The Power of Acceptance

“We need to tell people not to be helpful. Trying to be helpful and giving advice are really ways to control others.
Advice is a conversation stopper…we want to substitute curiosity for advice.
No call to action.
No asking what they are going to do about it.
Do not tell people how you handled the same concern in [...]

Entrepreneurship as a Team Sport

I get to work with a lot of businesses. Some of them are successful. Very successful.
And all of the successful businesses have one thing in common – a successful management team with diverse talents. Between them they are able to produce a great product or service, market and sell it brilliantly and [...]

Enterprise Centres – All things to all people?

One of the things that LEGI has stimulated in ‘deprived areas’ all over England is a renewed interest in Enterprise Centres.
Many of them have a very wide remit to:

Provide serviced workspaces for social enterprises as well as more traditional ‘for profit’ businesses
Make available hot desks in open plan environments to encourage ’start-up’ entrepreneurs to network [...]

Cycle of Change – Prochaska and Diclemente – and Enterprise

When we are encouraging individuals to become more enterprising we are encouraging them to consider the merits of changing.
To consider replacing one pattern of attitudes and behaviours with another.
So if we are going to succeed in helping people to change in this way what can we learn from other professions and professionals who have [...]

What do we want Enterprise to do for us?

This is an important question and one that is rarely given serious consideration. Of course more entrepreneurs means more wealth means better communities. Right?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
In the current context most enterprise programmes focus on finding individual entrepreneurs and helping them to find ways of making their business ideas work. There is [...]

Minding the Assets

It is deeply ingrained in most enterprise professionals to try to fix things. Business plans, cash flows, products and people.
We listen to our clients for signs of weakness or difficulty and then we try and fix the problem, usually by referring them to a course or another expert.
Much of our work is biased towards [...]

Triple bottom lines, social enteprise, localism and sustainability

Triple bottom lines
Social enterprise
Localism and
Sustainability

Four hot topics.
Four inter-related topics
Four topics that get a lot of people very fired up to make change happen (definition of enterprise?).
Yet when I surveyed over 100 enterprise professionals recently this was one of their lowest priorities for personal and professional development?
Are missing a trick in really understanding what motivates many [...]

Career Readiness Certificates

I keep track od some of the thinking on economic development and enteprise that develops in the US.  One of the current ideas on the rise (fads?) is that of the Career Readiness Certificate or CRC.  The Career Readiness Certificate (CRC) is a qualification that gives employers and career seekers a ‘uniform, standard, objective measure’ [...]

Enterprise Problems are Multi-Dimensional

There is a school of though that says that enterprise professionals just need to be experts on helping clients with the business planning process. However in my experience the enterprise dimension is just one several that need to be addressed if the client is to be helped to make real progress. If the [...]

Enterprise Professionals Missing the Point?

I am amazed by the wonderful work done by so many enterprise professionals that is not:

recognised
valued, or
paid for

Sometimes the only things that seems to count in the world of the Enterprise Professional are:

businesses started/expanded/retained
jobs created/retained
GVA (Gross value added)
Percentage of people who have ‘thought about’ starting a business/going self employed
numbers engaged in 6 hours (or more) [...]