I am amazed by the wonderful work done by so many enterprise professionals that is not:<\/p>\n
Sometimes the only things that seems to count in the world of the Enterprise Professional are:<\/p>\n
Sometimes even obviously important measures are no longer tracked because they are not directly called for in the policy frameworks within which enterprise work is commissioned and delivered.\u00a0 These include measures such as the survival rates<\/strong> of the new businesses and also the number of people who thoroughly investigate a business idea and then decide to walk away from it because it is not ‘right’ for them at this time.\u00a0 These are the clients who put their enterprise dreams ‘on hold’<\/strong>.\u00a0 It is likely that they will have learned a lot about enterprise on the journey and they will often return with a better business idea after a while.\u00a0 They will have got the enterprise bug and should certainly be counted as successes.\u00a0 By putting the ‘dream on hold’ they have almost certainly been saved from future misery and debt.\u00a0 It is ‘dreams on hold’ clients that we should really be counting as the percentage of the population who have really thought about enterprise.<\/p>\n Failure to collect data on survival rates can lead to an increase in poor start-ups destined to struggle or fail, often leaving a trail of debt, despair and depression with enormous social costs.\u00a0 Indeed there are often perverse incentive schemes that ‘reward’ enterprise professionals for the facilitation of such start-ups as they are seen as ‘countable’ successes in the short term at least.<\/p>\n However these are not the main points I want to make in this rant!<\/p>\n There are a ream of other measures that are valuable in both social and economic terms that many enterprise professionals fail to track and remain unrecognised.\u00a0 These often relate to the development of social capital<\/a> in the course of the enterprise journey.\u00a0 Tracking social capital or social return on investment<\/a> is not a massively difficult task – but it does need some planning.<\/p>\n The kind of indicators that could be tracked\u00a0 and reported on by enterprise professionals include:<\/p>\n I am sure that the list of good work done by enterprise professionals could go on and on (feel free to let me know any you think I have missed).<\/p>\n The important challenge is how we go about recording the true impact of our work – both socially and economically and making sure that the full value of this is recognised and paid for.<\/p>\n\n