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Archives for October 2010

Appraisal Time Cometh….

October 29, 2010 by admin

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9LLZJFBWdc]

Do you need some training to help you with the appraisal process?

Filed Under: Leadership, management Tagged With: 121s, communication, improvement, Leadership, management, performance improvement, performance management

After Business Link…Time for a change of tack?

October 29, 2010 by admin

So it was confirmed in the White Paper yesterday that Business Links will be gone by the end 2012.  All that will remain is a website, and perhaps a call centre.

So what will replace £154m per year of business information, advice and guidance?

Time for DIY support I think.

Time for businesses and the wider communities of which they are a part to help themselves on their own terms.

I am not talking about ‘local’  Chambers of Commerce or Enterprise Agencies winning contracts from the State to deliver outputs and targets in return for tax payers cash.  That will just recreate the problems of the old regime:

  • post code lotteries,
  • sectoral discrimination,
  • services designed to trigger funding payments and hit targets, rather than work in person centred ways to deliver just in time support to the people who are hungriest for it,
  • groupies who learn to lunch with the bureaucrats and help them to deliver the targets while some people who are the most hungry for support are denied it because they are not aiming to turnover £2m within 24 months, live in the wrong part of town, aren’t working in a priority sector and so on.

DIY culture can provide support that is:

  • more accessible,
  • more inclusive,
  • much less expensive and I suspect,
  • much, much more impactful in terms of creating economic, social and political progress than the current system.

Why, because it is convivial, inclusive, centred on people and relationships, not focussed on policy goals and targets, bureaucracy light, puts experts and expertise in the back seat rather than the driving seat (it is great to have them on board when we need them – but much of this stuff we can figure out for ourselves), dynamic and above all fun!

And I would ensure that everyone who wants it, who really wants to work on making progress, should have access to free, confidential and competent coaching, in the community, from a coach who is supported, and held accountable by local people.  This is both practical, sustainable and affordable with the potential for a tremendous return on investment in terms of business, culture, health and well-being, community development, skills development and so forth.

The radical secret to this is that the coach engages with and works on the clients agenda – not the agendas of the planners and policy makers.

Time to take ‘enterprise development’ out of the ghettos of ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘business support’ and to put it at the heart of our strategies for community development.

Because if we develop the people and the communities then they will build the economy.

I wonder if any of the new Local Enterprise Partnerships will have the courage, foresight and leadership to give it a go?

Filed Under: enterprise, entrepreneurship, management Tagged With: Business Link, community, community development, community engagement, enterprise coaching, entrepreneurship, management, operations, social capital, strategy

Duck Farming, Enterprise, Big Society and Neighbourhood Challenge

October 26, 2010 by admin

This morning saw the launch at NESTA of the Neighbourhood Challenge.  A chance to pitch to become one of 10 organisations to be given 18 months and £150k to galvanise communities to respond to local priorities.

Much talk of hyperlocal websites, community organisers, big society, radical shifts in power and areas of low social capital.  All good stuff.  But not the kind of things I hear when I am talking with people in communities in Leeds about their priorities.  These things are not their concerns.  They are the concerns of policy makers and funders.

It reminded me of  the launch of the Local Enterprise Growth Initiative.  A very sage colleague of mine said to me at the time,

Mike, I have concerns about this programme.  These people don’t understand enterprise.  I think if the minister had stood up and said that ‘The future of our communities lies in duck farming, and so today I am launching a major new programme to promote duck farming in our most deprived communities’ we would have had much the same audience nodding and clapping.  These people know how to write bids.  They know how to manage projects. But do they really know about enterprise?

I hope that this mornings audience was more versed in community organising, social capital and community.

And less versed in snaffling up money on behalf of the communities that they serve.

I am sure many communities will put forward bids.  And I expect that people from outside of their communities will sit in judgement and decide.

And there is the rub.

Filed Under: Community, Leadership Tagged With: Aspirations, Big Society, community, community development, engagement, Government, innovation, Leadership, Leeds, Motivation, Power, Regeneration, regeneration

More on Creating Jobs…and Delaying Transformation

October 25, 2010 by admin

Will Hutton’s piece in The Observer this weekend has some very useful insights. He has looked back at how the private sector ‘created’ 1.2 million jobs in the recovery from the last recession between 1993 and 1999.  (Interesting to note that ten years on it is many of these jobs that were created less than a decade ago that are now going….)

This time around the Government needs the private sector to create 2.5 million new jobs if the economy is to recover according to plan. Last time around we ‘created’ 900 000 jobs in business and financial services – and look how that panned out.  But this time the forecasters are saying that business and financial services is likely to shed 300 000 jobs.  I have written before about how the natural instinct of employers is to destroy (or at least off-shore) jobs not create them.

So where is our equivalent of ‘financial services’ this time around?  Where is the sector that can create the jobs that provide the ‘simple key to a set of interlinked problems‘

Well, the obvious place to look has to be in ‘green’ jobs.  If climate change is as big a gig as it has been billed then we need to lag, insulate and glaze like never before. We need to install solar panels, wind turbines and hydro-electric units unless we want to slowly poach in the products of our own carbon hedonism.  And while some of this will be about large engineering projects much of it will need to be done at the neighbourhood level.  It is work that has to be done in our houses and gardens.  On our streets.  This sounds like it might meet the criteria for ‘good work’ for many.

But how do we make this work ‘pay’ in a recession hit City?  Where does the money come from to make it happen?

The current plan is to make the recovery work by pushing hard for further ‘economic growth’, driven by large investments in export.  I guess the short hand is that instead of borrowing money from the Far and Middle East our businesses learn to sell more to them, profitably.  I am not yet quite sure what we have that those with the money need to buy – but there must be something.  Biotechnology no doubt.  Arms perhaps – that has always been a historical stalwart.  Premier League football teams.

So our strategy is to compete, profitably, in global export markets.  And we will finance this additional export by persuading the banks to ‘lend more’ (where have I heard that before). It is a familiar story and one that, even if it works in the medium term, is surely both unsustainable in the long and changes nothing.  It leaves us still reliant on sustaining rapid economic growth and creating profits for the wealthy and jobs for the rest of us.  But, if it works in the short term we can increase the tax take and use it to fund a whole load of green jobs.

We can put off transformation for another day.

Filed Under: Community, Leadership Tagged With: community, community development, Government, Leadership, Regeneration, regeneration

What Does Big Society Mean to You?

October 20, 2010 by admin

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rql8rkZy9ek]

  • All things to all people?
  • A revolution in service design and delivery – co-production and co-design?
  • Trusting people more?
  • A fundamental re-distribution of power?
How will it/might it play out in your neighbourhood?

What are your thoughts?….

Filed Under: Community, Leadership Tagged With: community, community development, engagement, Government, innovation, Leadership, person centred, Regeneration

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