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Are You Biased Towards the Present?

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A paper published by the UK Government’s Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology provides a useful reminder that people do not always/often make rational decisions, and that one of the reasons for the irrationality is a bias for the present.

In short this means that we put off or never do things that are in our own best interest simply because we see the pay-off being to far away in the future.  Hence we stay fat and smoke – because any benefits of giving up won’t be experienced for ages.

It transpires that the poorer you are the more likely you are to show this bias for the present over the future.

This bias would seem to be important for enterprise professionals to :

  • recognise,
  • understand and
  • overcome

Any tips you want to share for helping cleints overcome their bias towards the present?

You can read the full OST paper on Delaying Gratification here.

Fascinating and Frightening in Equal Measures?

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Kanya King is a remarkable woman.  More precisely she is a very unremarkable woman with a remarkable story.  We all have the potential to do remarkable things.  She is best known for re-mortgaging her house to see her dream – The MOBO Awards – become a reality.

She is passionate about giving young people the opportunity to experience enterprise.   To inspire a new generation of business entrepreneurs.

To further this passion she has teamed up with Thomson Local – the database people – to challenge school children (16+) to develop business ideas that will benefit their local community.

The best will secure a  bursary of £100 and mentoring from a ‘business hero’.

Thomson will also build them a web site – apparently whether their business idea demands one – or not.  It might have been more interesting if Thomson helped them to develop a strategy to get to market.  The default position of ‘I need a website’ is not always the best one.

The overall competition winners will win a ‘money can’t buy prize’.  VIP experience at the next MOBOs perhaps?

I love the fact that this kind of stuff happens.  That people care about enterprise.

But I worry too;

  • I worry that they cite research (unreferenced) suggesting that 81% of British children want to run their own business – can this be true?  On what basis has this want developed?
  • I worry that combining the forces of a for profit like Thomson with a business planning competition will further distort what educationalists percieve enterprise education to be all about.
  • I worry that the emphasis on ‘pitching your ideas’ – letting others attach their valuation to your business dream – will emphasise an external locus of control that is unhelpful to the entrepreneur.
  • I worry that asking young people to focus on making things better in their community – perhaps before they have learned how to make things better for themselves might inculcate lessons of selflessness that could be unhelpful.
  • I worry that this type of scheme will attract those who are already destined for an enterprising future and turn off those who think that school based competitions are uncool and that business is for geeks.
  • I worry about the language of supplying ‘business hero’ mentors.
  • I worry about the volume of work that such projects place on students and their teachers at a really busy time in the their school life.
  • I worry about further strengthening the perception that enterprise = business and more teachers resisting the enterprise agenda as a capitalist plot to brainwash young people.
  • I worry about the fact that the website that is the home of the competition appears to have no RSS feed.  I am invited to ‘check back’ for updates!  As if web 2.0 had not happened!!

So I have signed up to offer to be a business hero – notwithstanding considerable reservations.

Let’s see where this takes us!

Enterprise Education Wrongly Understood?

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Shout out to Gareth Sear for putting me onto this from TeacherNet:

Enterprise education consists of enterprise capability supported by better financial capability and economic and business understanding. Young people need opportunities to be enterprising through applying their knowledge, skills and attributes — to ‘make their mark’

Learners are expected to take personal responsibility for their own actions through an enterprise process that involves four stages.

  • Stage 1 — tackling a problem or need: students generate ideas through discussion to reach a common understanding of what is required to resolve the problem or meet the need.
  • Stage 2 — planning the project or activity: breaking down tasks, organising resources, deploying team members and allocating responsibilities.
  • Stage 3 — implementing the plan: solving problems, monitoring progress.
  • Stage 4 — evaluating the processes: reviewing activities and final outcomes, reflecting on lessons learned and assessing the skills, attitudes, qualities and understanding acquired.

Enterprise education consists of enterprise capability? Very enlightening!

Young people need opportunities to be enterprising? Young people are enterprising. Really enterprising. They have to be.

Even the ones who are quiet, shy and withdrawn are being enterprising. This is their ‘best plan’ for how to get by in life. Our job is to help them find a better, more powerful one that will help them fulfil their potential. Or to at least recognise the possibility.

Once again this all pervading direct linking of enterprise education with ‘financial capability, economic and business understanding’. Why?

Why not link it to sociological understanding? Or to psychology?

Why not link it to the Romantic poets and their descriptions of the transformational power of imagination and vision?

Why not link it to History and the power of some individuals to shape the course of civilisation? Hitler, Gandhi, Mandela as case studies in enterprise.

Why link it to money?

Why take such a utilitarian approach to enterprise?

In pursuing a narrow definition we are likely to turn students off rather than on. And certainly we will turn off other teaching staff who will continue to see enterprise education as just an extension of business studies, another example of the corruption of education by capitalism.

Learners are expected to take personal responsibility it says. Enterprise is the ultimate lesson in taking responsibility. It is only when we are enterprising – really living our lives in tune with our convictions that we have to take responsibility. All the time we operate in more bureaucratic modes we can duck responsibility by blaming others. “Sorry guv’ just following orders”.

There is nothing very enterprising about reaching a common understanding – although it is a valuable skill. It is holding a different understanding and having the courage to live by it that characterises enterprise.  Seth Godin has just written on this.

And then the soulless linear process of develop an idea, develop a plan, implement it and then learn from it. The enterprising process is all about ups and downs; it is about emotions and resilience more than it is about ‘problem solving’ and ‘deploying team members’.

It is no wonder that we are struggling to embed enterprise in the curriculum.

Enterprise Lessons from Jim Sinegal Costco Founder

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Jim Sinegal founded Costco 25 years ago.

This is a great post capturing some of what Jim learned about management, enterprise and entrepreneurship along the way.

Full of wisdom!

Shows that if you set up a small business in the right way – it can become massive.

The Creative Entrepreneur – WOW

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Good networking event last night hosted by WYLLN, bmedia and nti.

Explored a couple of questions:

  • In a fast-moving industry dominated by freelancers and SMEs, what does ‘Leadership & Management’ really mean?
  • Why is it important?

More prosaically put – why are so many creative/digital businesses poor at establishing basic business processes, managing other creatives and getting paid?

My opinion?

It is because we (the business support industry) insist on training digitals and creatives (and every other entrepreneur) that they have to do all this stuff if they are going to be successful in business.

And this is, frankly, nonsense.

It damages people.

It distorts them from their true purpose.

The challenge is being comfortable with who you are, what you want to become and what you want to spend your time doing.  Enterprise is a long term process of becoming, of exploring and realising potential.  And then finding people you can work with to do the rest.  It is about negotiating your self interest and building the right team.  All really successful business are team starts.

Why don’t we teach this?

  1. Find out what you love.  What you really love. Something that will keep you engaged for years while you strive for mastery and excellence.
  2. Get really good at it and keep getting better.  Specialise.
  3. Understand the importance of other things that you do not love.  Learn to respect and value them.  If you are a creative/digerati this is likely to be management, sales and marketing. (Most creatives and digitals have spent many hours over many years working alone honing their craft.  They tend to be introverted and uncomfortable with conflict.  Hence the aversion to management, sales and marketing.)
  4. Find other people who love doing the bits you hate.  Form a team.  A strong team. Form it with care. Take your time.  Unpicking the wrong team can be very expensive.
  5. Collaborate on developing a vision and an action plan for the business.
  6. Act – act often.
  7. Reflect and learn.

Simple.

DO NOT TRY TO DO IT ALL.  You will build a mediocre business.  You will find yourself falling out of love with large parts of it.

Dave Pannell from the Design Mechanics recognised that he would perhaps never have been a really great graphic artist (I think I heard you say that Dave).  And my guess is that this freed him up to run a great design business.  His job is to work on the business as it grows and to spend less time working in it.

Liz Cable from Reach Further is building an agile team of freelancers and employees covering all the main bases.  Balancing the demands of MD/entrepreneur working on the business, and passionate digerati working in the business is already a challenge.  Being  1.4 of an FTE is not sustainable.

I suspect that Liz will either have to spend more time in the MD role or find someone the team trusts to take this on, freeing her up to surf the wave of technology and its application to building better businesses.  Or she may find a way of balancing the two.  However if the growth plans she outlined are to be realised I suspect a decision one way or another will be required before too long.

You see the real job of the entrepreneur is to manage the art of becoming.  It is about the emergence of identity; building a life and a living – not the development of cash flow forecasts or the ticking of boxes on a competence framework.  And when we take this seriously we will develop much more powerful and engaging process for enterprise education and build more powerful, sustainable and great businesses.

We must remember that the Latin root of educate is ‘to lead out’.   Our job is to facilitate the emergence of identity – not to pour in the trivia of business skills.