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BSE – Before Social Enterprise

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Mike in the days before social enterpriseHard to imagine I know, but I was remembering with some old friends the time ‘BSE’, Before Social Enterprise.

I used to work in what was called a ‘Community Home with Education’, similar to an ‘Approved School’.  A residential home for young men with emotional and behavioural ‘difficulties’.  When they reached 16 they would have to leave the home and make their own way in the world.  For many, the next step, after a short spell in the community, would be prison.

However we worked hard to give them the best chance that we could, and this often meant trying to find them work, trying to find employers who would give them a chance.  And, surprisingly it wasn’t as hard as you might think.  Despite their dubious CVs and frequently a complete lack of qualifications, we could usually find an employer who would give them a chance.  These were not ‘social enterprises’ set up specifically to provide vocational training and development for the needy.  They were good old ‘for profit’ businesses who were more than willing to do their bit.  This was the time BSE.

And I don’t think things are that much different now.

While we have a small number of social enterprises specifically setting out to help particular groups with a step on the employment ladder, I reckon that for every one of these there are probably a hundred or so for profits that work with the same client group.  Restaurants and kitchens that employ people struggling with addictions or to stay out of prison.  Building companies employing ex-offenders.   Football clubs giving players with drink driving convictions, anger management problems and occasional inclinations to racist abuse a second chance.

I wonder what impact the rise of the specialist social enterprise might have on the willingness of mainstream for profits to ‘do their bit’. They don’t get the rate rebates, soft loans, grants, PR or additional support of their social enterprise counterparts, so why should they push the boat out.

Or will they all become ‘social enterprises’ and reap the same rewards?

 

Some forgotten truths about enterprise…

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  • Poverty is not about scarcity – it is not that there is not enough – but that it is not shared
  • The challenge is to give more people the power that they need to play a positive and powerful role in markets; This means accessible and relevant processes to develop individual capabilities and power
  • Markets will always have a place in our society but not everything can be bought and sold.  Care for example is an emotional relationship that cannot be bought and sold.
  • Development is a measure of the extent to which individuals have the capabilities to live the life that they choose.  It has little to do with standard economic measures such as GDP.
  • Helping people to recognise choices and increase the breadth of choices available to them should be a key objective of development.
  • Developing the capability and power of individuals provides a key to both development and freedom
  • Development must be relevant to lives, contexts, and aspirations
  • Development is about more than the alleviation of problems – stamping out anti social behaviour, teenage pregnancies, poor housing and so on.
  • It is about helping people to become effective architects in shaping their own lives
  • We need practices that value individual identity; avoid lumping people into “communities” they may not want to be part of, and promote a person’s freedom to make her own choices.  Promoting identification with ‘community’ risks segregation and violence between communities
  • Society must take a serious interest in the overall capabilities that someone has to lead the sort of life they want to lead, and organise itself to support the development and practice of those capabilities
  • We should primarily develop an emphasis on individuals as members of the human race rather than as members of ethnic groups, religions or other ‘communities’.  Humanity matters.
  • We need to make the delivery of public education, more equitable, more efficient and more accessible

If we took this stuff seriously what kind of enterprise development activities would a LEP commission?

Management and the Start Up

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I work with businesses and organisations at all stages of the life-cycle. Pre-starts, start-ups and mature businesses.

I often see management DNA develop in the start-up phase and it is seldom a pretty site. Habits and relationships are set early and become very difficult to shake off. This is largely because of the mindset of the original founder of the business:

  • This is their baby;
  • They know how they want it to develop;
  • They have exacting standards.

Consequently their management style can be brusque, directive, bruising and ultimately damaging to the long term growth of the business.

Ideally I get to work with a business pre-start and ensure that the entrepreneurs builds their management team BEFORE the business plan is developed. This way all members of the team can own the plan and a more open and collaborative management DNA can be established from the start.

However this is pretty rare.

More usually I am working with an owner manager who has already established a pretty controlling management style. Helping them to see a different way of running the business is tough enough.

Coaching them to make it happen is even tougher.

Often it takes a real shock to the business and the entrepreneur to make them realise that something has to change.  This ‘shock’ can be bankruptcy, divorce or a significant health issue.

But sometimes that is what it takes before the need to change is fully recognised.

The Leeds LEP Summit…

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Last Friday, 700 people descended on Saviles Rooms in Clarence Dock, Leeds to attend the Local Enterprise Partnership’s Summit on Realising the Potential.

I wish I could say it was a day full of surprises.  Of innovative and critical thinking.  Of real insights about how enterprise works in the region and beyond and what can be done to make it work better.  I wish I could say that we were listened to, engaged, given the chance to shape, not only ‘The Plan’ but also how it might be put into action.  But I can say none of these things.

It was the usual formula of a stage sequentially inhabited by a series of be-suited folk advocating their politics, or their research, or in some cases their business interests.  But generally, far too much politics and macro-economics, a sprinkling of economic development orthodoxy (clusters, sectors, high growth) and hardly any enterprise at all.  And where differences in ideology or strategy were clearly apparent there was no attempt at analysis or synthesis. It just came down to ‘we’re in charge now – so we’ll do it our way’.

The importance of SMEs was mentioned several times, but they were talking about 10+employee, high growth startups willing to put together funding bids and set up KTPs (knowledge transfer partnerships) with universities.  The kind of startup that allies itself with the economic development infrastucture and pursues every penny of public funding that it can.  There was little to no indication that anyone had given any thought to the potential of the regions enormous number of micro-enterprises and the fact that these are the hot bed from which the higher growth businesses will over time emerge.  We are back to what Drucker called ‘wanting the top of the mountain without the mountain’.

The implicit assumption was the regional economy would remain one based on traditional models of ’employment’, a white and blue collar region rather than a region where large numbers of self organising free agents contributed significantly.  What kind of employer skills board is going to define the skills and attitudes needed to escape employment by others but actually shape your own portfolio of work?  No, as per usual there was much discussion of what ’employers’ are looking for and the importance of that Holy Grail of employability.  As I said on the day, I don’t want the net result of 2 decades of education for my daughters for them to be merely ’employable’.  I want much more from the system than that, thank you very much.

It was also assumed that growth in the economy IS the only future.  And we seem to have the choice of whether we measure it using GVA or GDP.  No mention of the possibility, never mind the desirability, of a steady state economy.  Or perhaps measuring progress in terms other than purely financial expansion.  In fact nothing that wasn’t about mainstream economic development policy.  Nothing that we were not discussing in Mandelson’s White Papers on Building the Knowledge Economy at the fag-end of the last century.  Those of us with alternative ideas about to make the world a better place need to take a long hard look at ourselves – because our messages are just not getting through.

Somehow we were soon well behind the clock and time for questions from the floor was cut.  Not that it would have mattered.  If you really want to listen, you do not dominate proceedings from a stage and  give 700 people in the audience a couple of roaming mics.  You take the challenges of helping people to find their voice and express themselves a little more seriously than that, you build it into the process. If you really want to listen.

I had tried to encourage a few small business people to attend and others with an interest in ‘the economy’ who do not see themselves as ‘in business’, because the future of our economy should not be left to a partnership between business folk and politicians!  Sadly most had left within the first couple of hours as they heard nothing that spoke to them of their goals, the contexts they are working in, or their aspirations and they felt the dice had already been thrown, and that the strategy had been set for yet more capital investment and a preoccupation with high growth companies in high growth sectors.  All I could do was mouth my apologies as they picked their way out of the hall while speaker after speaker talked of engagement with ‘the business community’.

At least we had the back channel of twitter to contribute some different views.  Not that the screen displaying the twitter stream was legible and it took until lunchtime for the inimitable @johnpopham to explain that if they used twitterfall they would not need to keep hitting refresh……  I can’t help but think that something so apparently trivial as understanding twitter may hold the seeds of something important for the LEP in recognising that tomorrows economy will not be the same as yesterdays, only bigger.

So, we were late into our breakout groups.  The one I attended was like a fractal of the main hall.  A stage, a panel, an audience and not enough time to do the subject justice.  But this time there were some women too!  At least one of the panel members talked passionately of the LEP needing to speak the language of micro-enterprise!

Lunch was good.  Soggy sandwiches.  Fruit so cold it hurt.  But at least WE got a chance to talk…..

After lunch it was back into the main hall to listen to more clever and/or opinionated men (I would have been at home on at least one of those counts).  One of these had some thing to say about the drivers of regional growth in OECD countries and how some ‘basket case economies’ had managed to turn things around.  I can’t think why he would choose to provide data on basket case turnarounds in our region, can you?  Sadly the slides he presented were unreadable and I could not follow the plot.  I was so angry!  We jet in a researcher from lord knows where, presumably at great expense to the sponsors and then we don’t make sure that his slides will be legible to any but the front rows?  So I bailed out to the LEP Conversation Corner which was deserted to begin with, but which did eventually yield some fascinating conversations!

What did surprise me was the number of attendees who seemed to think that the gig was OK.  That it had ‘gone well’.  That any dissenting or challenging perspectives on twitter were just negativity rather than the result of any critical thinking, or different perspectives that may be worth exploring.

I found it genuinely puzzling until I realised that this was the congregation of the church of orthodox economic development – at prayer.  Where GDP is all that matters, and green/culture/tech/creative is only good IF it will create yet more economic growth.  This was the economic development supply chain in the room.  Hardly likely to be open to the possibility of radical innovation when they have so much vested in the status quo.

The business of human endeavour…

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For a long time now I have had real concerns about the focus of policy makers, and the projects that they spawn, on ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ as being just too business oriented.  It is as if the only fields of human endeavour that matter are commerce of some kind.  Making money or fixing societies ills.

This is especially un-nerving when you see it played out in our primary schools as 6 year olds are encouraged to wear badges that proclaim them be a ‘Sales Director’, an ‘Operations Manager’ or a ‘Brand Executive’. Yuk!

What about all of those other great fields of human endeavour?

Climbing mountains, making art, having fun, playing sport, writing, cooking and so on.

What if we encouraged our 6 year olds to wear badges that proclaimed them to be ‘Footballer in Training’, ‘Ballet Dancer under Construction’, ‘Surgeon to Be’ or ‘The Next Michael McIntyre’?  OK, so perhaps we don’t need another Michael McIntyre…. but you get my point?

Because what really matters is not exposing more people to the world of business and entrepreneurship.  It is to get them imagining possible futures, and learning how best to navigate towards them.  It is about developing people with a sense of agency and influence over their own futures.  It is about building a generation with both power and compassion. And a generation who really understand how to use the tools of collaboration, association and cooperation in pursuit of mutual progress.

Does it really only matter if their chosen endeavour contributes to GVA?  Or is there more to our humanity that we need to recognise and encourage through both our policy and practice?

And this is not just an issue in schools.  It runs like a plague through our communities from cradle to grave.

I think this is important because we lose so many who are completely turned off by the thought of a world of commerce (and let’s face it we don’t all want to dive headlong into a world of Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice).

So what about if instead of focussing on enterprise and entrepreneurship we attempted to throw our net wider and to encourage and support people to build their power and compassion in whatever they choose to be their particular fields of human endeavour?