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Enterprise Development Needs a Very Different Response

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If we are serious about developing more enterprising individuals and communities, rather than managing the outputs that most enterprise funders are looking for (start ups and VAT registrations), we need to concern ourselves with the development of self-interest and the accrual of power through organisation, association, collaboration and the acquisition of ‘knowhow’.   We are in the realms of person centred facilitation, community development and education.  Not business planning.  This requires an enormous shift both in what we do, and how we do it.

Helping people to clarify their self-interest and find the power to pursue it requires very different structures and processes to those that we currently use to develop enterprise. It is not about setting up a business.  It is not about experiencing ‘Industry Days’ at school or attending ‘Enterprise’ Conferences with (not so) secret millionaires, dragons and ministers.  It is not about Catalyst Centres and managed workspaces (although these might be useful for the small percentage of people who choose entrepreneurship as the most appropriate way to express their enterprising souls).

It is about engaging in a dynamic and continuous reflection on who we are and what we want to become, and managing processes that will help us move in that direction in a complex and rapidly changing world.

The Davies Review defined enterprise as  the capacity to:

  1. handle uncertainty and respond positively to change – Resilience
  2. create and implement new ideas and ways of doing things – Creativity and change
  3. make reasonable risk/reward assessments and act upon them in one’s personal and working life – The Pursuit of Progress

No mention of employment, entrepreneurship or business. Instead it is about resilience, change making and progress.  Enterprise development needs to find a new home where this broader conception can flourish without the distorting, primarily economic calculus of entrepreneurs and The Treasury.  They will have much to offer to the development of entrepreneurship – but that is only ever likely to be relevant to a minority.  Enterprise needs to escape, what for many is, the deadening hand of business.

The art and science of enterprise is relevant to all and we need to build communities and relationships that understand how to nurture it.

One of my big regrets is that so little LEGI funding has been used to drive this sort of innovation.  Instead it has been used, often wastefully, in the short term pursuit of business startups and in placing cuckoos in the heart of some of our poorest communities.

Anyone up for some innovation in Local Enterprise?

Warming the Cockles of Enterprising Hearts

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I recently ran some 2 hour workshops for staff at Wakefield College where steps are being undertaken to ‘Embed Enterprise’ across the curriculum.  I got some lovely feedback about the sessions:

  • Enjoyable structure to lesson; enterprise from another angle.
  • Great presenter learnt a lot of new ideas of how enterprise can be embedded across the college.
  • Good varied discussion; topic was quite thought provoking, good and interesting speaker.
  • Inspirational; thought provoking.
  • Really helped me understand the concept of enterprise, both personally and to help the adults I work with.
  • Interactive: Thought provoking
  • Very interesting presenter, stimulating & thought provoking, it flew by.
  • Session leader engaging, funny, and interesting – actually had something important to say.
  • Excellent input led by an interesting person who has credibility and vision.
  • Motivational speaker, clear messages, fun! Message matured my view of what teaching is about.
  • Right messages about enterprise, good pace, good balance of theory and anecdote, good understanding of issues in FE.
  • Stimulating, helped me look at my position at college in a slightly more “empowered way”.
  • Thought provoking, lots of ideas I would like to follow up on / research (if time permits).
  • Food for thought, helped me to basically understand the role of enterprise, training and business has to fill the gap not the need.  A really good session.
  • Flexible, great knowledge, inspiring.
  • Fab delivery, stimulating ideas I’d really like the power points and any refs etc.
  • Brilliant!…….. really interesting, interactive.
  • Variety,  fantastic thanks.
  • Very interesting, good tutor, good use of IT.
  • Interactive excellent, provoking thoughts, highlighted further development, how to manage entrepreneurship.  Team sessions with staff about developing enterprise.
  • Varied session covering a wide topic.  Encouraged reflection on own practice and future role in college.
  • Made us think, interactive, quite moving at times.
  • Very thought provoking, interesting topics and examples, well presented.
  • Good depth.
  • Fantastic delivery, so useful and incredibly inspiring.  Very relevant and realistic, thoroughly enjoyable.
  • (Strengths), presenter and activities, style personality knowledge.

Do get in touch if your team could do with the cockles of their enterprise hearts warming.

Enterprise Coaching – One Day Workshop

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Just been putting together a one day Introduction to Enterprise Coaching programme. Unfortunately because delegates are coming from far and wide we have a late start and early finish.
Here is the outline:
10.30 Arrive, register, welcome etc
11.00am Introductions and Objectives Exercise
11.30 – What are we Trying to Achieve with Enterprise and Entrepreneurship?
12.00 – Self Directed Learning – a framework for managing and leading our own development
12.30 – When I was a Kid – An Insight into (part of) our target market
13.00 – Lunch
13.45 – Situational Enterprise – understanding technical and psychological demands of the service
14.15 – The Enterprise Coaching Cycle and 4 Interventions styles
15.00 – An exercise in acceptant interventions
15.30 – Self image and enterprise
15.45 – So what might change?
16.00 – Close
How does it look?  Interesting?  Challenging?  Relevant?

Just been putting together a one day Introduction to Enterprise Coaching programme. Because delegates are coming from far and wide we have a late start and early finish.

Here is the outline:

10.30 – Arrive, register, welcome etc

11.00am – Introductions and Objectives Exercise

11.30 – What are We Trying to Achieve with Enterprise and Entrepreneurship?

12.00 – Self Directed Learning – a framework for managing and leading our own development

12.30 – When I was a Kid – An Insight into (part of) our target market

13.00 – Lunch

13.45 – Situational Enterprise – understanding technical and psychological demands of the service

14.15 – The Enterprise Coaching Cycle and 4 Interventions styles

15.00 – An Exercise in Acceptant Intervention

15.30 – Self Image and Enterprise

15.45 – So what might change?

16.00 – Close

How does it look?  Interesting?  Challenging?  Relevant?

What else would you want to see covered?

There is so much material and so little time!

Tackling Enterprise Head On Is Wrong-Headed

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Most projects designed to promote enterprise tackle the problem head on.

When we say that a community ‘lacks’ enterprise we are saying that we believe fewer businesses are starting per head of population than is ‘normal’.  Typically in a community that ‘lacks’ enterprise you might get 4 new starts per hundred adults per year.  In an ‘enterprising’ community this is closer to 6 per hundred.  This might not sound much of a difference – but this 2% increase could in theory be worth millions in a local economy.  We are usually also saying that fewer businesses are registering for VAT than we would like.  We want more business start-ups and we want more VAT registrations and all of our attempts to promote enterprise are geared pretty directly to these ends.

‘Never mind how you percieve your self interest.  Just start a business.  We will even make it easy for you’.

The assumption is that if we encourage more people to ‘be enterprising’, if we give them access to knowledge, skills and money then surely we will get more enterprise as a result.

In my view this is wrong headed.

I would argue that all human beings are innately enterprising.  All of the time.  It is a part of the human condition.  We create and pursue a set of habits and behaviours that we believe will work in what we believe to be our self interest.  Behaviours that will maintain our self image and help us to get where think we want to be.  This IS enterprise.  These behaviours and habits are a reflection of what we perceive to be in our ‘self interest’, and what we perceive to be our ‘power’.  There are a massive range of ‘enterprising behaviours’ from claiming benefits and watching day time television through to planning a multi-million pound bio technology start up or a space tourism operator.

If our self interest is ‘to maintain the status quo’ then we will get the power we need and our enterprising behaviours will serve this goal.

Ditto if our self interest is ‘to be a millionaire by the time I am 30’.

A thorough development and negotiation of  self interest is central to the kind, and extent, of enterprise that emerges.  If we want ‘more’, ‘better’ enterprise then we should focus our efforts on helping  more people to clarify their self interest and build their power to pursue it.

Chasing More Enterprise

Often what we call ‘enterprise’ (or more accurately ‘count’ as enterprise) is a set of behaviours generated in order to comply with a system of stick and carrots that we have carefully constructed to pursue our policy goals.  This is not enterprise.  It is compliance.  Manipulation.

Helping individuals to clarify self interest – to work out what they want to spend their time and energies doing – is not a trivial task.  It takes a strong relationship (confidential, compassionate, challenging, person centred rather than policy driven) and sometimes many months of introspection and exploration of options.  Helping people to recognise the difference between self interest and selfishness and to recognise and adopt the principles of ‘sustainable’ enterprise cannot be rushed.

But when we get it right we can bet that much more enterprise will emerge.  Not only will the economy benefit but our community will become much more vibrant too.

Enterprise at its best—decoupled from self-interest?

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Julia Middleton has written an interesting piece for the Institute of Directors.  She argues that we need to decouple ‘enterprise’ from ‘self interest’.

Julia contrasts the motivations of the bankers  – ‘primarily financial‘ with the interests of Narayana Murthy, Chair of Indian IT giants Infosys – primarily about a ‘wider social gain‘.

Julia suggests that ‘Bankers’ are primarily motivated by self interest, while Murthy was motivated by a wider social need that ‘transcended’ personal gain.

“Many people wondered why I wanted to take such a risk, to create, at that time in India, a company that would set a new standard of ethics in business. I had a good job, I was married, I had a small child, and I was brought up middle class. It was no easy decision. But all of us are driven by factors that transcend the hygiene factors: money and position. We all want to do something noble and make a difference to the context.”

Julia argues that this view of enterprise is “glorious and grand and is delivered the world over by people motivated not only by personal gain but also by the needs of their communities and countries. It is enterprise at its best—enterprise decoupled from self-interest.”

But Murthy was acting EXACTLY in his own self interest.  He was driven by factors that ‘transcended the hygiene factors’.  He was driven to do something ‘noble’.  He believes that everyone else is as well.  Presumably even bankers?

In my book, both enterprise and entrepreneurship are all about ‘self interest’ and ‘power’.  About taking decisions and actions that work for a self interest that has been properly understood and negotiated.  Not simply in terms of profit, but in terms of sustainability, and wider societal impact.  Some bankers seem to have managed this ‘proper negotiation  of self interest’ more effectively than others.  As indeed have some IT companies.

Perhaps Julia is arguing that good enterprise is ‘selfless’ rather than ‘selfish’?

I would argue that both of these are equally dangerous foundations on which to build an enterprise.  The middle ground of self interest, where my hopes and aspirations (to get rich, to save the whale, to reverse climate change, to do something noble) are properly and sustainably negotiated with the interests of others provides the only strong foundation for a sustainable, progressive and effective relationship.

I cannot be always giving (selfless) nor can I be always taking (selfish).

The point is not that we should decouple enterprise from self interest – but that we should work with people to ensure that their self interest is both rightly understood and properly negotiated with both the present and the future.  That personal perceptions of self interest remain dynamic and relevant (witness Bill Gates journey from techy to philanthropist – all the time pursuing his self interest).

Instead of urging people to put self interest to one side we should be urging them to put it ‘up front and centre stage’.  We should then help them to explore how their self interest ‘works’ with the self interests of others.  To understand how self interest is served by helping others.  How association, co-operation and mutuality work in pursuit of individual and collective self interests.

Because it is the mutual negotiation of self interests, and access to the power to pursue interests effectively, that provide the basic building blocks of civic society.