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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?

Drucker on Economic Development and the Value of ‘No-tech’

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Above all, to have ‘high‑tech’ entrepreneurship alone without its being embedded in a broad entrepreneurial economy of ‘no‑tech’, ‘low‑tech’, and ‘middle‑tech’, is like having a mountaintop without the mountain.

Even high-tech people in such a situation will not take jobs in new, risky, high‑tech ventures. They will prefer the security of a job in the large, established, ‘safe’ company or in a government agency.

Of course, high‑tech ventures need a great many people who are not themselves high‑tech: accountants, salespeople, managers, and so on.

In an economy that spurns entrepreneurship and innovation except for that tiny extravaganza, the ‘glamorous high tech venture’, those people will keep an looking for jobs and career opportunities where society and economy (i.e., their classmates, their parents, and their teachers) encourage them to look: in the large, ‘safe’ established institution.

Neither will distributors be willing to take on the products of the new venture, nor are investors willing to back it.

Peter Drucker – What Will Not Work

Good Work….

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Just reading Schumacher’s Good Work again.  Although the original lectures on which the book was based were first given in the 1970s it seems that we have made little progress in helping people with the challenge of finding good work.

From the Foreword…

At the heart of our system of work lies our system of values, and more precisely, our view of the individual and his relationships with others. By way of illustration, consider one of the current pseudo-intellectual clichés, that work is part of the Protestant ethic and that a more enlightened view of it is (presumably) that the less work you can get away with, the better.

This is a cynical and degraded view of human nature (certainly not subscribed to by any religion that I know of) because it assumes that money is the sole reason for working. Set this view against Schumacher’s opening remarks in this book, in which he identifies three purposes of human  work:

  • to produce necessary and useful goods and services;
  • to enable us to use and perfect our gifts and skills; and
  • to serve, and collaborate with, other people, so as to “liberate ourselves from our inborn egocentricity.”

…

From the Preface….

A recent article in the London Times began with these words:

“Dante, when composing his visions of hell, might well have included the mindless, repetitive boredom of working on a factory assembly line. It destroys initiative and rots brains, yet millions of British workers are committed to it for most of their lives.”

The remarkable thing is that this statement, like countless similar ones made before it, aroused no interest: there were no hot denials or anguished agreements; no reactions at all. The strong and terrible words “visions of hell,” “destroys initiative and rots brains,” and so on–attracted no reprimand that they were misstatements or overstatements, that they were irresponsible or hysterical exaggerations or subversive propaganda; no, people read them, sighed and nodded, I suppose, and moved on.

Not even  the ecologists,  conservationists,  and doom watchers are interested in this matter. If someone had asserted that certain man-made arrangements destroyed the initiative and rotted the brains of millions of birds or seals or wild animals in the game reserve of Africa, such an assertion would have been either refuted or accepted as a serious challenge. If someone had asserted that not the minds and brains of millions of workers were being rotted but their bodies, again there would have been considerable interest.

After all, there are safety regulations, inspectors, claims for damages, and so forth. No management is unaware of its duty to avoid accidents or physical conditions which impair workers’ health. But workers’ brains, minds, and souls are a different matter.

Enterprise, Community and Complexity

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Enterprise, community and complexity.  Slippery words.  So slippery that I wonder what can be meaningfully written about them.  But I will have a go.

Having worked on these ideas for many years I hold my beliefs tentatively.  But they offer the possibility of a very different direction for both promoting enterprise and building ‘harmonious and cohesive’ communities.  And few would argue that we don’t need a fresh approach.  That more of the same will get the job done.

It won’t.  We need to innovate and experiment.

Lets start with ‘enterprise’.  First, empty your mind of all those misconceptions that I must be talking about ‘business start’s, ‘cash flow forecasts’, ‘profits’ and ‘Dragons’.

I am not.

I am talking about enterprise as a measure of ‘agency’ in one’s own life.  The extent to which an individual is able to recognise what ‘progress’ (another slippery word) means and to take action its pursuit.  This is what I mean by enterprise.  It is the product of clear self-interest (I know what I want) and power (I have the confidence, skills and knowledge to take organised action in its pursuit).  An enterprising person is one who is clear on what they want from their life and actively pursues it.  An enterprising community is one which has many such people – because they are valued and supported.

If self-interest is ‘enlightened’ then it is likely that the product of enterprise will be a positive contribution to society.  If on the other hand self-interest is poorly understood then the product of enterprise may be damaging.  Enterprise in itself is not an inherently good thing. If we are going to pursue this route then we need to have faith in the essential positive nature of human beings.

If we are serious about developing ‘enterprise’, rather than managing the outputs that most enterprise funders are looking for, we need to concern ourselves with the development of self-interest and the accrual of power.   We are in the realms of person centred facilitation and education.  Not business planning.  This is an enormous shift both in what we do, and how we do it.   Helping people to clarify their self-interest and find the power to pursue it requires very different structures and processes.

It is worth noting that if you have money, there is a fair chance that at some time you will have hired a coach to help you with the difficult and personal work of clarifying self-interest and gaining the power you need to pursue it. And if they were a good coach they would not have manipulated you towards their preferred outputs – but would let you work on your own personal agenda.  If you have little or no money the chances of you ever having access to such a potentially transformational relationship are slim to none.  The relationship that you have with various ‘helpers’ is likely to be one where they try to manipulate you ‘back to work’, towards a ‘healthy diet’  or some such policy goal of funded output.

Over the last few years I have spoken with many enterprise educators, bureaucrats and practitioners and they have all accepted that this conception of enterprise has merit.  Not only will it help us to get more business start ups, but it will also help us to get large numbers of people acting in pursuit of their own wellbeing – however they define it.  It will also help us to make significant and real progress towards PSA 21 – Building More Cohesive, Active and Empowered Communities.

Which brings us to the question of how does this conception of enterprise  fit with ‘community’?

Community is a property that emerges when individuals and groups learn to negotiate their self-interest with the self-interests of others.  Community is an emergent property.  If this contention is right then it raises serious questions about approaches which attempt to provide short cuts to community (building community centres and one stop shops for example) without addressing the preconditions necessary in a complex adaptive system (such as society) for its emergence.

Community emerges when individuals learn how to associate and collaborate in pursuit of mutual self-interest.  When they recognise that the best way to achieve their own self-interest is to help others to achieve theirs.   When they understand the nature of reciprocity.  Or to borrow the words a well known Business Networking group that ‘givers gain’.

A beautiful by product of this is a raised awareness of the importance of difference.

If I learn how to associate and collaborate with someone who has different skills and knowledge, or a different cultural heritage to my own I am likely to gain more opportunities than if I associate with people who are pretty much the same as me.  Association across race, gender, age and so on provides the key to opportunity and provides a precondition that will allow harmonious communities to emerge.

With difference comes both opportunity and resilience.

Social Participation and Enterprise

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One of the key themes explored at the recent Future Gov Work Better Together event was the promise that ‘social participation gives people the power to self-actualise’.

I am sure it does.

However ‘social participation’ has also been the technology of choice for us human beings to make progress at all stages of Maslow’s Hierarchy – not just at the ‘self-actualising’ peak. Competence in social participation (or what de Tocqueville called ‘association’) and the ability to negotiate self interest through effective collaboration is one of the critical enablers in community and personal development.

Whether it is learning to share a cave (or a housing estate) to meet needs for shelter and warmth, putting together a team to start a new business venture, or pursuing self actualisation, effective ‘social participation’ is the key.

The challenge facing us here is promoting social participation, collaboration, association. Not technology. In very few of the communities where I work is the REAL barrier to progress access to a networking site or high speed internet access (although these are cited usually after lack of money and skills).

It is often a lack of understanding about how collective self interests can best be met through negotiation and association.  About the need to see what can be contributed rather than taken.  About the need to build real trust rather than uncomfortable bureaucratic ‘compacts’.

The other barrier to social participation in the real world is an almost complete loss of belief that progress IS possible – manifesting itself in apathy and resignation. A belief that perhaps this is as good as it gets – and, if it is going to get any better, those bloody politicians had better get their fingers out, because I AM POWERLESS.

So IF we are serious about trying to shift the enterprise culture of a community we need to be in the game of building social capital, self belief and personal responsibility for making things happen.