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Be Careful What You Wish For

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As the legendary Bruce Springsteen said back in the 1970s when he just started to win recording contracts – ‘When they pay you $400 a day you get to have $400 dollar a day problems’.

I found a great blog yesterday that quoted some research on the relationship between wealth and stress.

The following five types of deal were offered:

  1. The Bum Deal: Being stressed out, overworked, and making less than $100,000 per year.
  2. The Really Bum Deal: Being stressed, overworked, and making less than $25,000 per year.
  3. The Submission Deal: Making around $20,000 per year, but accepting your dirt-poor status. Your dire situation, in turn, leads to a sense of resignation that allows you to relax and enjoy your free time.
  4. The You’re-An-Idiot Deal: Being ultra-rich (making more than, say, $3 million per year off interest income), having nothing to do, and stressing out over golf games, financial managers, and all the poor people trying to bilk you out of your fortune.
  5. The Sweet Deal: Making more than $3 million per year off interest income and relishing your liesure time with hedonistic pleasure. At the same time, you’re conscious enough to avoid misogyny and gambling addictions.

Now I think that sometimes the deals people settle for are a reflection of their self worth, as much as of their potential or achievement.

You can read the original post here.

Enterprise, Entrepreneurs and the Fine Art of Progress

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‘Enterprising’ people can recognise a gap between the way the world is, and the way they would like it to be and are taking actions that they think will help to close the gap between the two.

They are practitioners of the fine art of progress. I would also make a case that everyone is already enterprising, acting in ways that we think will make things better. We are all practitioners of the fine art of progress.  It is a fundamental characteristic of of healthy people.  It is just that some – many –  of us have got ‘stuck’.

For some the nature of ‘progress’ is purely personal – making things better for themselves and their immediate families. For others it is a much more social objective – about making things better for others or for the planet. For the vast majority it is some combination of the two – which is why the distinction between the entrepreneur and the social entrepreneur, enterprise and social enterprise is such a tricky one to maintain.

If we want to develop more enterprising communities then our task is to:

  • encourage more people to reflect on the gap between the way the world is and the way they would like it to be;
  • nurture the skills and passions required to help more people believe that they can take action to close the gap;
  • help people to recognise that action can and often does lead to progress;
  • recognise that each ‘failure’ represents progress – a lesson learned.

It is about helping more people to become active citizens in shaping their own futures rather than to be passive consumers of whatever ‘life’ throws their way. It is about helping ‘stuck’ people to ‘unstick’ themselves.  If we can help more people to get on this ‘enterprise journey’ then incredible progress becomes possible. We will be building more enterprising communities. We will even find that the business startup (and survival) rates go up as some enterprising people become entrepreneurs. This will be a by-product of our efforts to develop a more enterprising community and not a cause of it! Indeed by pusuing business start-ups direclty we may become the victims of at least two unintended consequences:

  • we ‘skim’ the most enterprising people from the least enterprising communities
  • we temporarily increase start-up rates with a parallel increase in business failure rates  – the net result of which is more people even more certain that ‘enterprise’ is not for them

In some of the most deprived communities we have to recognise that large numbers of people have become stuck. The options for progress that they see are narrow. Their belief in their own ability to make progress has been eroded. They have little or no confidence in their own skills or their ability to develop them. This is one of the reasons that I have been finding out more about the work of The Pacific Institute.  The Pacific Institute started life in 1971 with a simple idea – if you open people’s mind to their own potential and how to achieve it, step changes in organisational and community effectiveness will follow.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr Neil Straker who heads up TPI here in the UK. I found out that they are already massively engaged with Leeds City Council and with Education Leeds – although the links to enterprise in the city do not yet seem to have been made.  They seem to have developed a strong track record in the city for helping individuals to recognise and develop their own potential.  They have developed a large number of ‘facilitators’ in the city who have worked with both children and parents in many of the secondary schools throughout the city as well as with young people and adults in some of our most deprived communities.

They may have an important part to play in the enterprise agenda in the city.

Enterprise Insight – Mind the Gap

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Although it is almost 12 months old now this report from Enterprise Insight carries much sensible advice.

‘Thinkers’ are overlooked

Large numbers of people think about setting up their own business, or becoming their own boss (which is an important difference) – but many of them don’t turn the thinking into action. Reasons for this include:

  • Believing that they don’t have what it takes to run a business, and
  • Not having a business idea

The first of these beliefs is perpetuated by much of the entrepreneurship reality programming on TV. Think The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den etc where only certain ‘types of people’ are deemed to have what it takes. I am sure that had Sir Richard Branson pitched some of his early business ideas (Budgerigar Breeding and Christmas Tree Farming – both of which he tried and failed at) to the Dragon’s he would have received the ritual humiliation that is meted out to so many.

The truth of the matter is that no-one knows what it takes to run a business until they try it. So when you here you someone say ‘Oh I could never run my my own business – I don’t have what it takes.’ ask them what they think it takes. This will get you much clearer on their perceptions on what business is all about.

The second is perpetuated by most of the enterprise marketing collateral I see. Most start of with some variation of ‘Do you have a great business idea?’. The implication being that if you don’t then perhaps enterprise is not for you.

Most entrepreneurs have to learn how to have, develop and let go of enterprise ideas before they find one that works for them. Anyone who wants to work for themselves or finds a way of expressing themselves can be helped to explore their passion and skill to develop some business ideas.

Ideas are the easy bits – its allowing yourself to believe that you could succeed that’s hard. So when you find yourself working with a thinker who never seems to act – exploring and challenging their ideas about the importance of ‘the business idea’ or ‘having what it takes’ can sometimes help them bridge the gap to action.

‘Some of the most significant barriers to starting a business are emotional and psychological such as lack of self-confidence’

Yet still so often we find it easy to judge the potential entrepreneur and their business idea. Learning to accept and not to judge is a critical skill if we are to succeed in helping people on their enterprise journeys.

‘Policy designed’ programmes are usually targeted at particular demographic groups based on gender, ethnicity, disability or disadvantage. Although this makes sense for addressing inequalities in society, such programmes tend to regard their audience as a homogeneous group. They tend to overlook the real needs, motivations and attitudes of individuals.

I have taught the fundamental importance of client centred enterprise coaching for a long time now. The sad truth is that most services are designed more for the convenience of the funder, the service provider’s organisational infrastructure (I have a manged workspace and I am gonna fill it!) or the individual advisers own comfort zones than they are for the needs of the client.

Targeted, customer-focused activities are needed to convert more young thinkers into doers. This audience is mobile and dynamic and communications campaigns are an effective way to encourage next steps. Personalised messages, stories, role models and competitions should be designed with a customer segment in mind.

Not only Young Thinkers – but most thinkers are far more likely to respond to well targeted marketing messages that speak to them as an individual. However better than that by far would be word of mouth recommendation to you and your service from someone they know and trust.

Encouraging-peer-to peer support can be effective in building the UK’s entrepreneurial capital and socially empowering young entrepreneurs.The knowledge economy depends on institutions that join up thinking and help bring together “the five tribes of enterprise”: creators, advisers, funders, facilitators and educators. We need diffused and cost-effective forms of support and less reliance on only professional business advisers. This requires greater use of mentors, ‘connectors’who can bring people together, the stimulation of support networks for young entrepreneurs as well as experimentation in the use of social media for enterprise purposes.

We have long known that entrepreneurs of almost any age and at almost any stage in the business cycle learn more from their peers than from professional advisers. Especially when advisers ADVISE instead of facilitate personal and entrepreneurial development.

You can download a summary of the Mind the Gap Report as well as the Full Monty here.

The Power of Acceptance

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“We need to tell people not to be helpful. Trying to be helpful and giving advice are really ways to control others.

Advice is a conversation stopper…we want to substitute curiosity for advice.

No call to action.

No asking what they are going to do about it.

Do not tell people how you handled the same concern in the past.

Do not ask questions that have advice hidden in them, such as “have you ever thought of talking to the person directly?”

Often citizens will ask for advice. The request for advice is how we surrender our sovereignty. If we give in to this request, we have, in this small instance, affirmed their servitude, their belief that they do not have the capacity to create the world from their own resources; and more important, we have supported their escape from their own freedom.”

Community – The structure of belonging – Peter Block

“One of the basic elements of the relationship between oppressor and oppressed is prescription. Every prescription represents the imposition of one individual’s choice upon another, transforming the consciousness of the person prescribed to into one that conforms with the prescriber’s consciousness.”

Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Friere

“It was wonderful! Incredibly powerful – just to be listened to.”

Participant on an Introduction to Enterprise Coaching Programme.

Cycle of Change – Prochaska and Diclemente – and Enterprise

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  • When we are encouraging individuals to become more enterprising we are encouraging them to consider the merits of changing.
  • To consider replacing one pattern of attitudes and behaviours with another.
  • So if we are going to succeed in helping people to change in this way what can we learn from other professions and professionals who have been working overtly on changing behaviour for years?

This was one of the questions that we set out to explore when we asked Vicky Sinclair from the substance misuse unit in Leeds Prison to work with a group of enterprise professionals in Leeds as part of the Sharing the Success Capacity Building programme. Vicky shared with us the Cycle of Change model developed in 1982 by Prochaska and Diclemente – which seems to have tons of relevance to enterprise professionals.

The cycle of change has 6 phases:

Cycle of Change - Prochaska and Diclemente

  1. In ‘pre-contemplation’, the person does not see any problem in their current behaviours and has not considered there might be some better alternatives.
  2. In ‘contemplation’ the person is ambivalent – they are in two minds about what they want to do – should they stay with their existing behaviours and attitudes or should they try changing to something new?
  3. In ‘preparation’, the person is taking steps to change usually in the next month or so.
  4. In ‘action’, they have made the change and living the new set of behaviours is an all-consuming activity.
  5. In ‘maintenance’, the change has been integrated into the person’s life – they are now more ‘enterprising’.
  6. Relapse is a full return to the old behaviour. This is not inevitable – but is likely – and should not be seen as failure. Often people will Relapse several times before they finally succeed in making a (more or less) permanent to a new set of behaviours.

A couple of things require thinking about when we look at this model in relation to encouraging people to change to more enterprising behaviours.

Firstly, most enterprise professionals think that the path to entrepreneurship is (or should be) a fairly linear one if the client has a half decent business idea. We just need to give them the right training at the right time and bingo! This model suggests that there are a whole range of factors that are liable to lead to lapses – if not relapses – on the enterprise journey and we should be aware of this. Lapse or Relapse does not mean failure – and should not be taken as indicators that the person is not capable of making the change. Indeed they should be EXPECTED as a normal part of the cycle of change in relation to new behaviours.

Secondly, the change cycle will often operate over a timescale of years rather than months. When we are designing enterprise services we need to take account of the fact that different individuals move at a different pace. Any attempt to group people into cohorts and move them at the same pace through a change process needs to take this challenge very seriously.

Thirdly, and perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, enterprise services generally seem to market themselves at those that are already contemplating or have already decided that ‘enterprise’ is for them. They recruit those who are already at Stages 2, 3 or 4. If we are serious about really changing the enterprise culture then we also need to find ways to engage and work with those who are at Stage 1 – Precontemplation. This stage requires a very different approach to marketing in terms of both the message and the media. It also requires a different type of service.