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What Now Leeds…?

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I spent a bit of time yesterday looking at the latest DRAFT ‘Vision for Leeds’, developed by the Leeds Initiative.  It has been under development for months now, and many of us will have contributed ideas through the ‘What If Leeds’ workshops or through the online forum that was set up for the job.  Depending on your point of view this document is either of central importance in influencing the development of the City, or just meaningless verbiage.  The amount of time I have put into this over the last year or so I really hope it is the former.

The new Vision for 2030 has been drafted, including City Priority Plans covering the work of 5 sub-boards:

  • Children and Families
  • Safer and Stronger Communities
  • Sustainable Economy and Culture
  • Regeneration
  • Health and Wellbeing

Clearly there are overlaps between these boards with much of what needs to be done needing co-ordination across several of them.

It is important to recognise that none of these sub boards have any powers. These remain with the partnership member organisations, including The Council, NHS, Police and Fire Authorities, Education, the private and third sectors. The boards simply provide a mechanism through which each organisation’s work can be co-ordinated and perhaps influenced to fit in with the over-arching development of the City.

But back to the draft Vision.

The Vision itself is incredibly bold and ambitious.  As the Vision says, the people of Leeds have spoken – and this is our Vision!

By 2030, Leeds will be locally and internationally recognised as the best city in the UK

By 2030, Leeds will be fair, open and welcoming. Leeds will be a place where everyone has an equal chance to live their life successfully and realise their potential. Leeds will embrace new ideas, involve local people, and welcome visitors and those who come here to live, work and learn.

By 2030, Leeds’ economy will be prosperous and sustainable. We will create a prosperous and sustainable economy, using our resources effectively. Leeds will be successful and well-connected offering a good standard of living.

By 2030, All Leeds’ communities will be successful. Leeds’ communities will thrive and people will be confident, skilled, enterprising, active and involved.

Nothing if not ambitious.

Each of these headline aims are expanded into a number of bullet points, such as:

  • people are treated with dignity and respect at all stages of their lives – (which I love because of the sheer scale of its ambition)
  • we all behave responsibly (which I love because of its sheer idiocy and unwillingness to accept human nature for what it is! Imagine the focus groups defining ‘responsible behaviour’, and the fun that might be had with enforcement!  And we all behave responsibly when?  All of the time?  Some of the time?  Once in a while?  In public places? We might need some kind of ‘responsibility licence’ where we get ‘points’ for irresponsible behaviour.  Too many points and your banned.  Perhaps each community can shape its own definitions of ‘responsible’ allowing us to develop communities with distinct cultures.
  • local people have the power to make decisions that affect us – (I am guessing that in this case the ‘Us’ is the council and its partners – just imagine that, a city where citizens had the power to make decisions that affect the state!  We could call it ….democracy….)
  • a strong local economy driving sustainable economic growth (a local economy! Not a regional, national or global one.  Just imagine that.)
  • work for everyone with secure, flexible employment and good wages – a city of full employment and good (above average?) wages
  • high-quality, accessible, affordable and reliable public transport
  • successfully achieved a 40% reduction in carbon emissions (by 2020)
  • people have the opportunity to get out of poverty (now I would like to think that we could strengthen this to say everyone that wants support to get out of poverty is able to access it and use it to make progress, or some such)
  • community-led businesses meet local needs (look out private ownership – the Peoples Republic of Leeds is after you.  You can go and meet the needs of non locals – but here, we look after our own.  Community led banks, utilities…everything! By 2030.)
Now I love a big hairy audacious goal as much as anyone.  They require great leadership, tremendous commitment, phenomenal communication, a willingness to fail in their pursuit and, usually a lot of time and money.  And if you are going to engage me in the pursuit of a BHAG, you had better be serious about it.  Any hint that this is hot air or political posturing without the commitment and resources to have a real crack…..
The draft vision then starts to move towards implementation in the form of a series of City Priority Plans, one for each of the 5 sub boards.  And here I have some real concerns – because some of our BHAGs get diluted,  BIG TIME.
City Priority Plans
So the Vision (or BHAG) of Leeds being a ‘healthy and caring city’, becomes a 4 Year Priority to ensure that ‘More People Make Healthy Lifestyle Choices’ which gets translated into a Headline Indicator that tracks the number of adults smoking.  A vision that could be something to rally people around becomes a simple quantitative goal that the NHS and Government taxation will ensure happens anyway.
And this is not a one off.
The City Priority Plan for regeneration has a Four Year Priority to ‘Support the recovery of the Leeds Economy’.  And the Headline Indicator for this?  Development of an as yet unspecified number of hectares of brownfield land!
If we are not careful we will end up with a bureaucratic response to the ‘Vision for Leeds’ that will enable the various strategic partners to get on with what they were doing anyway.
At least some of the people of Leeds spoke their minds when it comes to setting the vision for the City.  I think that we now need to speak our minds again when it comes to developing the City Priority Plans.
You can download the full document in pdf format here.  Just click the link for ‘Tuesday 15 March 2011’.  The Vision for Leeds starts on page 37.

High Growth/High Start Up Rates – and why we must not chase them

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Should we throw our limited resources at businesses that we believe have high growth potential or should we just go for lots of start-ups, knowing that a minority of them will experience high growth anyway?  I can imagine LEPS all over the country worrying for seconds over this conundrum.

The plain truth is that both are equally foolish policy goals.

We simply can’t pick winners/high growth businesses. So how do we know which to resource?

And as Drucker said ‘you can’t have the mountain top without the mountain’ . High growth businesses emerge from a strong and vibrant enterprise ecology. An ecology that is diverse, tightly knit and well connected (bridging and bonding, social and cultural capital).

Focus on building the mountain and the top will look after itself.

But please don’t build the mountain by rushing to increase the start up rate.

When we do this we just increase the failure rate too and that undermines aspiration and confidence. So start fewer businesses, but make sure they are good ones, team starts, well thought through and researched. Get survival rates into the 90%s after three years. Not just survival, but successful. Allow these small but significant success show the way to others.

So set up a broad enterprise ecology – lots of people with ideas and the confidence to act on them (this is not just about business but about social impact, culture, festivals, campaigning and so on) and build social networks, communities, that know how to support their members.

Invest your economic development budget in supporting people, who really are committed to making things better, and building communities. Smart, confident people in competent communities will not only give you the economic outputs that you require – but they might just give you something much more interesting as well.

I expect these ideas to be dismissed by those who have High Growth and Mass Start Up Programmes to sell, and by those running economic development teams who have for decades been buying these programmes and commissioning evaluations that say ‘much has been achieved but much remains to be done’.

 

But perhaps some will see that now is as good a time as any to try something new….

 

 

High Growth and High Start Up Rates: Why We Shouldn’t Chase Them

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Colin Bell over at Winning Moves picks over this old chestnut in his latest post.

Should we throw our limited resources at businesses that we believe have high growth potential or should we just go for lots of start-ups knowing that a minority of them will experience high growth anyway?

The plain truth is that both are equally foolish policy goals.
We simply can’t pick winners/high growth businesses.  So how do we know which to resource?
And as Drucker said ‘you can’t have the mountain top without the mountain’ .  High growth businesses emerge from a strong and vibrant enterprise ecology.  An ecology that is diverse, tightly knit and well connected (bridging and bonding, social and cultural capital).
Focus on building the mountain and the top will look after itself.
But please don’t build the mountain by rushing to increase the start up rate.
When we do this we just increase the failure rate too and that undermines aspiration and confidence.  So start fewer businesses, but make sure they are good ones, team starts, well thought through and researched.  Get survival rates into the 90%s after three years.  Not just survival, but successful.  Allow these small but significant success show the way to others.
So set up a broad enterprise ecology – lots of people with ideas and the confidence to act on them (this is not just about business but about social impact, culture, festivals, campaigning and so on) and build social networks, communities, that know how to support their members.
Invest your economic development budget in supporting people, who really are committed to making things better, and building communities.  Smart, confident people in competent communities will not only give you the economic outputs that you require – but they might just give you something much more interesting as well.
I expect these ideas to be dismissed by those who have High Growth and Mass Start Up Programmes to sell, and by those running economic development teams who have for decades been buying these programmes and commissioning evaluations that say ‘much has been achieved but much remains to be done’.

But perhaps some will see that now is as good a time as any to try something new….

In Defence of Start Up Britain…

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I am grateful to Andy from Flexibility for stopping by the site and leaving this comment:

There are weaknesses in the startupbritain site and in the approach.

But it’s not actually a government initiative – it’s an idea that has been promoted to government by a group of businesses, and endorsed by government.

A lot of the criticism I’ve seen has come from other providers of commercial services to small businesses, who are clearly peeved that the startupbritain founders have been more successful in their self-promotion. They should look and learn.

There’s a whiff of sour grapes in the air, for sure …

The comment resonated with me for several reasons and prompted this reply:

Thanks for taking the time to stop by and comment Andy.

I think we are all clear that this is not a government funded initiative.

But Cameron, Osborne and Cable all took significant time out to promote Start Up Britain at what is hardly a quiet time on the world stage, when they themselves were looking for something that they could hold up as part of a ‘strategy for growth.’

By aligning themselves so closely with Government Start Up Britain were always going to split opinion along political lines, even without the controversy caused by ‘weak’ implementation. I think it was Ronald Reagan who said ‘The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’ Well Start Up Britain looks a little that way.

A lot of the ‘criticism’ that you have seen relates to broken links, links to malware, links that fail any test of impartiality, ‘guidance’ that lacks credibility, guidance that misses vitally important areas (like the role of family in friends in financing startups) and guidance that appears ‘self serving’ for the site founders.

Now whether these faults are pointed out by people with their own vested interests in offering commercial services to the sector, or by the sugar plum fairy is really neither here nor there. They are substantial and significant problems that must be addressed quickly. To be fair some have been dealt with. The Warren Buffet Malware link is a thing of the past. But the broken link to the HP ‘offer’ is still with us.

My criticism comes from having spent decades working with a range of organisations on business support, including credit unions, Business Links, Enterprise Agencies, Regional Development Agencies, Chambers of Commerce, Local Authorities and so on. And while most of what they did fell well short of perfection they always took very seriously the need to be impartial, independent and accurate with any guidance offered. Sure, in part this was because they didn’t much fancy the inside of the courtroom, but primarily because they wanted to start their work with small businesses from a premise that says they will ‘Do No Harm’.

I have spent much of the last couple of days looking at the comments of the most vociferous supporters of Start Up Britain, trying to work out a) what precisely is it they find so useful in the site and b) what is their motivation for going public in their praise.

Specifics on what people find useful I have been given little feedback on. Apart from a couple of authors who have told me that it has increased their book sales and newsletter registrations and a couple of vague comments about ‘useful’ links.

What motivates them to go public in their praise? Well perhaps good old fashioned friendship. I have had a number of calls from people saying ‘these are good people behind the project’ and I should ‘support them or shut up’. Well, I am sorry but if the site was founded by Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Bob Geldof and my Mum, I would still be pointing out the same flaws.

Or perhaps supporters are looking to curry favour with what is clearly a powerful groups of individuals with some even more powerful friends. The possibility of having a #bepositive tweet retweeted by a dragon is not to be sniffed at I suppose. I prefer a slightly less fawning approach to engagement myself trusting that they will value robust, objective criticism over the banal nodding heads of the yes wo/men

Or perhaps supporters are looking to position themselves to get their ‘offers’ on the site. A link to your own excellent website on flexible working would make much more sense than that slightly weird ‘shedworker’ link for example. The #startupbritain twitterstream is already filling up with accountants, bookkeepers, designers and printers all looking to do start ups a favour by taking their money from them. Even a car dealer offering £100 of free fuel! Is this the future of Start Up Britain? A price discounting race to the bottom? I hope not.

So conversely it seems to me that it is not just the critics of Start Up Britain who may have the vested interest so much as some supporters with sharp elbows looking to promote their own wares through the site.

That whiff that you are picking up?

Well, yes, there maybe a hint of sour grapes in it. I would be livid if I had worked for decades on providing independent, impartial and competent advice to the sector to have my own efforts dismantled and see this ‘curates egg’ fanfared by Cameron, Osborne and Cable and a bunch of celebrity entrepreneurs.  I am amazed that the mainstream press have not had more of a field day with it to be honest.

But the main smell is a whiff of anger and frustration, laced with just a little hope that perhaps this time we really will be able to build a support network led by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs that models the very best of British enterprise rather the naked self interest and lazy opportunism.

Here’s to the hope.