrepreneurial prodigy.

It is to help us to recognise that the leash has been slipped.  And we can begin the journey of becoming the person that we want.  And to show us how we can help ourselves and our peers to explore what we might be able to achieve through association, collaboration, perseverance, learning and skill.

This is the role of the enterprise educator.

Mentoring Enterprise – the corruption of a powerful process?

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According to Tim Smit over at the School for Social Entrepreneurs all social entrepreneurs should demand a mentor. Far be it from me to disagree with such a luminary but I think not.   It is this kind of sloppy thinking that says we should ‘universalise the particular’ that leads to powerful processes of creative learning being undermined.
Entrepreneurs should seek to develop clarity on what their learning priorities (and which ‘gates’ they need ‘keepers’ to open), and they should be clear on how they are going to learn.
But the truth is that mentoring, while transformational for some, is next to useless for others.
We all have our preferences for learning process.  This truth is a problem for many enterprise support organisations who default to the ‘we’ll provide you with a mentor’ setting because they are more focussed on delivering their neatly pre-packaged service offer, agreed with funders no doubt, than they are in really understanding the needs of their service users.
Many of the mentoring enterprise schemes that I see use poorly trained mentors with even more poorly trained mentees.  There is a lack of clarity about the importance of choosing and using mentors in lifelong professional development, as the provider short cuts this with a ‘matching process’ to force start their own mentoring scheme.  No wonder that often the results are disappointing.
Such schemes tend to put the mentee in a passive role.  Mentoring becomes a process that is done to them rather than a process to help them find the personal and professional relationships that they need to help realise their enterprising vision.
Mentoring is an immensely powerful tool for professional development and the transmission of wisdom.  However poorly designed mentoring programmes, driven by big businesses CSR ambitions, and wads of taxpayers cash have undermined its credibility in the enterprise sector for many.

All entrepreneurs should understand the power of the mentoring process and how it operates in the REAL world (where it is not funded by taxpayers) as it is likely that most of them might need mentoring at some point in their career.   But is should never be a set component of enterprise development programmes and it is certainly not right for all.

So let us stop grabbing the cash and setting up the schemes and develop an understanding of the mentoring process that will serve our entrepreneurs and our communities for many years to come.

Person Centred and Responsive Service Delivery

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I am thinking about developing a workshop to explore what is involved in developing a person centred and responsive mechanism for high quality service delivery.  Relevant to public, private and third sector organisations, this workshop will help to understand the challenges of adopting person centred and responsive methodologies and the very real benefits that come from meeting them head on.

Drawing on both theory and practice I would see the session covering:

  • Why person centred – what does it mean – how does it help?
  • Responsive versus strategic service delivery
  • At the point of engagement – what do we do at the front line?
  • Managing boundaries, outcomes and expectations
  • Building responsive networks
  • Making the financial dynamics work – if we don’t guarantee outputs who will pay?
  • Person centred, responsive and local
  • Moving in the right direction – next steps

Would you be interested?  What else would you like to see covered?

Feedback and comments welcome!

The Single Biggest Problem Facing the Third Sector?

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I think the biggest challenge to the 3rd sector is the prevalence of many to look to the procurement requirements and proclivities of the state rather than looking long and hard at the community, its wants and needs.

A preoccupation with what Government wants to buy over and above developing enterprising services that local communities really want and need will gradually erode what credibility and goodwill the sector retains.

Social enterprises and community development organisations need to face those they purport to serve. Too many good development workers and voluntary organisations have already been ‘bought off’ to deliver the states objectives around obesity, entrepreneurship, smoking cessation, worklessness and so on.

Not only does this make a mockery of community development, it also wrecks the chance of doing good person centred development work in the forseeable future.

The problem is not just the pursuit of government funding and a ‘race to the bottom’ of the ladder for costs of service delivery – but a real and lasting breach of trust with those whom we purport to serve which may take us years to recover.

Those that wish to represent the sector need to make a much better fist of negotiating its relationship with the state. Otherwise the dead hand of the bureacrat will kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

Harvey Nichols as a Force for Good?

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This morning, the very wonderful, Simon on the Streets had bit of a shindig with its supporters in the Fourth Floor Cafe of Harvey Nichols in Leeds.

Now Simon on the Streets is a magical organisation for many reasons.  Not only does it do great work with homeless people in Leeds (with bold plans to expand) but it does it with a philosophy of person centredness and respect for service users that is quite beautiful to see.

But this post is not about Simon on The Streets.

It is about Harvey Nichols.  And me!

I am firmly in the camp that says the economic and social development of Leeds has been far too heavily dependent on the retail and financial sectors.  So when Harvey Nicks came to town I was not one of the first through the door.  I saw it as yet another step in the grand brand invasion of the city I call home.

In fact as I queued to get in I commented to a friend that I had NEVER set foot in Harvey Nicks before, and that I wasgobsmacked that it was my relationship with Simon on  the Streets that had finally lured me in.  I was certainly a ‘fish out of water’.  A one man boycott.

The event itself was wonderfully managed.  Simon on the Streets message as ever gave me goosebumps and bought  a tear to my eye.  But I noticed something else.  The quality of the service in the cafe bar was also a thing of beauty.  They must have served 60 or so hot breakfasts while speeches were being made with barely any intrusion.  No dropped cutlery.  No clanking of china.  Skilled and efficient waiting staff who knew their work.  Not always the case!

After the event the General Manager of Harvey Nichols, Brian Handley introduced himself to me.  He had heard me mention that I had never been in before and asked me why.  So I told him about my one man, informal boycott of ‘up market cathedrals of consumption’!

I then listened to Brian tell me about many pieces of work that Harvey Nicks do to raise money for social enterprise in the city, but perhaps more importantly how they use their purchasing power to support Yorkshire based business, their venues to provide showcases for Leeds based charities and artists and their partnership work with 11 mills still making cloth in Yorkshire to help keep them in business.  He told me about the local sourcing of produce in the Cafe Bar.  And he told me about the pride and effort that they put into training retail as almost a craft occupation.  He also told me that Prada are a real supporter of Yorkshire textiles.  Some of my prejudices were well and truly put to the test, and exposed for what they were – prejudices.

Now I doubt that everything is the Harvey Nicks garden is rosy.  I expect there are chinks, perhaps vast gaping holes, in their CSR agenda.  There must be issues around carbon footprints and food miles.  I am sure there will be people thatwill tell me about their bad practices.  But here was a man who clearly was proud that he and his employer were doing what they could to make sure that not only does Harvey Nicks provide a great return to shareholders and a wonderful retail experience to customers, but doing it in  away that creates as much good as possible and does as little harm as practicable.

I have written before about my cynicism about the self congratulatory nature of some of the social enterprise sector and their demonisation of  ‘for profits’, about how there are simply good businesses, bad businesses and a whole lot that fit somewhere in the middle.  ‘For profit’ does not mean ‘bad’.  And being a social enterprise is by no means a guarantee of ‘goodness’.

Here was a partnership working for both Simon on the Street and Harvey Nichols.  And here was a ‘for profit’ ‘cathedral of consumption’ doing great work to keep local businesses going and support the third sector.

It was a useful reminder of my own message that there are just good businesses and bad businesses and sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.

And to beware my own prejudices!