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How to Destroy an Enterprise Culture

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This is the title of a workshop I am submitting to the International Conference on Enterprise Promotion, taking place in Harrogate next month.  Don’t know yet if it will be accepted as it bends the ‘submission guidelines’ a little.

Workshop Aims

  • To illustrate how and why most contemporary interventions designed to promote enterprise usually have precisely the opposite effect;
  • To demonstrate how narrow conceptions of enterprise serve to undermine the value of enterprise development for both funders and citizens and sells our profession short;
  • To outline ‘in which direction progress lies’ if we really want to develop more enterprising behaviours in the community;
Conclusions
  • We (policy makers, professionals and community leaders) need to re-conceive what we mean by ‘enterprise’ and ‘enterprise development’ and understand more fully its relationship to ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘business development’ and ‘community’.
  • We need to adopt much more ambivalent approaches to ‘entrepreneurship’, of all kinds, if we really wish to engage ‘community’.
  • We need to take seriously the principles of person centred development in our work to teach people how to live a ‘becoming existence’ and pay serious attention to a credo that says above all ‘Do No Harm’.

Sounds interesting?  See you in Harrogate.  Or get in touch.

Community, Council and Commerce in Leeds

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The three big Cs in our city.

Each is diverse and varied in itself.  Each embodies different values, visions, beliefs, goals and aspirations.  Each labours away in its’ own context with opportunities and threats, restrictions and obligations.  Each has its own processes, rituals and structures for getting things done which make it hard for effective partnerships to be built and to last.  We might manage to find an accommodation, but to find real synergies?

It easy for each to see the other as the enemy, or difficult, or greedy.  I know this is a trap that I fall into MUCH too easily.

How good a job do we actually do at bring all three constituencies to the Party?

Getting them to listen to each other.  To understand each other.  To help each other as much as they possibly can. To learn to really associate.

We need much more than Victorian Philanthropy models and trickle down.  We need genuine partnerships.

How well do we design our processes as a city that ensures that not only do we get the job done, but that we also improve the relationship between these three constituencies?

I suspect we worry much more about the task than the process and the relationships.  I may be wrong.

Time for some innovation anyone?

Social Enterprise and Good Work…Provoked by Craig Dearden-Phillips

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Craig Dearden-Phillips wrote an excellent piece on the need to financially incentivise social entrepreneurs.

When I read it I was not sure whether I agreed violently or disagreed violently.  Let’s just say I ‘felt’ strongly about it.  It troubled me.  I was provoked.  As I am sure Craig was when he wrote the piece.

Schumacher (Fritz, not Michael) helped me to explore the basis of my feelings.

He pointed out that from the perspective of the employer, work is a bad thing.  It represents a cost.  It is to be minimised.  If possible eradicated – handed over to a robot.  This truth always makes me smile when the government talks of the private sector ‘creating jobs’.

From the perspective of the worker too it is  often a bad thing. What Schumacher called a ‘disutility‘. A temporary but significant sacrifice of ‘leisure and comfort’ for which compensation is earned.

Schumacher pointed toward a Buddhist perspective where work serves three purposes:

  • to provide an opportunity to use and develop potential
  • to join with others in the achievement of a shared task – to provide opportunities for meaningful association
  • to produce the goods and services that are necessary for what he called a ‘becoming existence’

He then went on to say

to organize work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence

What can we do to make sure that more of our work is ‘good work’ and not merely a disutility for which we are compensated?

What products and services do we really need for a ‘becoming existence’.

This for me is the true role of the ‘Social Enterprise’ sector in our economy.  The development of good work.  The enhancement of association and compassion.  To provide a real alternative to the mainstream work as profitable disutility philosophy of much (but not all) of the private sector.

And there is no good reason why we should not take sufficient value from our business to lead a ‘becoming existence’ is there?  So I agree with Craig’s thesis, but not with the line of argument that took him there.  Are the risks really any greater?  Can a business be anything other than directly social?

I’m trying to learn just to die with pride,

Like the birds and the trees and the earth in time

But I’ve got this complex and it makes me fear,

That I’ll die knowing nothing and feeling less.

Hope and Social

Now, anyone for some truly social enterprise?

What if Leeds carried on as it is..?

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Leeds Architecture

This is an interesting question asked on the What If Leeds.…website (registration required before you can contribute)

The underlying sense is that perhaps Leeds is fine.  We can just keep on keeping on.  Now I am sure that the sustainability crew would have a thing or two to say about that.  Interestingly they haven’t, yet.  As might those who don’t get to share in the benefits of living in the city, the poor and marginalised.

But, change is inevitable, progress is not.  Leeds’ own Max McKeown taught me that.  The art of strategy is about increasing the chances of progress being achieved, because change takes care of itself….
The real problem here is in the methodology that we use to try to think about change and ensure that it is progressive.
The current vision and plan methodology is, how can I put this, a little clunky.  A touch slow.  Impractical.
However if we write it off and do nothing then the usual suspects will maintain power so that they and their friends can order the city as they would like – some would say as  a big investment opportunity to suck disposable income from a city region while providing the promise of good work and jobs for all.
We need a process for influencing strategy in the city that is a)continuous and b) gives everyone a voice and power in the process.
We need a market place of visions where we can choose to work towards as many or as few as each of us personally prefer.  We need to use visions to enable self-organisation, conversation and action.  Not to produce statutory documents.  We need personal visions of what progress means – not just a ‘city’ vision.
We should be thinking about how we continually facilitate a process of ’emergent change’ rather than a vision session every 5 years followed by decades of bureaucratic management in its pursuit.  No-one does strategy like this anymore, do they?
But what is this process really about?
  • Are we giving a steer to the city fathers so that they can benevolently chart our progress to a better place?
  • Or are the city fathers really trying to engage us in creating our own future?
  • Or is this just a necessary/statutory piece of ‘consultation’?
Time will tell.
But Leeds has to change.  The only questions are how, and who will benefit?
I think it is time for Leeds to have a complete rethink about how it organises itself to be a truly innovative city.  And innovation (the prodigal child of strategy) is not an elite sport.
It is very much for all of us.