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So You Wannabe…An Entrepreneur?

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Timothy Spall last night told a story recounted to him by that great British legend of the stage and small screen Richard Briers.

Briers’ daughter had said something like, ‘Dad, I have made up my mind.  I want to be an actress.’

Briers replied ‘Want?  Want?  Want is not enough!  To succeed you must HAVE to become an actress.  If you have to become an actress then I will roll up my sleeves and help. If you just want to be an actress then forget it.’

The story made me smile as I use almost the identical line when I am working with people who tell me they want to start a business, or they want to become an entrepreneur.  I often ask ‘Is this something that you HAVE to do?  Are there no other alternatives that you could pursue?  Is there NOTHING more important than this in your foreseeable future?

In fact I will often go further, telling them all I can about the life of the entrepreneur.  How it can take you away from family and friends, lead you into debt, consume your life and damage your health.  Of course we explore the upsides as well but those downsides are the things that will derail the process if not considered, if the desire is not sufficient.

And then I will move the focus away from ‘becoming an entrepreneur’ which is such a vague concept as to be practically meaningless and will focus on what it will be like when they have their business up and running.  What it is like to be sole trading as a furniture upholsterer, or a plasterer.  What the transition will be like going from being a professor in the Biochemistry Department to being a part owner of a biosciences company working with venture capitalists to commercialise their intellectual property.  Because being an entrepreneur is all about managing transitions.  Starting with one lifestyle and ending up with another which is very different – and hopefully better.

Enterprise really IS about the emergence of identity.  About shaping lives.

Getting to the Nub of Things

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Many coaches consistently fail to get to the point where their client is really going to tell them anything worth listening too.   They rarely get to the nub of things.

The conversation is often a pretence where both parties say the things they need to say in order to satisfy their respective bureaucracies with little or no real intention of any transformation taking place.   They play the game and keep the scores.

Many ‘enterprise coaches’ are little more than glorified sales people for the enterprise fairytale and act as modern day pressgangs to fill workshops and provide a ‘continual source of referrals to the mainstream’ which is neither resourced nor trained to deal with them properly.

So much talent and potential is lost because we rush its development and plug it into systems designed to provide management with outputs rather than provide people with a real chance of transforming their lives.  We put people into systems instead of into potentially transformational relationships.

Getting to the point where we can have really powerful, transformational conversations takes time, real skill and a lot of trust.  This is the work of the enterprise coach.

So what is at the nub of things?  What are the kinds of conversations that transform lives?  In my opinion they are conversations about identity, about being someone that you can face in the mirror every morning.  About developing passi0n, commitment, resilience and perseverance

Enterprise for All – Some Reflections

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Enterprise for All was a one day conference organised on behalf of emda by Unleashing Enterprise with a mixture of key note presentations and workshop sessions.

A few things really struck me about it.  From the key note speakers and a tour of the exhibition hall it was clear just how much of a grip business and economic development interests have on the enterprise agenda.   Enterprise really IS all about business.  Business start ups, business growth and business education.

Except of course enterprise has relevance in many, perhaps all, spheres of life.  It relates to parenting, cello playing, footballing and planning.  To mathematics, politics and dance.  An enterprising approach helps with business, yes, but it helps with so much more as well.  Because an enterprising person is someone who has a theory about the direction ‘in which progress lies’, and has the confidence, strategies and skills that they need to pursue it.  By conflating enterprise with business we do it a disservice.  We alienate many who should be our natural allies, and we repel some who we should attract.

Business is a great vehicle for teaching enterprise – but so too is sport, art, history and drama.  In Bolivia, enterprise education has been conducted largely through the power of classical music.

I was deeply surprised when another  speaker said that ‘Business is Easy’.  This has not been my experience.  Business is hard.  And small business is really hard.   There have been times when it has been so difficult that I have though it must be me doing it wrong.  And I talk with some of my closest confidantes about my fears and they tell me ‘No – it’s not you, it IS hard’.  One mistake and your reputation is shot.  It can take over your life and ruin your relationships with friends and family.  It can leave you depressed and in debt.  It can also be the most wonderful platform for personal development and a fulfilled life.  It really is a double-edged sword!

I have never met an entrepreneur, until yesterday, who has told me that business is easy.  This is the ‘Enterprise Fairytale’.  I would agree that it is relatively easy to theorise about business.  To develop ideas, to refine them and to think about business plans. To get advice from business experts and to act on it, or not.  All this is quite easy.  On paper, it certainly isn’t differential calculus. But in practice it is something else.  It is easy to imagine yourself juggling, or being an astronaut or a pop star.  Actually doing it is another thing.  It is NEVER easy!   Good enterprise education needs to help learners to recognise the ‘double edged’ nature of the sword and recognise that a career in business will  not be a glorious extension of a 2 day facilitated workshop held in the comfort of the  college hall.  It just won’t be.  Good enterprise education nurtures the resilience, character, determination and commitment that is required to succeed in business or any other challenge that life throws our way.  It teaches the importance of craft and skill, of persistence and commitment.  And knowing when might be the right time to give up.

And the strange thing is that in my experience, the more honest we are about the challenges of entrepreneurship, the emotional, analytical, physical and financial challenges involved the more likely we are to get good, enduring entrepreneurs.  The more we help people to recognise how hard it is to leave the comfort zones and try something different the more likely they are risk it.

I was very struck when another keynote speaker told us about a primary school class that wanted to sell him a presentation.  An 8-year-old offered to sell  him the copyright!  Now I am all for educating young people about the importance of intellectual property, but at 8?  Is this really what enterprise education should be for such young children?  A Primary Business Curriculum?

Now this is a contested area.  No-one holds the truth on this.  In enterprise education we have little consensus on curriculum, assessment or methodology.  But I know that if my 8-year-old had come home from school telling me that they had been learning about copyright I would be seriously questioning the schools priorities for primary education.  I have witnessed primary classes being taught the difference between tangible and intangible brands. And I was once approached in a  Leeds hotel by a girl of 6 or 7 wearing a badge that said ‘Sales Executive’.  She knew exactly what margin she would make if she could sell me the beetroot plant that she was brandishing.  Are we really introducing appropriate content at the right time into the classroom?  Do we deserve the respect of our colleagues as educators when we teach this in the primary school?  I am not so sure.

Throughout the day I was approached by a number of people who made very similar comments.  ‘Mike, I agree with you wholeheartedly, but we only get paid for outcomes related to business.  I know it isn’t right, but if that is what the funders are paying for that is what we have to provide. It is what the system demands’.   I love the irony of this.  ‘We teach enterprise by following instructions’.  But I think it points to a wider challenge for the policy makers and the funders.  Does this ‘head on’ approach to entrepreneurship really work?

The title of the conference was also telling – Unleashing Enterprise.  Much of the socialisation of young people is all about putting the leash on them.  We value compliance, academic achievement, team playing and conforming.   Those that dare to see things differently, to do things differently, to paddle their own canoe, tend to be bought back into line, or expelled.   And it is not only enterprise that we struggle to unleash.  Creativity, leadership, innovation, potential…all of these have been subject to the leash fetish.

I have not done much on the enterprise conference circuit.  I have worked in community centres, village halls and at kitchen tables helping individuals and communities to develop their own approach to a more enterprising future.    It was a new experience for me. I pushed myself out of my comfort zone – and as always happened I learned a lot!

We may not be Mother Glasgow but perhaps we too are clipping wings?
In the second city of the Empire
Mother Glasgow watches all her weans
Trying hard to feed her little starlings
Unconsciously she clips their little wings
…
Among the flightless birds and sightless starlings
Father Glasgow knows his starlings well
He wont make his own way up to heaven
By waltzing all his charges in to hell
Perhaps it is time for a more inclusive, person centred and responsive approach to enterprise.  Where development is not so tightly wedded to GDP but instead to a freedom to develop our capabilities.  To develop our abilities to live the kinds of lives that we want to lead.
Or perhaps we should just keep on ‘living the vida loca’ and hoping  that we can make it last.

Entrepreneurship or Rockin’ Da Vote?

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There are a number of competitions out there designed to ‘promote enterprise’.   In some of them the key arbiter of success is the ability of the would be entrepreneur to turn out a vote.  Whether it is about getting your pals to turn up at a dinner and vote (old skool) or winning support on the web as in Barclay’s One Small Step Competition this is a puzzling phenomenon.

Prizes are awarded in part on the ‘quality’ of your business idea, as established by judges, and on the number of people who you can persuade to ‘click or tick’.  Kind of Dragon’s Den meets Britain’s Got Talent.  A popularity contest with business plans.

I would rather see bankers, and others with cash to spare, investing in businesses rather than giving prizes through competitions.  Competitions identify winners and losers. We should be identifying ‘investment ready’ and ‘not yet investment ready’ if we are really interested in supporting entrepreneurs.  And what happens if the winner is not yet investment ready?  Or they require investment at a different time or level to the prize?  What if it is not cash that they need?

Competitions work well for the publicists and the marketeers.  But I am not sure who else they really serve.  Let’s put our time and money into proving real support on the journey to investment readiness.

Let’s get back to the work of making informed investment decisions instead of awarding prizes in swirls of publicity.  Of helping entrepreneurs on the long journey toward investment readiness that rarely fits neatly with competition deadlines.   This way more entrepreneurs might get the right level of investment at the right time rather than a few ‘lucky’ prize winners.  I remember hearing one ‘prize winner’ wondering how to spend the £10k she had just won and making some quick and bad investment decisions to fit in with competition timescales.  Her business is no longer trading.  Another asked me whether I thought the cheque made out in his name was for him or for his business?  The last I heard he was splitting it 50:50.

I also believe that the ability of the entrepreneur to raise clicks and votes is a poor indicator of success.  Let’s face it on this basis Paris Hilton is going to give Warren Buffet a beating.  Ashton Kutcher would be a nailed on winner.  Unless of course the other finalist was Steven Fry.  The best connected and most socially networked do not have a monopoly of good ideas.  Nor, in general are they the ones for whom the investment might make the biggest difference.  Such voting mechanisms are surely discriminating unfairly?

As it says on the One Small Step website

‘it’s worth getting supporters on board now, so you’ve got plenty of local backing in time for voting’

And this perpetuates another myth.  That business ideas are in competition with each other.   That we have to choose winners and losers, when the market will do this much more effectively in its own time. In fact we should be looking to help everyone with passion, talent, commitment and a viable business idea.  There is always room for another good idea.  Investors will back propositions that meet their  criteria for risk and reward.  I am not convinced that creating winners and losers in very public competition really helps.

It is not about the competition for first place but about the development of an entrepreneurial ecosystem in which players collaborate and support each other as much, if not more than they compete.  I have seen how competition based on popularity can damage local entrepreneurial ecosystems as the community fragments into ‘camps’.

So, if you are about to sponsor yet another ‘enterprise competition’ please just pause for thought.  Could your money be better used to create a sustainable and enterprising society?

Craft, Motivation and Wasted Talent

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Richard Sennett’s ‘The Craftsman‘ is well worth the considerable effort it has taken me to read it.  Although very well written many of the ideas it tackles are not easy!

He makes the point that we have used tests of intelligence and education to smear citizens along a bell-shaped curve of distribution that is in fact very flat and very wide.  As a result we have come to believe that ‘ability’ is not anywhere near uniformly spread through society.  And this belief has been used to justify the increased public investment in the education of the most able and the relative paucity of opportunity offered to those who, in the tests, appear to be ‘less able than average’.

Sennett then argues that this is a social construction with little basis in facts, outside of educational IQ tests such as the Stanford Binet.  These tests rely on questions to which there is an answer – either right or wrong.  They cannot deal with questions where the answer is a matter of opinion or insight.  Where the answer is contestable.  This especially, argues Sennett, serves to discriminate against those whose talents might lie in developing real craft skills.  Sennet is at great pains to point out that these are not just about traditional crafts but anything where learning happens over a long period of application through experience, reflection and adjustment.   This includes many roles that are incredibly relevant in modern society.  People who are capable of this craft type learning may do poorly on the Stanford Binet and its equivalents (SATS) and from that point on they are socialised as ‘low ability’.  Or those that thrive on the assessment regime they are socialised as ‘Gifted and Talented’.  It is hard to know which is more damaging!

This socialisation has little to do with true potential or inherent capability and more to do with what we choose as a society to recognise, label and invest in.

Sennett’s argument (again assuming that yours truly has understood it) is that capability is MUCH more evenly distributed – we just might need to search for it with a much more open and creative mind.  Many more of us are capable of doing ‘good work’.  This insight would have enormous implications for how we organise education.  Sennett says;

“Motivation is a more important issue than talent in consummating craftsmanship”

Socialisation serves to disconnect many of us from our talents as they are neither recognised not valued.  The capabilities remain, but our motivation is eroded.  Re-establishing motivation then becomes more important than extant talent.  Indeed the key motivation required to renew the search for potential and to enter into a period of ‘craft type’ learning action, reflection and adjustment, often over a period of years until the capability becomes a craft.

Another leading academic Nobel prize wining Amartya Sen also talks about capability, its recognition and development as a central tool in poverty reduction.  He also recognises the structural processes that serve to justify the enormous gaps between the haves and the have nots on a global scale.

Perhaps one of the vital roles of the enterprise coach is to help people to challenge the way that society has shaped them and to renew the search for ‘capability’ – the potential of those who use our services that has often been suppressed by societies warped, distorted and narrow perceptions of ability.

This is the Craft of the Enterprise Coach.  And it may have nothing to do with starting a business.