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Most of our attempts to develop an enterprise culture are all about fixing individuals. Giving them support (because they are not strong enough), providing them with advice (because they are not clever enough) etc. It is all about fixing faults.
Very few attempts take seriously the social context in which we expect enterprise to develop. Enterprise is a social phenomena- a product of community and relationships – it is not about fixing individuals.
It is about building communities.
That is the title of a workshop I am running tomorrow for the Young People’s Enterprise Forum at a conference to look at Embedding Enterprise in Further Education.
A fresh look at enterprise….Not an easy challenge when you have been looking at it for decades! How do we engage the history department and the art team?
So how about if we look at Enterprise as a mathematical expression. How would you express it?
I think this has a lot to offer:
E = P x SI
Enterprise is the product of Power multiplied by Self Interest.
Power is the capacity to make things happen to get things done. It is about the ability to organise people, money and other resources to make things happen.
Self Interest is the extent to which we know what it is that we want to achieve. It is about vision, ambition, goals, vocation, purpose, dreams, aspirations and hopes. But self interest is not selfish. Self interest is mediated through a set of relationships with others. With supporters, colleagues, investors and activists (who might have an interest in whether we are helping or harming). Self interest (rightly understood) is the driving force for making progress, for realising potential, for negotiating an interesting and worthwhile life. Increasingly self interest and therefore enteprise is associated with interest in global issues such as climate change, social justice and wellbeing as much as it is about financial wealth.
If this expression has any merit then to embed enterprise in FE – or anywhere else – we need to understand it as an act of embedding the development of power and self interest – rightly understood.
Enterprise becomes a genuine developmental process. It is about equipping people with the knowledge, skills, wisdom and experience to develop their power (capacity to act; to get things done) and really develop an understanding of what lies in their own self interest. It comes straight from the schools of Alinsky and Freire as much as it does from the beliefs of Branson, Sugar et al.
Under this formulation the relevance of enterprise to:
Doesn’t it?
It allows enterprise to be applied to much more than entrepreneurship. It becomes a discipline for living an interesting and worthwhile life.
And isn’t that what education is meant to prepare us for?
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It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own self interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly on the benevolence of his fellow citizens.
Adam Smith – Wealth of Nations
Is a failure to really understand our own self-interest, a lack of self-love, a causal factor in some of our most disadvantaged communities? If yes, what to do…
Just over a year ago I blogged about smarta.com.
It was essentially a one page site, full of short videos of entrepreneurs of all kinds talking about their response to certain questions and challenges. You just chose an entrepreneur and a topic and you were away.
No sign ups, no profiles, no networks, no business tools. Just quick, easy access to technical and emotional support for entrepreneurs.
This month the full smarta service was launched. And it appears to have all the bells and whistles you would expect from an online entrepreneurs network. But it is, in my opinion, complicated, time consuming, unintuitive and all those great resources are now presented in a much less creative and serendipitous manner.
I have joined smarta and will do my bit to help it work.
Fingers crossed!
Why are so many ‘entrepreneurial’ workspaces so empty?
I have visited many recently. Those that pursue sustainability through membership fees and rentals are often the emptiest. Or full of people from out of town who can recognise a bargain when/if they see one. Those that recognise that local people often cannot afford to pay and therefore offer their services for free seem to have customers literally queuing up. However these are written off as ‘unsustainable’. Investing in the development of people – ‘Obviously unsustainable’!
The symptoms are obvious to the semi-expert eye. Tired signs saying ‘under offer’ for months without new tenants materialising? Acres of untouched hot desk space. Continual assurances that we were busy yesterday. Caterers that come and go – because the footfall that they anticipated has not materialised.
Promises lying broken.
When we build these places – WHY DON’T THEY COME?
This is an important question. And one that we CONSISTENTLY fail to address.
Why do those charged with developing a more enterprising culture believe that building catalyst centres, managed workspaces, incubators and other spaces will somehow change the psychology, the prevailing beliefs of a community?
Why is the “build it and they will come” mentality so prevalent? And so successful in unlocking the wallets of planners, politicians and commissioners alike?
Why in the face of refurbished or newly built, but largely empty, buildings do we insist on building yet more? Is it in the name of job creation?
We develop a more enterprising culture when we tell better, different stories. Stories of hope, aspiration, potential and achievement. Stories of progress, passion, skill and learning.
When we provide respect, encouragement and transformational relationships built on trust and wisdom. When we engage people as individuals and help them to clarify and achieve their own goals – not those pre-defined by some policy maker.
When we listen to them talk about their hopes and dreams – not tell them about the great deal we can do them if they take rent our workspace.
We don’t transform a culture by providing people with access to whitewashed vanilla workspaces and the chance to use a shared laptop with a keyboard dirtier than a toilet seat.
It is not just the waste of valuable resources that is so galling when we see buildings refurbished just because they can be. It is the ongoing waste of money as we try to cover up our mistakes in a futile effort to make them work. As commissioners cover their backs and hide behind and fall back on the recession as an excuse for their failed investments. Buildings don’t change cultures even in the good times. They don’t narrow the gap between the haves and the have nots even when the economy is on a roll. People do.
Now I hate to see a beautiful building falling into decay just as much as the next man. But I hate to see the talent and potential of people being wasted even more. Those buildings were a by-product of a vibrant, creative and enterprising community – not the cause of it.
To develop a more enterprising culture we first have to stimulate the demand side – get more people wanting to do stuff. Believing that THEY can do stuff. That they have a right to succeed or at least try – and that they will be supported with care, compassion, competence and creativity.
Only when this work on the demand side is underway and delivering tangible results should we invest in the infrastructure that they need – because then we have a chance of making an investment in something that people really want.
Something that might just fit.
Something to which they will come.
NB Of course if you build high quality entrepreneurial spaces in places that are already enterprising then they fill quickly. Anyone else see a pattern emerging here?