Love

Workshops are fascinating and dangerous places. In the right hands they can produce things of great beauty and real lasting value. In the wrong hands they can do great damage and wreck lives.

The entrepreneur’s workshop is no different.

True enough; the tools in the entrepreneur’s workshop have no sharp edges, burning fires or high speed drills.

The entrepreneur’s tools are a set of ideas, principles, practices and habits that, applied with care and passion, can produce a wonderful lifestyle. Learn to use these tools properly and they will serve you well.

Misuse them and the consequences are likely to include debt, damaged relationships and misery.

10 of the most powerful tools in The Entrepreneur’s Workshop:

The Truth Detector – How to decide what might work for you
Want to or Have to…?
The Double Edged Sword
Getting Organised – doing what has to be done, and doing it well
Entrepreneur Artisan or Artist?
Have, Do, Become…
Build a Team OR Do it All – the choice is yours
The ‘investment ready’ Business Plan
Situational Enterprise – the importance of technique and motivation
Towards the Total Quality Enterprise – a tool to decide ‘What’s next?’

For more information contact Mike on 07788 747954

Twitter: @mikechitty

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LinkedIn: mikechitty

Enterprise, Self Interest, Power and Love

June 16, 2010 by admin

I have written before about the potential of representing enterprise (E) as a mathematical equation, and offered this as a starter for 10:

Enterprise = Power x Self Interest

This week I had a wonderful conversation with Mike Love – who runs Leeds based Together for Peace to explore some of his reservations about my work on community based enterprise and to help me understand some of his perspectives on community as the building block rather than individuals. Mike is a deep thinker about philosophy, theology and social change and conversations with him are always a delight

We discussed the work of Adam Kahane – especially Power and Love – A Theory and Practice of Social Change . Kahane suggests that we need to learn to move forward in a rhythm in which power and love are exercised alternately.

This harks back to some ideas that Martin Luther King helped to articulate:

Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change…

There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites — polar opposites — so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love….

Now, we’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.

So in the equation I have described ‘self interest’ – the role of self properly negotiated amongst others – can be seen as the exercise of love. Love for self – and love for others.

So perhaps we could re-write the equation as

Enterprise = Power x Love

Love, in this case, for a better future for self and others – and power the ability to move towards it.

Enterprise without love can become exploitation of people and planet.
Love without power can be anemic and sentimental.

Good enterprise takes very seriously both concepts of love and power and seeks to use them in tandem to create a better world.

If we took this seriously our enterprise education programmes would focus on love at least as much as on power (the organisation of money and people to achieve purpose). And our programme sand schemes would look very different.

More thinking to be done I suspect….