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Unlocking the Talent

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Just re-read the Unlocking the Talent paper from HMG March 2008.

Here are some of the bits that have stuck with me.

This is a government committed to unlocking the talents, not of some of the people, but of all of the people. We want to see every region, city, town and neighbourhood do well, not just the few. Our national prosperity and competitiveness depend on our ability to tap into the creativity, energy, ingenuity and skills of the British people.

Well yes – but we have got more prosperous over the last 30 years but much less happy.  The drivers for this are not purely economic…

We need to unlock the talents of the British people, so that each of us may rise to our full potential, for the benefit of all of us.

But this is about more than individual fulfilment and success – it is about our place in the new world developing around us. Britain can no longer be a country held back by disadvantage and unfairness, but instead be a nation firing on all cylinders, and ready to embrace the future. With the rise of the economies of China and India, we need to unlock British talent so we can be competitive in this rapidly changing global economy.

Ditto comments above – this is not all about global competitiveness and ‘laggards’ holding us back.  The rationale for fulfilling potential is not about prosperity – it is about humanity, becoming, identity etc.

Government at all levels must be focused, imaginative and courageous to create opportunities for people to flourish. A key element of this is to forge more influence, control and ownership by local people of local services such as employment, health, education and transport.

To tap into the talents of all of the people, not merely the few, we need to involve people actively in:

  • improving deprived areas through regeneration and promoting work and enterprise
  • encouraging active citizenship, and reviving civic society and local democracy
  • improving local public services by involving local users and consumers; and
  • strengthening local accountability.

Community empowerment is the process of enabling people to shape and choose the services they use on a personal basis, so that they can influence the way those services are delivered. It is often used in the same context as community engagement, which refers to the practical techniques of involving local people in local decisions and especially reaching out to those who feel distanced from public decisions.

Interesting that this empowerment stuff is only targeted at ‘deprived areas’.  Strikes me that doing this in some of the more affluent communities could produce remarkable results too.  This is about fulfilling human potential – everywhere.

Promoting work and enterprise and strengthening the economic base of an area – and so connecting the supply and demand sides for labour – will be central to reversing decline.

Yawn…..This is not about providing employment fodder…..

Effective regeneration:

  • relies absolutely on the active participation and engagement of local people and communities, and not on just the articulate and organised, but on the broad majority of residents and groups traditionally excluded from consultation exercises
  • creates lasting solutions by giving local people the power to control their destinies, create enterprises, channel investment and income, and to involve local people in social enterprises, mutuals, and co-operative ventures
  • tackles the underlying causes, rather than the symptoms of decline. Regeneration strategies will need to tackle market failures that act as barriers to economic growth and employment as a means to reversing decline. Evidence shows that those in employment are happier, healthier, and less likely to be involved in crime; conversely poor health can prevent people getting into work
  • targets investment at the appropriate spatial level, with effective co-ordination between neighbourhood, local, sub-regional and regional levels, as well as between national agencies
  • takes account of the fact that successful regeneration will require private sector investment, for example in delivering new homes and in creating jobs.

Recognising the Real Problem?

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Regeneration aims to bring opportunity to areas that are in decline, and to empower people to take advantage of those opportunities. The decline of an area is often caused in the first instance by structural economic change and a reduction in employment. Parts of the UK have experienced substantial deindustrialisation and loss of jobs since the 1970s, particularly during deep recessions in the early 1980s and early 1990s. In some areas there has been a rapid turnaround in employment; in others a cycle of decline has been set off.

Unlocking the Talent of Communities – DCLG 2008

This is a fairly standard analysis of the reasons for decline.

When industries pulled out things went wrong.

I believe things went wrong when the big employers moved in.

Policy and practice focused on providing a largely compliant workforce that was fit for purpose.  Employer engagement ruled.  All parties were more or less happy with the deal.  At the time, and for many years after, it (arguably) worked reasonably well.

A bureaucratic mindset prevailed – characterised by patriarchal contracts between workers and employers which rewarded compliance.  Industrialists and managers came up with the plans.  Unions negotiated for pay and conditions and the majority just had to pick sides and choose leaders – on whom they felt they could depend.

A deep mindset of dependence set in. Dependence on employers, dependence on unions.  DEPENDENCE.  Generations learned how to successfully play the dependence game.  Many still play it.

Entrepreneurial qualities were lost.  Autonomy was devalued.

The genesis of the problem was not when the industries left, it was when they arrived.

For nearly 30 years now I think policy has largely neglected this deep change of identity, personality and self image that swept through many of these communities.

If we are serious about unlocking talent, then as well as providing skills training, CV clinics, classes in self employment, business planning and entrepreneurship we have also to tackle these issues of identity, personality and self image.  And this is best done through conversation – not classes.

Challenging, caring, compassionate but powerful conversations.  Conversations that accept, catalyse and confront.  Conversations that are characterised by high trust and strong relationships.  Conversations that are genuinely focused on helping to unlock potential and to enable potential to develop.  Conversations that start from where people are at – and follow them where they need to go.  Not the usual conversations that steer people towards opportunities predefined by the planners.

Instead we breeze into these communities and ask naive questions;

  • Have you got a great business idea?
  • Ever thought of starting a social enterprise?

Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people. The result is confusion, fear, and retreat.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of an opponent. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.

Dragons’ Den is a Bare Faced Lie About How Business is Done

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You can usually trust a good comedian to get down the truth of the matter, and David Mitchell has done just this with the Dragons’ Den format.

“Dragons’ Den is a bare-faced lie about how business is done,” he says. “The people who do that job are not rude because there’s no percentage for anyone in them being so.

“They don’t sanctimoniously tick people off nor do they spend 10 minutes thinking up a weak pun which combines their wish not to invest with the field of the invention in question – ‘A new type of cheese, I’d have to be crackers to invest’ as if they’re auditioning for the Beano.

“Dragons den not only misrepresents rudeness for straightforwardness, but also implies that this is how successful business people behave.”

Rudeness aside Dragons’ Den is responsible for other misconceptions that damage the perception of enterprise and entrepreneurship:

  1. Getting investment is a competition. The best entry wins whether it is good bad or indifferent. (Specifically this is what the enterprise professionals ‘teach’ when they try to piggy back on Dragon’s Den to get their engagement numbers up.  The dragons themselves would invest in any and every opportunity that meets their investment criteria.)
  2. Any business that does not meet the criterion for investment from a venture capitalist is not a good business. “It might make a decent business for you and your family – but there is not enough in it to interest me – I’m out“.  This echoes and reinforces the disdain that much of the public sector has for ‘lifestyle’ businesses.  They seem to forget that most entrepreneurs learn the ropes in life style businesses before some of them get bigger aspirations.  As I believe Peter Drucker said – ‘You can’t have the mountain top without the mountain.’
  3. You have to conform to venture capitalist norms and conventions if you are to succeed – everything from the way you dress, your hairstyle through to your knowledge of the numbers (you had better pretend WITH CONVICTION that your crystal ball is good for revenue forecasts at leas three years ahead.
  4. Investment readiness should be evaluated on a single pitch – there is a simple binary response – yes or no.  In fact most investments come as a result of a relationship between an investor and client.

So come on.  Let’s drop the Dragon’s Den emulations.  No more ‘Strictly Enterprise.’

Instead let’s get down to the hard work of having some informed conversations about enterprise and what it can do for our communities.

Economist’s Special Report on Global Entrepreneurship

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The Economist’s special report on entrepreneurship is well worth a read.  Some highlights:

  • entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation
  • the report uses (entrepreneur)  to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem
  • its not all youthful techies – Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to start Garmin
  • average entrepreneur was 39 when he or she started (their business) The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.
  • why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks?
  • the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right
  • the history of … start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners.  [WHY DON’T WE TEACH THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING DIVERSE TEAMS?]

Read the full report here.