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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!

Ripples Out – Reflections

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First of all congratulations to everyone involved (Lippy Films, Yorkshire Forward, Together for Peace and local residents) in creating a powerful, provocative  film.

I sincerely hope that it helps disturb the comfortable equilibrium in Leeds (and beyond) that exists between the controllers of the public purse and the developers.  There maybe a brief window for reflection while development is ‘put on pause’ by recession – but I am sure that we will soon see business resumed as usual – if only temporarily.  At the moment, conveniently, there is no other game in town.

The likelihood of this will be increased if we focus our time and energies in trying to ‘influence’ the processes of planners and developers.  This will be playing their game – on their terms.  And I have a sneaking hunch about who might win – no matter how articulate and informed those that advocate the voice of the community are.  We also run the risk of further contributing to the dilution of our personal power as now, instead of relying on planners, we learn to rely on ‘our representatives’ to create a better future for us.  Developers and communities can become bedfellows – trading favours, but they are unlikely to become allies – they are seeking different and mutually exclusive goals.

The ‘Planners Analysis’ that says ‘give us time to finish‘, ‘forgive us a few mistakes‘ and ‘we just need to complete our investments‘ essentially says that ‘Planning’ works.  Visions, blueprints, plans and ‘investments’ will lead us to a better world.  ‘You ‘the people’ will be well looked after once we have engineered things fully – but we need more than 10 years – much more‘.

Can I be the only one that doubts this promise?

Am I the only one that thinks they, the planners, don’t really believe this themselves?

But it keeps the Porsches and the Mercedes on the road.  This is an unsustainable and unjust paradigm for progress that we engage with at our peril.  Our best endeavours are perhaps focussed on the search for a new paradigm for progress.

Perhaps the root of the problem is a perception that it is the decisions and actions of ‘others’ that largely determine the course and quality of our lives.  That the quality of our lives depend on decisions about where money is spent and what infrastructure is built.  If ‘others’ make the wrong decision or do their jobs badly our communities will be broken.  This is a dangerous and pernicious myth made even more dangerous and pernicious by an obvious ‘face validity’.  But we have learned that it takes more than PVC windows and doors to ‘renew’ communities.  Physical infrastructure creates profits (on a good day).  It rarely creates sustainable progress.

If we believe that others have ‘the power’ then we are relinquishing ours.

Finance and infrastructure accrue as a by-product of community.  As by-products of people (diverse tribes including inventors, creatives, workers, financiers, developers, mothers, carers, young and old, healthy and sick, bureaucrats and anarchists – you get the picture?) collaborating to make ‘good’ lives and ‘good’ work.  They are seldom the preconditions for it.

And now, more than ever before, what we need to produce is not profit or GDP – but ‘wealth’; that stuff which remains when the money has run out – wellbeing.

Learning to collaborate to do ‘good work’, understanding what ‘good work’ is – learning to use our talents to create (private and common) wealth (not just profits) for our communities offers us a more robust framework for progress.  These are the challenges that require our time and our attention.  Thankfully they are much less expensive than buildings and ‘walkways in the sky’.

If this analysis offers hope we need to allow a new cast to take to the stage.  Architects, planners and bureaucrats must become the servants of community rather than its masters.  Community development workers (not outreach workers paid for by the state to deliver outcomes), and educators (not teachers paid to deliver ’employer’ requirements) perhaps hold the keys to this kingdom.

Perhaps this is a crude analysis.  I do not believe that planners, architects and developers are bad people.  Nor that there is any planned assault on community.  This is cock-up – not conspiracy.  Nor do I believe that vibrant communities can develop without an effective dialogue with planners.

It is just that this is not the place to start.

Mentoring for Enterprise

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Thinking of setting up a mentoring scheme?

Here are some top tips to improve the chances of success:

  1. Educate mentees in how to choose and use a mentor – this will provide a better return on investment than training people in how to be good mentors
  2. Offer a mentor matching service – but always encourage people to look for their own mentors first – this ensures relevance
  3. Always encourage people to check out a few potential mentors rather than allocating them one
  4. Train people who have already been approached to become mentors – avoid training a whole bunch of people who want to mentor, but for whom there is no demand

Please do add more….

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.