Category: Banging on about… Business

Continuing Education, Economic Growth and Changes of Mind and Culture

Life is what happens to you
while you’re busy
making other plans.

John Lennon, Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)

This paper is about metamorphosis, and in particular the changes that occur during the process of transforming a publically sector driven education policy initiative into a third sector arts based education social enterprise. It will consider those changes that are forced upon the protagonists in that process; the changes the protagonists initiate for themselves and the effect of these changes on organisational structure, culture, identity, programme and the raison d’etre of the enterprise itself. It is particularly timely given the recent upheavals in the public sector and the Coalition government’s intention to broaden the supplier base of public services like to health and education to the private, charitable and social enterprise sectors.

It will do this by focusing on the Aspire Trust, a social enterprise based in Merseyside and will focus particularly on its current business activities in the field of continuous education and lifelong learning. Whilst it will demonstrate that its continuous education programmes have had a beneficial impact on its economic performance, the more significant findings and implications for practitioners who are considering the leap from public sector to social enterprise will be in relation to the structural, cultural and attitudinal changes took place during the company’s set up and establishment phases.

The changes that this company went through involved challenges on many practical and theoretical fronts: personal, social, political, artistic, and educational. Orthodoxies such as ‘The Business Plan’; ‘The Bottom Line’; ‘The Job’ all came under scrutiny in the company’s early years and the results of this scrutinisation are tangible in the company’s existence and will be drawn out through this blog.

The paper concludes with four specific transformations the company has undergone since its inception which have contributed to strengthening the linkage between its education programmes and its economic performance. These transformations are not however offered as a potential ‘toolkit’ for future social enterprise development but as the provisional and partial results of an retrospective analysis of the company’s birth and growth.

The paper will continue to develop here until its presentation at ISBE, Sheffield in November.

Why is Health and Safety a contradiction in terms? Some advice for Human Resource Managers

If a healthy mind and body can be associated with minimising fear, hence reducing insecurity, increasing confidence and so on – then why does a combination of health AND safety in policy documents and organisational habits actually cause the opposite – ie encouraging tendendencies to be risk averse, to be fearful and anxious – and hence feel less secure, less confident?

Being healthy is not the same as being safe. “Health and Safety” as a policy mantra has the makings of  a phrase which has a capacity for its own inbuilt contradiction and self destruction. It’s a fallacious concept behind which many human resource managers cower and attempt to frighten their resources into behaving and moving in particular ways. They would be clearer in their intentions if they were to relable their policies as “health and risk” or  “fearfulness and safety” or  “health and insecurity”.

Being risk-tolerant (and attractive even)  is possibly one of the key features that makes us healthy, alive individuals instead of cowered, withdrawn amoebae.

Is your boss acting like your parent? The pint that thinks it’s a quart.

In the name of keeping a friendly face to their workforce, some bosses think that they can put a friendly arm around you – or if you’re really unlucky place their tongue in your ear – and act in a semi parental way when enquiring about your health, family relations, social life and general demeanour and performance levels.

They rationalise this as demonstrating a concern for their employees, arguing that as a holistic learning, family friendly employer (for example) it is in everyone interests (including yours) for them to become your mum or your dad. This includes doing things like telling you to tuck your shirt in, put your tie on straight and speak nicely to the noisy neighbours.

They don’t realise that the last thing you need in your life is another bloody parent as the two you already have –or have had – are quite enough, thank you very much.

The boss who likes to think he or she is your surrogate dad or mum are like that old beer advert; the pint that thinks it’s a quart. They tend to see the workplace as their own personal fiefdom where everyone is some kind of subservient relationship to them; you are their prodigal son, their daughter, their wayward cousin, the nephew they always resented.

Whatever family role you find yourself playing, one thing is for sure: they don’t see you as their equal. One solution is to reverse roles and become – however temporarily – their hypercritical mum or dad.  Scold them ferociously; hug them harder than they hugged you; remind them of their embarassing faux pas at the last office party: whatever you do, don’t let them get away with sticking their tongue in your ear.

Frozen is the new fresh, horse is the new beef and I am the Count of Monte Cristo.

The MD of Unilever enthused 5 years ago to a conference of school teachers and chlldren that creativity is essential for business success. He suggested that creativity should be at all levels of the business, “not just the top”.  He referred to various examples – Virgin Airlines  (apparently an airline which makes you feel special every time you travel on it), Top Shop  (“many of you go to top shop and can now buy high fashion at affordable prices” and the café chain Patisserie Valerie (which makes you feel like you’re in France allegedly).

He said that Unilever needs to recruit people who think differently, people who can work with you, not for you, and leaders at all levels of the organisation whose task was to ‘clarify what was wanted, be a voice from the front, encourage risk taking and awaken peoples passion.’  An example of what he meant by passion followed on film –  a 5 minute advert for Findus foods which was to indicate how his employees were having their passion awakened by the generation of new products and ideas: frozen vegetables.

He finished his sequence with questions from the conference panel: ‘are schools doing enough to generate creative ideas for business’ and ‘how could you make sprouts more appealing to children?’  His final comment, in some joking aside about the issue of school dinners… ‘our frozen food is fresher than fresh food… Frozen is the New Fresh’: now makes a lot more sense 5 years later with the recent horse meat scandal.

Now we know that ‘creativity’ is often an excuse for all sorts of linguistic shenanigens and that teachers at conferences on creativity and education often have to swallow a lot of frogs when it comes to assessing what is ‘good practice’.  But in the era when  Frozen can be the New Fresh and Horse can be the New Beef then I can clearly become the Count of Monte Cristo.

The porkie pies that Findus have been unashamedly peddling for years are at least out in the open although you might reasonably wonder whether there is something else other than pork in those pies.  Over-enthusiastic marketing is built upon a lot more than reconstituted delusional seaweed.

Running can increase your carbon footprint! A caveat for Earth Day

Commuters who think they are preventing global warming by getting out of their cars and onto their bikes have been told to think again. Sports scientists who recently met at the International Convention for Environmental Protection in the Azores heard that the carbon dioxide generated by personal exercise could contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer above the antarctic.

In a sophisticated computer modelling programme entiitled SCOFF, scientists have proven that mass cycling in cities the size of London over one working week will wreak havoc in one acre of Amazonian rain forest.

Consequences are far reaching, not only for cyclists. Running for at least five minutes a day will increase your carbon foot print by as much as 1.00003% over the average lifetime; and mass sports like football could cause enough rainfall to flood a country the size of Wales at least once every two years. An emergency disaster committee is now reviewing the consequences that the CO2 generated by the athletes at the 2012 Olympics will have in London. Early reports that the slow bicycle race may be a surprised addition as an Olympic sport have not been denied by the IOC.

It’s Conference Season! How to avoid the worst of conferences

Its that time of year again!  Time to pack our bags, brush up our papers, remember how to work powerpoint remotely and steel ourselves for mass produced sandwiches in ecologically friendly cardboard boxes.  Yes, the joys of the conference and all it entails.

i’m really looking forward to conferences that don’t build on their content, aren’t a mix of practical and theoretical, are technologically unreliable, are unrigorous, provide a platform for the wrong kind of speakers, aren’t chaired well, don’t offer chances for dialogue, have the same old same old people on the panels and  provide too many spaces for axe grinding: and particularly those educational conferences which have little in the way of artistry and preach the educational message in an utterly non-educational manner.  Conferences with a pay-bar on the opening night are also low on the list.

But hope springs eternal and i’m looking forward to a better experience of meeting old colleagues, making new friends and confering – the whole point of the conference experience of course.  As Mohammed Arif said at our first All Our Futures conference, I came to England alone; and leave the conference with new friends’. So here’s to new friends, new ideas, new challenges and with any luck, new solutions to feeding the conference frenzied masses.

If you’re at BERA at the Institute of Education, London next week, the Transformative Difference Conference at Liverpool Hope University the week after, the PASCO Conference in Belgrade next month or the ISBE (Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurialship) Conference the month after, please feel free to come and strike up a conversation.  Who knows, we might have some ideas on what constitutes the best of conferences!

The difficulties of feeding international conferences

Food and its connections to our inner deeper emotional world  and how /why we feel insulted if people turn up their nose at what’s out in front of them – it’s not like home – whatever that is – and it’s not what you expect – it’s a statement of this is who we are, like it or not, and if you reject it, you reject us, and for all your laughter and hilarity and our liberal flexibility, this moment when a gulf of difference between us appears – says so much about our difference in our upbringing and emotional connections and ties -culture is too simplistic a word to express how we do things and how -if you’re not of our culture – how we expect you to do things..

The process of going to a restaurant is one of a microcosm of assimiliation, acculturation or rejection, of (in)tolerance and (dis)respect -and fear.