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Knowing ‘Bugger All’

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I spent a very pleasant afternoon recently in the offices of New Start Magazine researching what makes for an inspirational or transformational relationship and I came across this wonderful quote:

In my ethnographic work, with a head full of American methodologies and theory, I thought I knew a bit about local government, urban and social policy and the theory of community and activism.  However, I knew as Betty was to tell me, “Bugger all!”.  All I knew was learned, abstract and distinct from reality.  Betty knew it from 60 years of lived experience.

Neil McInroy Chief Executive, CLES

This is why we need to have a process for community development that is not controlled by local government but by the lived experience of local people.

Hunger for Inspiration

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Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think this offers us some powerful, but largely ignored, clues as to how we should design our enterprise development services.  We need to offer a service that helps people to seek, find and, crucially, act on their inspiration.

Their inspiration – not our policy goals.

Their inspiration – not ‘our’ desire to get ‘them’ off benefits or back into work.

Their inspiration – not our idea of ‘opportunities’ designed to meet employer demands.

Because the reality is that MOST enterprise development services are not designed to inspire.  They are designed to teach people how to commoditise themselves.  How to ‘fit in’ with the needs of the economy.

Take a good, honest look at your services.  Are they really designed to develop the users agenda – or to channel them into ours?

Perhaps this is why we are continually engaging ‘inspirational’ speakers in the false hope that we can somehow put back into our service a missing essence.  An essence that will always be missing until we change the assumptions around which our enteprise services are built.

The cornerstone of a service based on the hunger for inspiration would be a relationship in which users can be open and honest about their hopes and aspirations.  A relationship, not a workshop, or a series of workshops or advice.  A relationship.

A relationship that recognises that development takes time.  That it will feature highs and lows, lapses and relapses.

Because it is only in a relationship, characterised by compassion, competence, respect, belief, optimism, commitment and skill that people will be open and honest about their hopes and dreams and start to get in touch with what inspires them.  It is only in such a supportive relationship that people will really dare to dream and act.  It is I believe only through a relationship that people can really find inspiration and the resources for transformation.

  • So how would we market such a service?
  • Where would we find clients?
  • How would we pay for it?
  • Who would manage it?
  • What might we expect from it in terms of outputs and value for money?

But the big question that always gets asked here is about affordability.  A genuinely personalised service.  Delivered primarily through 121 conversations – isn’t that ridiculously expensive?  Well no its not.  The numbers stack up well in comparison to competing services.

The real challenge here is changing the mindset of service suppliers and commissioners.  Helping them to recognise that our communities are not full of the feckless and ignorant who need to be fixed.

They are full of people seeking inspiration and the power to act effectively on it.

Full of people who would love to become the kind of person that they know they could be.

As soon as we start designing our services around these assumptions we might get some much more positive results.

Interested?

Should Enterprise Education Be More Than Business Literacy?

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I was approached by a young woman in the Holiday Inn in Garforth yesterday.  She tugged gently at my trousers and asked me if I was interested in buying.

She was clutching a beetroot plant in a wonderfully hand painted plant pot, with a colourful and neatly laminated label saying ‘BEETROOT’.  She must have been six or seven and barely reached waist height.  She had a badge on her that gave me the name of her school and her job title in the social enterprise that they ran.  She was the “Sales Executive”.

She was one of the students from Leeds taking part in a wonderful event called ‘Social Enterprise Takes Off’ organised by the brilliant team of Enterprise Ambassadors at Education Leeds, led with so much enthusiasm, energy and knowledge by Mike Cooper and Chris Marsden.

“Do you want to buy my beetroot?” she asked.

“I would love to” I said, “but tell me, what should I do with it when I go on holiday?”

“That’s not  a problem – just put it in a bag and take it with you!”

“Ok. How much is your beetroot plant?” I asked sensing that she had not really grasped my holiday concerns.

“£1”

“And do you know how much profit you will make if I buy your plant for £1?”

“Yes, about 80p.”

Sold – in so many ways!

The event was wonderful – not withstanding the slightly tired and dated environs and buffet of the Holiday Inn.  Some great speakers including Magic Man John Hotowka, Beermat Entrepreneur Mike Southon (“some people become entrepreneurs because no-one else will give them job – like my mate Mike Chitty over there” – thanks for that one Mike!), Make Your Mark Ambassador Sabirul Islam (check him out) and Nick Bowen inspirational head teacher of St Benet Biscop RC High school and advocate for Benet Enterprise – a school owned social enterprise into everything from professional theatre production (from scriptwriting to travelling productions) and event management to video making.  They are tapping into the current (and I suspect temporary) rich veins of public funding for all things social enterprise and turning over hundred of thousands each year raising significant funds to improve facilities at the school.  Apparently more skeptical members of staff  ‘were soon won over when they saw the laptops and other kit that the ‘surpluses’ from Benet Enterprises were able to supply‘.  Setting aside the issue of using unpaid pupils and adults paid by the state to compete with local businesses for a minute they are doing some remarkable work.

Mercifully not a Dragon, Failed Apprentice or (not so) Secret Millionaire in sight.  (I have no problem if they bring real substance and experience and engage fully, ‘Yorkshire boy done good’ Carl Hopkins is a great example of this – it is when they just bring their ‘celebrity’ and a carefully honed sales pitch for their latest book/consultancy/educational board game/business development workshop that I struggle.)

But the star attractions were the students working (and I mean WORKING) an exhibition space that felt more like a Mediterranean souk than a fusty business exhibition.  As soon as I got my wallet out to exchange my pound for my beetroot I was beset by passionate sales executives hawking fair trade chocolate, handmade wooden signs (“any design, any wood you like”) and glassware. Young people selling with energy and passion, plants, books, woodwork, plastics, ‘stone’ plant troughs made from polystyrene.  Young people who clearly loved their businesses and their products.  Contrast this with the (almost uniformly) sombre, conservative and impassionate business exhibitors at the Chartered Institute of Housing a few miles up the road in Harrogate.

I have no doubt that work of the Enterprise Ambassadors from Education Leeds and the hard working pupils and teachers who make these things happen will lead to a much more business literate generation in the future.  And that matters.

However there is more to excellent ‘enterprise education’ than business literacy and great teamwork.

It is about understanding passion and potential whether that lies in ‘business’, ‘ballet’, ‘beatboxing’ or ‘beetroot’.

It is about belief in ‘self’ as an active agent in shaping the future and building a better life, society and world.

It is about the power of education and the development and realisation of potential in whatever Ken Robinson refers to as your ‘Element’.  And the point of engagement for that, indeed the vehicle for the fulfillment of that, might not be ‘business’.

So it is time for a broader conception of the enterprising student.  It is not about the next generation of entrepreneurs but about the next generation of cellists, authors, policemen and women, nurses, gardeners, mathematicians, politicians and bankers.  About the next generation full stop.

Everyone should have the opportunity to become ‘business literate’ by the time they leave full time education.  But primarily, fundamentally and at their very heart they need to be enterprising, creative, innovative, bold and self confident – and this might have little or nothing to do with entrepreneurship and business literacy.

As I write this sat at my kitchen table I am looking out the door at my beetroot plant in its brightly hand painted pot.  There is a part of me wondering about their costings and worrying that, like so many social enterprises, they have missed or chosen to hide, some of their real costs of production.

But there is a much, much larger part of me that hopes and prays that the young ‘sales executive’ has learned much more than just how to spot opportunities to turn a profit.  That she has learned more about herself and what she could become.  About her self interest and her power to realise her potential and how she might really be able to make the difference that she wants to see in the world.

It is these lessons that we enterprise educators should be teaching.

I am a freelance trainer, consultant, thinker, speaker and writer on the subjects of enterprise, entrepreneurship, management and leadership If you would like to work with Mike then please get in touch.  mikeatmichaelchittydotcodotuk

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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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