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Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

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Essential viewing especially for all of you who promote fast start-ups:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU]

How do we provide enterprise coaching that provides spaces where people with ideas can meet, swap and take on new forms?

It is a team game after all!

I am glad to say we have been getting much better at this in Leeds recently thanks to tremendous efforts on things like Bettakultcha, Cultural Conversations, and Progress School all helping to build an environment and an ecology where slow hunches can brew.

Arts Funding in a Web 2.0 World

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I tend to agree with JG Ballard when he said:

The funds disbursed by the Arts Council over the decades have created a dependent client class of poets, novelists and weekend publishers whose chief mission in life is to get their grants renewed….

The trouble is the alternatives to pursuing public funding are so damned hard.  They traditionally rely on someone liking your art enough (or believing it to be a decent investment proposition), to want to actually buy it at a price that does not lose the artist money and that values their time and skill reasonably.

But what if we set up a site where artists could pitch their projects at the ‘drawing board’ stage, including the budget necessary to create the work, and then donations were crowd sourced from the web?

It could look a bit like this from the US.

  • Does such a platform exist here in the UK?
  • Could it?
  • Should it?

An Enterprise Escalator? No Thanks! Give Me a Sherpa Instead

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Kevin Horne is the CEO of Norfolk and Waveney Enterprise Services (NWES) ‘one of the leading business support organisations’ in the UK.  NWES is a members of the National Federation of Enterprise Agencies and Kevin has written a piece drawing attention to the NFEA’s Enterprise Manifesto.

Kevin goes on to describe the ‘Enterprise Escalator’ which provides a ‘comprehensive customer journey’, comprising:

  • Outreach and awareness raising.
  • Pre-start advice.
  • Start-up training.
  • One to one support.
  • Access to finance.
  • Mentoring.
  • Networking.

On the surface, good sensible stuff.  But it perpetuates a myth.  The ‘escalator’ implies that, if start up is right for me, I just have to get on and I will effortlessly ascend to the next level.  It is a false promise.  It is the enterprise fairytale.  Real world is less ‘escalator’ and more ‘snakes and ladders’.  Less gentle trip to the shopping centre and more laying siege to the mountain.  It is life making work.

And what if it is not right for me?  Kevin rightly suggest that we need to signpost to other services – but will any of those really help?  I have seen too many people with aspiration and potential be sent back to the job centre because the job of helping them find their enterprising feet will just take too long.  It won’t fit with the neatly packaged funded services that look to provide a start up fast track.

Perhaps we should offer an enterprise sherpa service.  Someone who has managed the ascent before – but who has also, on occasion, failed.  Someone who recognises that this is a risky endeavour and needs to be carefully managed if it is not to cause damage.  Someone who can recognise when the time is right to push for the summit and when the time is right to do more training and preparation at low levels.

If we are to engage people in communities then we have to engage them ‘where they are at’.  Some will already have made it to base camp and are hungrily eyeing the peak.  It might not quite be an escalator but we can certainly pass them the oxygen, clip them onto the fixed ropes and wish them luck.

But many remain in the valleys and seldom look to the cloud covered tops.

We have to personalise our services and we have to recognise that many are not yet close to being  ready to start a business – now is not the time to launch an assault for the summit – but instead to weigh up the pros and cons of even considering a short trek.

Different people are at different places.

Some will be highly motivated but with few skills.  Others will have skills (that they often don’t recognise) but little or no motivation.  Some will have neither motivation nor skill. A precious few will have both.

The real ‘enterprise’ challenge is to engage those who have already decided that the ‘labour market’ is not for them and to encourage them to reconsider what they can do with their lives.  It is about reconnecting them to their aspirations, helping them to find belief and confidence and finding ways in which they can unstick their lives and make progress.  It is about helping them to see that their is an enterprise journey that might be right for them.  Can we cost effectively extend our sherpa service to engage and inspire them?  What are the costs of not doing so?  This should be the realm of the enterprise coach.

It is often a protracted job that requires a long term, strong, supportive, challenging, trusting and non-judgemental relationship.  It is not about the ‘Enterprise Fairytale’ and fast start ups.  It is about the hard work of developing people and helping them to find ways to dare to move forward again.

I wonder if Enterprise Agencies have the skill and commitment to required to develop an enterprise based service that will really start where many people are at?

The Information Problem…

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Todd Hannula has blogged about the possibility of an open source information platform for social entrepreneurs.  He posits that such a platform might help more social entrepreneurs get the information that they need at the right time.  Sounds like the kind of idea that the public purse might get interested in investing in.

But does it stack up?

  • Is the Internet not an open source information platform?
  • Is it possible to provide any more information within a few clicks?
  • Is the supply side of business support not already rammed full to the gunnels with information and workshops?

I think that the answer to the information question lies in an exploration of the ‘demand side’  for information rather than thinking about how we can develop the information ‘supply side’.

If entrepreneurs REALLY want to succeed (rather than look and feel good for a while) they should get the right team in place before they start.  A team that is as obsessed about financial management and marketing and sales as it is about saving the world.  With a balanced team seeking information and ‘better practice’ in each of these domains they are much less likely to fail as a business and the demand side of the information market place will be more robust.

So let’s have less encouragement to individual entrepreneurs to change the world single handed and more encouragement to them to build powerful and balanced teams.

Todd suggests that the realisation for most social entrepreneurs that they are ‘not very good’ at business comes ‘just too late’.  This is an unpalatable (and therefore largely unspoken) truth for nearly all entrepreneurs – social or otherwise.

They nearly all get a massive shock at some point.

  • They run out of money.
  • Customers get angry.
  • Products and services don’t work as well as was planned.

The question is how to respond?

  • Are they prepared for the shock?
  • Did they know it was likely to come along?
  • Do they have the networks and resources to work through the shock and to learn from it?
  • Or do they bail out thinking – ‘I am not cut out for this’?

How do ‘support agencies’ make sure that they are ready to face these traumas when they almost inevitably come?

Because the painful traumas of business start-up might discourage some people from starting, they are often swept under the carpet.

We might use some euphemism, like ‘You need to do a little more work on your business plan’, but we rarely help the client to explore the unvarnished truth; No matter how much planning they do they will never be ready.  There will be nasty and uncomfortable surprises.  It is the ability to deal with these shocks and their ramifications that will separate the entrepreneurs from the wannabes.

I choose to consistently focus clients on the possible downsides of their business as much as on the upsides.  I usually beg them to find some less risky way of following their dream other than starting their own business.  I make them explore the things that might go wrong – and of the devastating impact that they could have on finances, relationships and reputations.

People say to me ‘Mike, they will never start a business if you keep pointing out all of the downsides…’

Well I make no apologies.

If someone is put off starting a business by a good exploration of the possible downsides then they are probably making exactly the right decision.

It is not more businesses that we need, but better businesses.  Businesses that have a pragmatic understanding of the risks that they face (bankruptcy, debt, damaged relationships etc) – and are still prepared to take them.  Businesses whose antennae are tuned to both problems and opportunities.  You can’t stop a business like this from avidly consuming information.  They seek it out.  They devour it.  Even if it is hard to find or ambiguous.

Instead we often find ourselves trying to resource dozens of ‘wannabe’ hopefuls buoyed up by a raft of interventions to promote enterprise on a sea of support agencies whose criteria for success is based on counting start-ups rather than survival rates.  And then we have to find ways to spoon feed them information like medicine that might keep their business off the rocks – and we wonder if there is not some better way of shaping the information supply side.

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Enterprise Lessons from Frazer Irving

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Had the privilege of attending my first Creative Networks event at Leeds College of Art.  Frazer Irving – a wonderful illustrator talked about his career – from which I took the following:

  1. the seeds of your (your clients) future are often sown early – go back to the early years to see if the basis for an enterprise were sown then
  2. just because it sells does not mean it is good – heroin is not better than tofu – even if it does shift more units – selling stuff is not the be all and all – truth and beauty matter too
  3. provoke, invoke, evoke – apparently John Lennon said that – not a bad JD for an enterprise coach either
  4. 5 years of crappy jobs and being on the dole – being on the dole were the ‘happy days’
  5. ‘ideas burning on the inside’
  6. managers/editors can leave you with tears streaming down your face and your soul ripped out and thrown on the floor
  7. the bad times provide the fuel and drive to allow the good
  8. an incessant streak of optimism helps – on being rejected by judges in a portrait competition Frazer chose to believe it was because he wasn’t important – ‘although it might have been because, then, I wasn’t very good’
  9. it takes a lot of time, training, passion and life experience to really master your subject
  10. great technology combined with great passion and skills produce remarkable, beautiful and important results
  11. sometimes you need someone to say ‘chin up – you will be alright’
  12. sometimes when your art is ripped off it gets you great new gigs – life-changing breaks…
  13. be a slave to the muse – let the story dictate the style – if the story is trivial don’t expect to get great results
  14. it is really about finding out who you are and what you can become – enterprise is about the emergence of identity – the process of becoming…
  15. treat me as a ‘pencil monkey’ and you will get mediocrity
  16. in the comic world a lot of bad product is there because of poor management – comics and every other industry on the planet – management is perfectly designed to get the results it gets
  17. if it is bad it is (nearly always) because the managers/editors have put the wrong people on the job
  18. if you have recruited the wrong people then forcing them to compromise WILL lead to mediocrity
  19. recruit great talent carefully and then trust it to deliver on its own terms – not yours
  20. when your hobby becomes your job – you get another hobby
  21. musicians jam and sometimes the results are great – what is the jamming equivalent for you?
  22. be careful about your reputation – one person saying you might not hit a deadline in a public forum can be a killer
  23. sometimes it is best not to claim the credit for all your ideas
  24. it really is full of ups and downs – but you come out of the downs with even more resources – psychological and technical if not financial

This was a great networking event – convivial atmosphere – great facilities – good food – great speakers and good management.

If only all networking opportunities were this good!