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E-mail to an Enterprise Professional

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If I said enterprise not entrepreneurship then I was too strong.

It is just that we can help people to develop their enterprising soul in so many more and varied arenas – many of which are more intrinsically attractive and powerful media than ‘business’ – especially to young people.  Musicianship, sports, art, food, writing, wildlife, gardening, web 2.0 etc etc.  Why nail ‘enterprise’ to ‘business’ so much of the time?  It just serves to alienate lots of people for whom the world of business seems phoney, vain, self serving, venal and corrupt.

Azjen’s stuff is interesting.  My problem with it is that it presupposes a set of behaviours that we are trying to move people towards.  ie an officially sanctioned version of what constitutes the enterprise curriculum.  I know that these exist – but I question their value.  I believe that the way in which each of us is enterprising is distinctly personal and probably neither transferable nor generic. It is an expression of our personality, culture and our experience as much as of our aspiration.  Enterprise education is therefore about drawing out what is within rather than grafting on what is (according to a gap analysis against our framework) ‘missing’.  It is about helping people to become fully themselves, not to fit our template for enterprise/entrepreneurship.

The fact that you might find enterprise conceived this way hard to measure is not a major concern of mine.  However I KNOW FOR CERTAIN that if we engage more people in this process of self discovery and emergence, a massively high proportion of them will go on to do enterprising and very possibly entrepreneurial things.  Invest in this and you will get increased wellbeing – and there is plenty of cash being spent on that!  Hint towards strategic repositioning, broadening income streams and increasing impact for your organisation.

From a more enterprising community will come more entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, actors, writers, intrapreneurs, political activists and entrepreneurs.  It is this idea of what constitutes an enterprising community that we should develop. Hint – it is not one where the measure of TEA =6%.

To develop a more enterprising community we need to help community activists and gatekeepers, to develop much more benign and open attitudes to the potential of enterprise as a tool for community and personal development.  All the time it looks like a thinly veiled government plot to reduce benefits and increase tax take we can not expect to be welcomed with open arms – especially when the cash runs out – as it will.

Listening to the Millionaire MBA was really insightful for me on this idea of the personalisation of enterprise where, even in the narrow field of high growth entrepreneurship, successful entrepreneurs accredited their success to a vast and often conflicting range of different behaviours, models, ideas and values.  Kalms and Roddick both had very different takes on the politics and practice of branding – yet they both exploited the practice wonderfully.  Similar examples are legion.

Success in business, success in life depends fundamentally on becoming YOU – not conforming to the policy makers aspiration of the ideal citizen.  Enterprise is about the emergence of identity not its manipulation by the Treasury.  So come on enterprise educators.  Let’s drop the obsession with ‘business’ and get on with the real work of educating more enterprising souls.

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Why We Must Develop People and not Entrepreneurs

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Economic growth is supposed to deliver prosperity. Higher incomes should mean better choices, richer lives, an improved quality of life for us all. That at least is the conventional wisdom. But things haven’t always turned out that way.

An even stronger finding is that the requirements of prosperity go way beyond material sustenance. Prosperity has vital social and psychological dimensions. To do well is in part about the ability to give and receive love, to enjoy the respect of your peers, to contribute useful work, and to have a sense of belonging and trust in the community. In short, an important component of prosperity is the ability to participate meaningfully in the life
of society.

This view of prosperity has much in common with Amartya Sen’s vision of development as ‘capabilities for flourishing’.

The ‘iron cage of consumerism’ is a system in which no one is free.

It’s an anxious, and ultimately a pathological system. But at one level it works. The system remains economically viable as long as liquidity is preserved and consumption rises. It collapses when either of these stalls.

Prosperity without growth?
The transition to a sustainable economy
Professor Tim Jackson
Economics Commissioner
Sustainable Development Commission

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Never Discourage Anyone…But Don’t Motivate Them Either

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Never discourage anyone … who continually makes progress, no matter how slow. – Plato (427 BC – 347 BC)

Never.  NEVER!  NEVER!

I wish the judges of enterprise competitions would understand the importance of this.

At the grand finals of a recent dragon’s den type event (which included the usual cocktail of local business people, ‘would have been’ apprentices and celebrity millionaires on the judging panel) 6 finalists were asked to pitch their ideas.

The setting was the enormous stage in the Main Hall of a local University.  Powerpoint, radio mics, lapel mics, comperes.  It had the lot.

The audience?  A couple of hundred family and friends, enterprise professionals and housing types.  Some of the finalists took to this platform like a duck to water.  For others it was more like lambs to the slaughter.  I suspect for none of them was this a situation that could REALLY be justified as a legitimate and essential part of their ‘enterprise education’.  For most it was certainly not timely.

The task?  Deliver a 6 minute pitch about your business/start up idea and then face 6 minutes of questionning, while dealing with problems with both sound and AV systems of farcical proportions.  These were so acute I began to think they were deliberatley staged to test participants’ ability to think on their feet.  I am still not sure if the computer maintenance business sabotaged their own powerpoint to make some sort of point?

And the judges seemed to have available to them one of two responses.  The first were variations of  ‘You have something’, ‘You will make this work’, ‘Whatever you try you will find a way’.  At least one of the judges seemed to be able form this response based on just what people looked like!

The second was ‘You have got a problem’, ‘You have got nothing’, ‘It is terribly confused’, ‘Your name doesn’t work’.

It is hard to know which of these is responses is more dangerous.

I am sure the event and the competition that led upto it was a great success for funders.  Lots of PR, a big dinner etc.  But can we really say this is community engagement in enterprise?

I suspect that some of the competitors found the whole process deeply discouraging.

Interestingly the winner and runner up were both graduates.  Another wonderful example of enterprise skimming?

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Community Anchors: Regeneration Cause or Effect?

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Community Anchors are independent, community-led organisations. They are at the heart of their communities, physically and psychologically.  They are able to respond in a holistic way to local problems and challenges, by giving local people support to act.

Community Anchors come in many different shapes, forms and structures but they all share this basic purpose of animating and co-ordinating progress.  You can read more about them here and here.

It seems that there is a high correlation between communities that experience successful regeneration and the development of effective Anchor Organisations.

This has led many regeneration funders to seek to establish Anchor Organisations in ‘failing’ communities in the belief that they can weave their magic and turn things around.  And perhaps they can.

But I have a slight concern.  I would hypothesise that Anchor Organisations emerge from communities that are already working actively at their own regeneration.  They are a natural evolution as independent people and community organisations begin to reach out to each other in the realisation that only through association can they become more effective in their work.

Their success depends to a very large extent on the timing being right and incumbent diverse and fragmented community groups recognising that the development of a successful Anchor Organisation is in their best interest.  This realisation and consensus can take many years to accrue.

If this hypothesis is correct then we should expect Anchor Organisations that have been artificially seeded by external funders to find it tough going.   The local incumbents may not yet have reached the limits of their own development.  They may not yet see the need for the anchor.  They may see it as yet another project foisted on them by funders by more money with sense.

Instead of acting as midwifes to the birth of a wonderful new baby, regeneration professionals then end up putting a premature and often unwanted delivery into some very expensive intensive care – if the baby gets born at all.

I have had the privilege of working with some highly successful Anchor Organisations – which emerged from local people and groups in response to local circumstances and opportunities.  I have also witnessed Anchor Organisations struggle to get off the ground – and most of these seem to have been primarily ‘funding’ and ‘policy’ driven, conceived by outsiders as an appropriate ‘strategic’ response to the needs of local communities.

If my hypothesis is right then Anchor Organisations are a naturally emergent property of communities that are already on the up.  They are an effect of regeneration rather than a cause.

And instead of trying to seed them in communities where they perceive there is a need, funders should focus on facilitating local groups until such time as they decide that the time is right for an Anchor Organisation to emerge.

A leader is best when people barely know he exists,

when his work is done,

his aim fulfilled,

they will say: we did it ourselves.

Lao Tzu

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Surrealism is Alive and Well and Living in Leeds

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I had an eventful afternoon yesterday.  In order to vote I had to pop into electoral services in the Town Hall as my postal vote had failed to materialise.  A polite, efficient, helpful and very professional service. Well done to the electoral services team at the council.

Vote registered I then visited a fantastic project in Hunslet called Involve led by Kris Clayden.  Based in the old Salvation Army building – which is a bit of a 1970s concrete carbuncle – Kris and his team provide a service to young people from South Leeds who have been permanently excluded from school.

Delivered on a shoe string, through a cocktail of short term funding, working with some of the most challenging young people in Leeds, based in a building that is far from fit for purpose but doing an important job with passion and vigour.  It took me back to my time of working with children in residential care.  You learn a lot in these environments.

My next engagement was for the launch of the Leeds City Workshop.  This is the product of a collaboration between Leeds City Council and one of the major property developers in the city to provide a physical space where planners can engage with communities and developers to discuss plans for the physical regeneration of the city.

The Leeds City Workshop occupies a part of the Wellington Street Marketing Centre where the city developers promote their latest residential, retail and industrial plans to well-heeled entrepreneurs and investors.

On arrival we were served with wine and lime and lemongrass cordial while a string quartet played Bach.  The canapes reflected the tough times in the city – mini shepherds pies, chicken kebabs, crab cakes and and bruschetta.  The patio was hardly sun drenched, but the re-assuring crunch of astroturf underfoot and the views across the city were sublime.

One of the proerty developers who had kindly provided the workshop space, in their Marketing Suite, (three enormous shipping containers sliced, diced and welded together) opened the speeches.  He talked of tough times, but work on physical development of the city goes on.  He  told us how they work all over the country – but no-where else is doing city place shaping work quite as well as Leeds.  Then a council official talking about the significant progress that has been made on the physical development of the city.  How, where development projects are put on hold, they are working hard with developers to put interesting temporary projects in place – seeding lawns, marking out football pitches etc.  How work on the arena will start soon and be completed in 2012.  There si only one small problem – we ‘just’ need a planning permission.  Luckily the head of planning  permissions in the city was in the room – so I am sure that will not be a major problem.

All very impressive.

Then downstairs to see the actual workshop where the planning conversations are taking place.  Without doubt they have created an impressive space.  A square table for 22 people surrounded by high walls draped with impressive and colourful plans of the city.  Acoustics professionally engineered and a state of the art audio visual system showing a film of the future Leeds with the city’s golden owl acting as winged guide from one planning triumph to the next.

This workshop is to be the base for John Thorp, the City Architect and his team to provide them with a more conducive environment for planning than the mundane facilities provided by the council.   Leeds city planners  co-located with and, in part, resourced by the developers – it reminded me of Our Friends in the North.

John seemed much taken by some ‘new’ technology that he heard about.  Some kind of graphics tablets that meant he could draw images directly onto the audio visual system.  No more climbing up ladders balancing felt tip pens and tippex!  Try the Wacom Cintiq John I think you might love it.

The contrast between these two experiences was surreal.  Kris in his 1970s carbuncle in Hunslet and John and the developers in their architect designed and styled acoustically engineered palace in the city with Bach and canapes.

One couldn’t help but feel that somewhere we had not quite the balance right between investing in local people and investing in physical infrastructure.

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