I visited a really great community centre recently. \u00a0Busy, friendly, homespun,\u00a0clearly\u00a0doing great work in and with the community. We were using several rooms, one of which was called the ‘Enterprise Hub’. \u00a0It was spotlessly clean, airy, spacious and well furnished, just like every other room in the building. \u00a0But for the life of me I could not work out what made it an ‘Enterprise Hub’. \u00a0It was not set up for hot desking, there were no PCs, no mail boxes, none of the usual\u00a0paraphernalia…<\/p>\n
So I asked the centre manager about the Enterprise Hub. \u00a0The answer\u00a0surprised\u00a0me – but it shouldn’t have done. \u00a0They were looking for cash to modernise and re-decorate the room and in conversation with the\u00a0local\u00a0authority it become clear that the only budget with cash available was in ‘Enterprise’.<\/p>\n
‘They said if we called it an Enterprise Hub we could have the cash.’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I love the way this\u00a0demonstrates\u00a0the inherent enterprise of the community centre management team in tracking down the cash that they need to ‘get the job done’. \u00a0I am less impressed \u00a0by what it says about some investments in ‘enterprise’. \u00a0I can just imagine the report to the councillors about the new enterprise hub…<\/p>\n
I remember a colleague saying to me at the launch of a major enterprise initiative,<\/p>\n
\n‘The problem is that many of the people in this room don’t really <\/em><\/strong>understand\u00a0enterprise. \u00a0They don’t live it and breathe it. \u00a0If the Government was announcing a major\u00a0initiative\u00a0to invest in duck farming, because an economist had said THAT <\/em>is the future of the UK economy, many of these same people would be in the room, nodding sagely, and would run home to invent new policies to encourage duck farming’.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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