Success Built to Last

Success in the long run has less to do with finding the best idea, organizational structure, or business model for an enterprise, than with discovering what matters to us as individuals…For the most part, extraordinary people, teams, and organizations are simply ordinary people doing extraordinary things that matter to them.
Success Built to Last – Porras, [...]

Demos Enterprise Report

Demos have just published a collection of essays on the future of enterprise from contributors such as:

John Bird
Tim Campbell
Peter Day
John Elkington
Gordon Frazer
Howard Gardner
Peter Grigg
Martha Lane Fox
Jim Lawn
Raj Patel
Carl Schramm
Simon Woodroffe

As DEMOS say in the blurb for the report:
Enterprise is all too often associated with making money. Yet, there is so much more to it: enterprise [...]

Bill Strickland at TED

‘Make the Impossible Possible’ is a wonderful book by Bill Strickland. You can hear Bill talk about his experience in engaging communities in enterprise and creating transformation results by watching the video here.
NB it is about 30 mins – but well worth a watch!

Ideas and Opportunities are NOT the Problem

Business opportunities are like buses, there is always another one coming along – Richard Branson
At least that is the case if you are already ‘enterprising’.  Then the main problem is to stop the flow of opportunities and ideas long enough to make disciplined progress on any one of them.
However if you have been born and [...]

Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Reading Group

There is a lot of stuff being written about enterprise and entrepreneurship at the moment. And there is a lot of stuff that was written years ago that still holds valuable lessons.
I am starting an Enterprise Reading Group for people who like to read the enterprise literature and find ways to apply what they [...]

“Oh, my God. With this reality, what can I dream?”

“I once was with somebody I liked very much — an older person, when I was considerably younger than I am now.
That person said,
“Spend at least fifteen minutes a day weaving dreams. And if you weave a hundred, at least two of them will have a life.”
So continue with a dream and [...]

Cycle of Change Re-worked

I have been thinking some more about the cycle of change and how it works when thinking about enterprise and transforming communities.
I think this re-work helps to show that there may be a lot of people who are not interested in changing to a ‘more enterprising’ set of behaviours.
If we are serious about transformation then [...]

Be Careful What You Wish For

As the legendary Bruce Springsteen said back in the 1970s when he just started to win recording contracts – ‘When they pay you $400 a day you get to have $400 dollar a day problems’.
I found a great blog yesterday that quoted some research on the relationship between wealth and stress.
The following five types of [...]

An Enterprise Marketing Fiasco?

I have been doing some work for a while now with LEGI practitioners in Leeds looking at the quality of marketing that we use to promote enterprise services and the people that might respond to it. Below is a piece of (non LEGI) marketing collateral that is currently doing the rounds. I think it [...]

Enterprise, Entrepreneurs and the Fine Art of Progress

‘Enterprising’ people can recognise a gap between the way the world is, and the way they would like it to be and are taking actions that they think will help to close the gap between the two.
They are practitioners of the fine art of progress. I would also make a case that everyone [...]