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Archives for March 2010

Development as Freedom – Enterprise as a Key

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Last night Nobel prize winning Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave an address with Demos and the Indian High Commission.  Sen has spent a lifetime studying poverty, its causes and how it may be alleviated.  His writing is dense, often supported with mathematical arguments.  He is not an easy read.  By his own admission he is a theorist and a researcher.  It is up to others to put his research into practice.

So what does Sen have to say?  How is it relevant to enterprise?  Well here is my interpretation and, no doubt, gross simplification – tentatively offered….

  • Poverty is fundamentally rooted in injustice – the problem is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It had little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity, avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

Clearly Sen is not arguing that everyone should start their own business.  Entrepreneurship is on the agenda but not at the top of it.

He is arguing for enterprising individuals and challenging us to develop our society in a way that encourages and supports them.

Anyone for enterprise?

Development as Freedom – Enterprise as a Key?

by

Last night Nobel prize winning Economist and philosopher Amartya Sen gave an address with Demos and the Indian High Commission.  Sen has spent a lifetime studying poverty, its causes and how it may be alleviated.  His writing is dense, often supported with mathematical arguments.  He is not an easy read.  By his own admission he is a theorist and a researcher.  It is up to others to put his research into practice.

So what does Sen have to say?  How is it relevant to enterprise?  Well here is my interpretation and, no doubt, gross simplification – tentatively offered….

  • Poverty is fundamentally rooted in injustice – the problem is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It had little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity, avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

Clearly Sen is not arguing that everyone should start their own business.  Entrepreneurship is on the agenda but not at the top of it.

He is arguing for enterprising individuals and challenging us to develop our society in a way that encourages and supports them.

Anyone for enterprise?

Entrepreneur – Or Entrepreneurial Seizure?

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More often than not ‘entrepreneur’ is used to describe both a passing phase of ‘start up’ and a lasting role of ‘business management and development’.    The two roles overlap to some degree but demand different dispositions and skills.

In the start up phase the entrepreneur is frequently working alone developing a personal vision and finding ways to make it work, in theory.  They are finding investors and developing plans.  They are researching and shaping their still very malleable ideas until finally they have something on paper that ‘works’.  They talk with advisers and potential customers.  But the business is just an idea.  It is not yet a demanding child; a long term commitment.

Sooner rather than later the infant business develops different needs; sales, management (especially financial management) and systems.  The emphasis shifts from the energy and drive of start up to a different vibe of business development.  Energy and drive are still required but so too is discipline and routine.  The business is no longer on paper where numbers can be changed at the stroke of a key.  It is now a real thing where to ‘change a number’ takes real work and often hard cash.  And the business is there, demanding, all day and every day.

Instead of a single person driving a personal vision it now may require teamwork and people management.  The entrepreneur has to morph into a cocktail that includes some or all of; sales, management, bookkeeper, product/service development, operations management and leadership.  A very few make this transition with relish. But for most it proves difficult.

Many entrepreneurs learn to move on with grace.  The passion, skills and energy that help them bring the businesses into life are not well suited to the more methodical and disciplined demands of business development.  Having been responsible for conception they leave the parenting to others.  They bring in professional ‘management’  while they move on.  This IS the entrepreneur.

But for the majority, who are venturing into entrepreneurship for the first time, this early exit to business ownership is not seriously considered.  The business is set up from the start as a vehicle in which the ‘entrepreneur’ can pursue their trade (social media guru, web designer, window cleaner, whatever).  There is no exit.  They have had what Gerber calls the ‘entrepreneurial seizure’.

Gerber recognised that most people who choose to start a business aren’t really ‘entrepreneurs’ as described above. Instead, they are technicians, craftsmen or artisans who have had what he called “an entrepreneurial seizure“. They have become fed-up with their boss, disillusioned by their employer, made redundant, or increasingly have never been employed and decide to start out on their own ‘Enterprise Fairytale’.

This is the entrepreneurial seizure, and critical decisions must now be taken.  Get them right and the transition to ‘entrepreneur’, and ‘business owner’ may be made.  Get them wrong and the entrepreneurial seizure may be prolonged, expensive and painful.  Society may still label you ‘an entrepreneur’ but you will be both boss and labourer, technician, craftsman or artisan.  What once felt like tremendous progress may soon turn into a trap.

If you learn your entrepreneurial skills at one of the worlds leading business schools you will be taught the skills of starting and owning a business.  You will be taught to avoid the entrepreneurial seizure.  If you learn your entrepreneurial skills in more prosaic settings this lesson may not be taught.  Indeed the working assumption may be that helping you into an entrepreneurial seizure  could be as good as it gets.

It might be perfect for you – but it is not really entrepreneurship.

And when the policy makers lament our ability in the UK to start businesses that consistently achieve global scale, I believe it is because we trap so many of our ‘could be’ entrepreneurs in their own entrepreneurial seizures.

Watch Out for the Vision…

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The point about Visions of the Anointed is that, whether they are co-produced or not, they will always be problematical. They will always create winners and losers. They will always consume vast amounts of time, energy, cash and other resources. And they will always be, at best, contemporary. They never successfully anticipate, and therefore can never be built well for the future.

They provide a damaging diversion, a displacement activity, that allows individuals to continue to blame the planners, the builders and their fellow citizens instead of doing the long hard work of climbing their own personal mountains and seeing how they can help fellow climbers along the way.

Co-production in the Vision of the Anointed is perhaps an impoverished and futile version of ‘active citizenship’?

By ‘engaging’ us in polishing their visions they disengage us from our own.

Communities are the product of citizens leading active and engaged lives in pursuit of progress. Not by getting the spatial infrastructure right.  By shaping plans that we then expect others to deliver.

And if ‘citizens’ can start to set the parameters for Placemaking then we are just replacing one group of the anointed (a professional elite) with another (the proletariat). Sowells’ point in Vision of the Anointed, IF I have understood it properly, is that it does not matter how we choose the anointed, the product of their deliberations WILL be flawed.

I think Drucker was also onto this in his work on meta-economics where he argued that planners can NEVER keep up with the process of enterprise and entrepreneurship as a force for driving social change.

So let’s be careful in our collusion with the anointed in trying to build the perfect cathedral. Let’s take ourselves instead into the bazaar and work on more personal, small scale pursuit of progress.

Anyone for ‘enterprise’ (rightly understood)?