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Building an Enterprise Culture – Laying the Foundations

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  1. Projects designed to develop an enterprise culture should be owned and managed by the community itself.  A community that is coerced towards enterprise by outsiders is likely to resist.
  2. Change agents, coaches, advisers and others working in the community should be recruited, managed and introduced to the community – by the community.  They should not be missionaries parachuted in to win converts.
  3. Change is best effected through a series of 121 meetings, characterised by honesty and openness, where a professional, compassionate and caring coach works to ensure that the client takes control of their own enterprise agenda.  To ensure maximum take up and productivity of the service it should be free of charge for as long as it takes for the client to complete their journey and believe that that they no longer need the service.
  4. Community based enterprise coaches should not replicate existing services.  Instead they should signpost and brokers clients to existing services and help them to use them effectively.  Where necessary the coach may need to advise existing service providers on how best to effectively serve their clients.
  5. The community based enterprise coach or business adviser helps the client to develop their commitment, passion and skill to their own enterprise agenda – using the tools and techniques of personal development.   Their focus is primarily on the development of the person and secondarily on the development of their enterprise ideas.
  6. Community based business coaches and enterprise advisers need to be at the heart of a network, of social capital, that can provide advice, guidance and support as required by the coach and their clients.
  7. Community based business coaches and enterprise advisers work in response to the wants and desires of local people – not to the delivery of strategies, plans and opportunities developed by economic planners.  They do not motivate or initiate but work in response to the passion, interests and skills of local people.
  8. The enterprise project must take a broad definition of enterprise – helping local people to use enterprise skills to tackle problems and opportunities that face them.  Entrepreneurship may be on the agenda – but it should not be THE agenda.

Choosing Enterprise or Bureacracy?

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Most of us experience ourselves reacting to both people and events that are outside of our control.  It feels to us like control lies elsewhere.

A reluctance to take full responsibility for our actions develops.  We learn to shift the blame elsewhere.  We lose sight of our responsibility for the type of life that we have helped to build.  We genuinely believe that the mediocrity that surrounds us has nothing to do with us. It is all the work of someone else, somewhere else.  We let ourselves ‘off the hook’.

Of course it is true that there is nearly always someone (many people) who has power over us.  But even in the face of this reality, we still have choices.  Choices that can lead us towards enterprise and progress – entrepreneurial choices; or choices that lead us towards safety and maintenance – bureaucratic choices.

We can choose to operate from an entrepreneurial mindset or a bureaucratic one.

We can choose between:

  • Maintenance and Greatness
  • Caution and Courage
  • Dependency and Autonomy

In my experience many potential entrepreneurs do not recognise these choices.  They wrap themselves in the  cultural cloaks of the community and the peer group – usually more about maintenance than enterprise – and lose sight of the fact that THEY can make a difference.

In the short term of course the bureaucratic choice has many advantages:

  • You blend in rather than stand out.
  • You risk little.
  • You minimise the chances of failure (and success).
  • You help to build a culture of shared contentment with mediocrity.

In the context of making the most of your life however the entrepreneurial mindset wins every time:

  • It allows you to find and develop your own unique contribution.
  • You take more risks – and develop the relationships and experience that will help you to manage them effectively.
  • You increase the chances of failure – but also give yourself a chance of great success.
  • You help to build a culture of enterprise and excellence; of enterprise

So just reflect as you go through your working day what do your actions say about the choices that you have made – entrepreneurial or bureaucratic?

What are you doing to help people in the communities that you serve recognise that they have these choices?

How are you helping them to build a more enterprising culture?

(It is ironic that most of the organisations charged with developing an enterprise culture are essentially bureaucratic in nature.  But then perhaps you have to be if you are to navigate the complexities of public sector procurement!).

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half – unless he is enterprising

Mike Chitty

Development as Freedom

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While it is important to distinguish conceptually the notion of poverty as capability inadequacy from that of poverty as lowness of income, the two perspectives cannot but be related, since income is such an important means to capabilities.  And since enhanced capabilities in leading a life would tend, typically, to expand a person’s ability to be more productive and earn a higher income, we would also expect a connection going from capability improvement to greater earning power and not the other way around.

The latter connection can be particularly important for the removal of income poverty.  It is not only the case that, say, better basic education and health care improve the quality of life directly; they also increase a person’s ability to earn an income and be free of income poverty as well.

Development as Freedom (p90) – Amartya Sen

Provision of Neighbourhood Enterprise Talent Scouts and Neighbourhood-based Business Advisors

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Another invitation to tender appeared today.  This time a council looking for the provision of Neighbourhood Enterprise Talent Scouts and Neighbourhood-based Business Advisors to work closely together in stimulating enterprise.

Talent and Business.  Business and Talent.  Is this REALLY what it is all about?  Or is it about frustration, unfulfilled potential, anger and possibility?

One thing I do know; If you set up a system to find people with a ‘talent for business’ you will find the same people that every other agency has already found.

Set up a system to find and help  people who are angry, frustrated and wasting their potential and you will find people with the potential to do something remarkable.

However their trust is not easily won.  More than likely they gave up trying to work with the agencies a long time ago. Set yourself up as a talent scout and they will stay well clear (they have probably spent years being told they are ‘a waste of space who won’t amount to much’ and the last thing they need is another Simon Cowell type rejection).

Set yourself up as a business advisor and likewise they are likely to avoid you like the plague – images of men and women in suits talking a foreign language of equity and turnover, profit and unit costs.

Instead just provide a service  with an unremitting focus on helping people to make progress in their lives – in whatever form that takes.  Build relationships, win trust and get busy.  It won’t be long before you are working with some really interesting people on some really enterprising ideas.

Oh, and by the way, don’t try to collect reams and reams of MIS data for the funders.  Ask for an NI number or for them to fill in an equal opps monitoring survey and they are likely to drop you like a hot potato.

Reflecting for Effective Practice?

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  1. What percentage of your clients come back to you for further support?
  2. What percentage do you just see once?
  3. What percentage of your clients go on to open a business?
  4. What percentage decide that enterprise is not for them?
  5. What percentage decide that they want to run their own business – but decide that they can’t make THIS business idea work.
  6. What percentage open a business – but don’t make it through the first/second/third year?
  7. How many different clients do you meet in a month/year?
  8. How many 121 sessions do you run in a month/year with clients?
  9. What is your average percentage occupancy? ie how much of your capacity is being used (by the people that you are meant to be supporting)?
  10. Are you really contributing to the development of an enterprise culture?
  11. What is your reputation with:
  • clients and their friends and families
  • funders
  • partners
  • other regeneration and community development professionals in the community?