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E-mail to an Enterprise Professional

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If I said enterprise not entrepreneurship then I was too strong.

It is just that we can help people to develop their enterprising soul in so many more and varied arenas – many of which are more intrinsically attractive and powerful media than ‘business’ – especially to young people.  Musicianship, sports, art, food, writing, wildlife, gardening, web 2.0 etc etc.  Why nail ‘enterprise’ to ‘business’ so much of the time?  It just serves to alienate lots of people for whom the world of business seems phoney, vain, self serving, venal and corrupt.

Azjen’s stuff is interesting.  My problem with it is that it presupposes a set of behaviours that we are trying to move people towards.  ie an officially sanctioned version of what constitutes the enterprise curriculum.  I know that these exist – but I question their value.  I believe that the way in which each of us is enterprising is distinctly personal and probably neither transferable nor generic. It is an expression of our personality, culture and our experience as much as of our aspiration.  Enterprise education is therefore about drawing out what is within rather than grafting on what is (according to a gap analysis against our framework) ‘missing’.  It is about helping people to become fully themselves, not to fit our template for enterprise/entrepreneurship.

The fact that you might find enterprise conceived this way hard to measure is not a major concern of mine.  However I KNOW FOR CERTAIN that if we engage more people in this process of self discovery and emergence, a massively high proportion of them will go on to do enterprising and very possibly entrepreneurial things.  Invest in this and you will get increased wellbeing – and there is plenty of cash being spent on that!  Hint towards strategic repositioning, broadening income streams and increasing impact for your organisation.

From a more enterprising community will come more entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, actors, writers, intrapreneurs, political activists and entrepreneurs.  It is this idea of what constitutes an enterprising community that we should develop. Hint – it is not one where the measure of TEA =6%.

To develop a more enterprising community we need to help community activists and gatekeepers, to develop much more benign and open attitudes to the potential of enterprise as a tool for community and personal development.  All the time it looks like a thinly veiled government plot to reduce benefits and increase tax take we can not expect to be welcomed with open arms – especially when the cash runs out – as it will.

Listening to the Millionaire MBA was really insightful for me on this idea of the personalisation of enterprise where, even in the narrow field of high growth entrepreneurship, successful entrepreneurs accredited their success to a vast and often conflicting range of different behaviours, models, ideas and values.  Kalms and Roddick both had very different takes on the politics and practice of branding – yet they both exploited the practice wonderfully.  Similar examples are legion.

Success in business, success in life depends fundamentally on becoming YOU – not conforming to the policy makers aspiration of the ideal citizen.  Enterprise is about the emergence of identity not its manipulation by the Treasury.  So come on enterprise educators.  Let’s drop the obsession with ‘business’ and get on with the real work of educating more enterprising souls.

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Why We Must Develop People and not Entrepreneurs

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Economic growth is supposed to deliver prosperity. Higher incomes should mean better choices, richer lives, an improved quality of life for us all. That at least is the conventional wisdom. But things haven’t always turned out that way.

An even stronger finding is that the requirements of prosperity go way beyond material sustenance. Prosperity has vital social and psychological dimensions. To do well is in part about the ability to give and receive love, to enjoy the respect of your peers, to contribute useful work, and to have a sense of belonging and trust in the community. In short, an important component of prosperity is the ability to participate meaningfully in the life
of society.

This view of prosperity has much in common with Amartya Sen’s vision of development as ‘capabilities for flourishing’.

The ‘iron cage of consumerism’ is a system in which no one is free.

It’s an anxious, and ultimately a pathological system. But at one level it works. The system remains economically viable as long as liquidity is preserved and consumption rises. It collapses when either of these stalls.

Prosperity without growth?
The transition to a sustainable economy
Professor Tim Jackson
Economics Commissioner
Sustainable Development Commission

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Wasting the Web in Enterprise Support

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There is so much great on-line training for people who wish to start, or are thinking about starting, or are looking to develop and existing business.  I wonder why we don’t encourage our clients to make more use of it.  (Could it be because we are too focused on bums on OUR seats and hits to OUR websites).

On-line learning does not suit everybody – and much of it does originate from the USA – but it is a wonderful resource that the engaged and committed would use AND it can be a tremendous vehicle for establishing client commitment and learning styles.

Here is a page with 85 FREE online learning resources for entrepreneurs.

Wouldn’t it be great if advisers and coaches could use on-line learning management systems with a  full range of on-line and off-line resources that allowed us to help clients to manage their own learning – and ensure that what we taught actually was correlated with later success?

If we could help connect would be entrepreneurs with sources of advice and support through social media networks.

If we could provide regular ‘nudges’ and opportunities to engage through applications like Twitter and Facebook?

When I was looking at this a few (10?) years back the technology was expensive and unreliable.  Now most of it is free/low cost AND more or less ubiquitous.  Most of the publicly funded business support sector is so digitally illiterate (the ranks are not exactly swollen with digital natives) and focused on old bums on seats/intensive assists metrics that I don’t expect a web 2.0 revolution in this sector anytime soon.

Anyone up for a Digital Britain?

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New Start, ACT, NfEA and the State of Business Support

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New Start Magazine have published an article about the recent NfEA conference to launch ACT – a new network for enterprise support professionals.  It certainly got my juices flowing.  Below are my comments submitted in response to the original article.

I am glad the launch of ACT went well.

When I was invited to become a supplier for ACT the prime criteria for selection was a willingness to pay NfEA several thousand pounds for the privilege!  Of course others do this kind of thing to – but that does not make it the best way to secure high quality and innovative learning for business support professionals.  When I managed BLU the only criteria for being included as an associate was that you had something great to deliver and that you consistently got good feedback.  Selection as an associate was based on a rigorous and open selection process – against priorities and learning needs identified by advisory groups consisting of civil servants and business support professionals who were collaborating to deliver public policy as effectively as possible.  It was not based on ability/willingness to pay.

I am also glad that SFEDI are reviewing the ‘issues’ with the accreditation of business advisers.  As the lead body with responsibility in this arena it will be very interesting to see what they come up with!  My money would be another ‘much has been achieved but much remains to be done’ report.  I am not anticipating any turkeys voting for xmas on this one!  I have sat with SFEDI in many a meeting where both standards and assessment procedures have been dumbed down significantly by those ‘charged’ with improving skills and enterprise just to make sure that they have an ample supply of affordable, accredited advisers to deliver the latest government funded business support wheeze.  The reality is that this is about hitting the numbers promised by politicians and civil servants, rather than ensuring that the owner manager gets access to high quality business support.

NFEA, SFEDI, IBC/A/C have been working to improve the standards of business support for decades and in that time have presided over a general decline in the quality of advice and support available through the public purse, primarily in my opinion because of political interference and the imposition of the successive waves of ‘reform’ in the delivery of business support.

George is right, there are some very good advisers out there.  Some younger than others.  But in general I believe that both the quality of the advisers, and the power of the business support process to inspire and transform our entrepreneurial base have been significantly eroded by short term thinking, too many initiatives and political interference.

Am I the only one that sees it this way?

A further observation if I may.  Anyone who seriously believes that effective business support is about ‘showing people the way’ – based on knowledge and experience of previous recessions is seriously off the pace.  Our job is not to show them the way – IT IS TO HELP OUR CLIENTS TO FIND THEIR WAY – in a world that is massively different and rapidly changing.  To help them develop their vision and follow their intuition and insights.  To adapt and innovate, not to mimic and comply.  Our job is not to ‘tell and show’.  Nor to ‘diagnose and broker’.  It is to facilitate and enable.

I remember a few years back, when I was assessing business advisers, watching one tell a young entrepreneur that he should obsess less about his need for a laptop.  “I ran my business for decades without using a laptop” he said.

And another who said that we should not worry too much about developing a good online presence for business support services because “proper business people don’t have time to surf the web”.

Web 2.0 is a very different world.  Yet how many business advisers have read Cluetrain Manifesto?  Or even Tom Peter’s Re-Imagine?

How many have the courage and the skills to bring these insights to the world of informing, diagnosing and brokering?

No, much of business support is still in a world dominated by the technologies of the past – like benchmarking; in a world where we believe that academic institutions and training providers can develop qualifications that keep up to date with emerging technologies and provide us with a workforce with the skills needed in todays’ world.   In the modern world technologies move too quickly to be codified into qualifications and training programmes.  Skills have to be learned on the job.  Most providers are teaching tomorrows’ workforce how to use yesterdays’ technologies.

I look forward to the business support industry giving up fighting the last war and recognising that there is a brand new one to be fought requiring very different methodologies.

My guess is that no-one live twittered the ACT conference!

10 Common Mistakes In Developing an Enterprise Culture

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Many projects designed to stimulate an enterprise culture fall foul of one or more of the following:

  1. they focus too much on the individual and not enough on the enterprising ecosystem – failing to address social context – instead trying to help individuals to ‘overcome the odds’
  2. believing that the reasons for low levels of enterprise are because we have not provided the right building – commissioning the latest interpretation of the ‘catalytic space’ – hoping that if we build it they will come
  3. failing to educate and engage other stakeholders and agencies involved in community development about the role of enterprise in economic and social development.  Helping them to see that this is about education and the development of human potential
  4. focusing on persuasion rather than education – using ‘carrots and sticks’ to drive people towards enterprise – rather than helping them to clarify their own self interest and then developing their power to realise it
  5. pretending that enterprise is a good thing – instead of portraying it in a balanced way as a double edged sword – a powerful vehicle for life that can crash horribly or take you on a wonderful journey
  6. skimming communities for those with most developed ‘enterprise potential’ and helping them take the last few steps – instead of helping those who have not explored their enterprise potential take the first few steps – ‘Have you got a great business idea?’
  7. designing interventions around 121, 12-several and 12 many interventions – instead of around word of mouth and other network effects – failing to train gatekeepers to act as educators and enthusiastic referrers
  8. designing services that are policy led (designed to achieve specific policy goals) rather than client centred – designed to help clients to become more enterprising in their own terms
  9. starting from where we want to start rather than from where clients are
  10. failing to recognise that strong, long term relationships are critical to building the trust and support necessary to enable people to take more enterprising actions – and a bonus number 11
  11. failing to build teams capable of starting sustainable growth oriented business – instead pandering to the myth of the lone entrepreneur bravely riding the range.

Any that I have missed?

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