Craig Dearden-Phillips

How do we attack the benefit culture without attacking poor children?

2012-01-23T10:34:00.003Z

I heard my old mucker Enver Solomon, now a spokesman for the Children's Society, on Five Live this morning, a voice of calm authority amid the oddballs and eccentrics who form most of Nicky Campbell's callers these days.

It was all about this proposed cap of £26k on benefits for families, regardless of where they live. This leaves many people uneffected but has a big hit on families in London where rents and living costs are high.

The debate seems to be settling into a left-right seesaw, with one side feeling it will just increase inequality and punish children and the other saying it is the only way to financially motivate certain parents to get a job.

Both sides have a point. To increase child poverty and inequality more than is going to happen anyway in the short term seems plain wrong. And since when did people who can't get it together to work respond to such incentives, even if the jobs were there for them? Equally, we have let a benefits lifestyle develop which is unhealthy for all involved and which, over time, needs to be dismantled. All advanced countries are having this debates, especially the Nordic countries where benefits are extremely generous.

Let's be realistic here though. There is no perfect solution. Any civilised society will always have a certain number of 'free-riders' - people who take out without putting back. There will always be a level of disgruntlement with such people, rightly so.

By the same measure, we have a larger responsibility to make sure our society justifies its name and that we are guided by a long-term view of what it means to share a country in terms of rights and responsibilities. I don't think the abuses of the few mean we should take a US approach to welfare and nothing should be done overnight which affects the life-chances of our most vulnerable children. I can't help but believe we need to adjust for rent in London and the South-East and raise the cap there, as a minimum measure.

But we must also retilt the scales over time so that those 'putting in' feel more comfortable about this, buy into the system and can believe that the free riders are, over time, getting a progressively worse deal than those who are net contributors. This can be done by cutting tax for the very low paid. We can get some of the money back, I believe, by re-introducting rent controls, which are successfully in much of continental Europe.

Long term of course we need new housing and vacant stock to be replenished but it is vital short-term that current measures both shore up confidence in the system without massively harming the life-chances of poor children.

I said 'Yeh yeh"'

2012-01-21T18:23:00.003Z

Do you remember a group called Matt Bianco back in the 80s? They had this song called, I recall 'Yeh Yeh'. I had kind of forgotten about it until this last year or so when quite a few of the people with whom I deal with (particularly those based in a certain south-east metropole) suddenly started jabbing 'Yeh, yeh' back at me before I had finished a sentence.

Am I alone here? Can it be I am the only person who feels on the other end of a conversational equivalent of a machine-gun. It feels, when you hear it like 'Yes, I've grasped your point, you can be quiet now, please don't go on any more, I can't really bear this'. To me, it feels impatient, rude even. I am sure this isn't the purpose of whoever is 'Yeh Yeh-ing' me five seconds into every sentence. Indeed empathy may be meant. Perhaps it is actually saying - 'I understand you, care for what you have to say Craig and yeh (yeh) I hear you.

Or am I perhaps being paranoid? 'YY' as I will now call it reached new heights last week. It appears to have spread to the provinces. In the course of an afternoon,I was YY'd in conversations with a Councillor, a conference organiser and fellow consultant. I know I gab on a bit but YY cuts me stone dead. Perhaps this is not the intended effect?

Hopefully YY will be one of these linguistic trends that is gone as quickly as it arrived. I hope so. Because I have even found myself using it too. And, yes, in just the situations when I am hoping, secretly, I wasn't. Yeh yeh.

A Life of Two Halves

2012-01-21T11:26:00.003Z

Before you click off yet another middle-aged rant, this isn't about me. It's actually about a chap you may or may not have heard of by the name of Paul Lake.

Lake is my age - 42. Twenty years ago, he was the captain of one of England's top Premier League team and about to join the full England team, as one of the most gifted players of his generation. But before he became a household name - a Linker or a Shearer - disaster struck. He ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament.

Even back then, this wasn't necessarily the end for a footballer. Technology was there to put these injuries right. But Lake received the wrong treatment and by the time he got the top surgeon, after three failed reconstructions, it was game-over. He finally retired at the age of 27. Indeed had he not stopped then he would probably have been disabled, so damaged was his joint.

I've just been reading Lake's autobiography which is called 'I'm Not Really Here - A Life of Two Halves'. Unlike a lot of soccer players, he wrote it himself, with some help from his wife. It is one of the best things I have read in a while not only because I love the game but because Lake is unsparing in his account of how long-term injury affected him. A couple of years after sustaining the injury, after many operations and curtailed comebacks, Lake succumbed, privately, to a long bout of full-blown clinical depression for which he, thankfully, in the end, received professional help.

Lake's way out of the darkness starts shortly after his career is finally declared to be over. Following a blood-curdling final operation to save the basic structure of his leg, Lake , he talks to his physios, two young women, and both suggest to him that he consider a career in phsiotherapy. Lake is naturally very bright and understands about injury. He decides to give it a go and the rest of the book focuses on his newly rebuilt life as a physio. After several years working with a range of clubs he now has his own practice in Manchester. On top of this he is an Ambassador for Man City because, as a fan and a player, the club has been the focus his life since, at the age of 7, he started going to see them with the local milkman!

The book, overall, is a story of recovery. About what happens when your life doesn't work out like you think it will. It is important to remember that Lake was soft-wired to play football, like an actor has it in their DNA to perform. He had a brief taste of what he could have been - and he was one of the best of his generation, ask anyone who knows football. And then he lost it all, possibly avoidably. His book shows us how we can adjust to a new reality and make our lives work, even when we've been driven to despair.

This sounds like a heavy book. It isn't. For someone of a similar age,like me, also from the the north-west, it is also an amusing journey through shared time. For any reader, it is a really funny - Lake has an eye for anecdote - and there's much here to warm the heart. For all of the difficult feelings Lake was, one way or another, subject to, during his period of injury and illness, the kindness of many people towards him is quite touching. Five years after getting injured, an eternity in football, 25,000 people attended his testimonial - City vs United.

In all, 'I'm Not Really Here' is a book about not about just football but all of life - so take a look if you can. It won't disappoint.

How to Win Work in 2012

2012-01-21T09:24:00.003Z

There was a time when I was writing two or three blogs a week. But this last month has been very dry. I put it down partly to being ill (my usual Xmas Man-Flu) and a certain listlessness I often feel at this time of year. Plus I have been very busy with Stepping Out - which has had a very strong start to 2012.

This doesn't mean, however, that things aren't hard. Everything at the moment has to fought hard for. Anyone selling into the public or voluntary sector faces a tightening market and burgeoning competition. Get this. One tender we won recently, firm in the belief that we were in pole position, saw 18 bids in a week-long tender window just after the new years. We won anyway, firmly on merit, but you can see, there are lots of appropriately qualified consultants waiting for the phone to ring. A lot of these are people fresh on the market from the midldle to senior tiers of public sector which are now shedding like a tree in Autumn.

Three other things tell me it's tight. Firstly, every week I am contacted by consultants and firms reminding me they are available. This rarely used to happen. Secondly, people are always asking me 'How business is going?'. Some of this is just banter, but I sense that a lot of people are trying to get the measure of how firms like mine are actually surviving at the moment. Thirdly, day-rates are tumbling and fixed fees are becoming increasingly common. I am paying myself - and anyone who delivers for us - less per day than a year ago. Such is supply and demand.

So how does a services-based business survive and grow in this climate. Again I would point to three things.

1. Differentiation / Specialisation. Know what you're good at - and focus on that alone. I think Stepping Out is working because we're not all things to all people. We know who we're seeking to work with and what we offer. A lot of people think they can just be John Smith General Consultant (Ltd). Sorry, but you can't anymore - unless you're famous, which you're probably not.

2. Show leadership in your space. Make speeches. Write articles, Write books if you can. This will help separate you from the mass of people all trying to work the space - and show your individual commitment to it. Having something to your name helps clients see you are one-on from the pack and 'safe' to work with in the area.

3. Pick up the phone. There's no point sending letters or emails to people any more telling them you're there. It just becomes part of the wall of electronic noise that fills most of our lives. One very successful entrepreneur, also in the business of selling stuff in the social enterprise sector, generally calls you if he wants your help or your business. It sounds like a step backwards - it's what I saw my Dad doing in his bedroom office on 1970s finger-dial on his rare days working from home - but it does work.

A fourth, though this is obvious, is to work your arse off. Showing persistence and commitment gives off a sign that you'll do this for your clients too. They are buying you, your attitude, your loyalty and your willingness to run through walls - as well, of course, as your wonderful brain! So swanning around like the consulting equivalent of a Premier League superstar will not help your cause. Be humble - as well, of course, as brilliant.

Time for the Old Guard To Go - My piece from Third Sector this week

2012-01-21T09:23:00.001Z

If you think 2011 was a bad year, brace yourself for worse. 2012 will probably go down as the first year the UK felt the full force of long-term austerity. No longer can charities expect this downturn to be like a dose of the flu - nasty for a bit, but fine again soon. No, this is more like a bout of pneumonia - long, agonising and potentially fatal. In the next decade, the UK will become a poorer, less equal and potentially less harmonious place. And we just don't know how our society or our political system will cope with it.

Away from the public eye, all the political parties are struggling to answer the scary question of how we maintain social welfare and community cohesion in a low-to-no growth world. We in the third sector therefore need to think about this too. We have this rather smug tendency to think we have the answers, many of which involve large dollops of 'investment'. But we are often fighting the last war. Indeed, most charities' staff, services and programmes still reflect the relatively benign conditions of the past decade - not the long, hard road ahead. Our present task is therefore, somehow, to reboot in the face of a very different set of conditions.

So what are our options? The first thing is that we must be utterly realistic. Things are not going to right themselves in only a few years. We won't just muddle through, as Debra Allcock Tyler implied in this column recently. We have to think very clearly about where we focus our resources, given that social problems are likely to snowball. This means putting resources into the people and places where need is most profound.

In practice, it means we get used to downsizing, merging and providing a lot more online. Smaller organisations are the new reality. We also need far fewer chief executives and senior people - and more responsibility at the front line, where we need fewer, better people who can operate independently. In short, we need a shake-out.

We're already seeing a lot of sensible activity. The best sector leaders are refocusing their organisations, letting a lot of people go and collaborating on a much deeper level than was possible in the past. Consolidation, refocusing or merger seems to be a live conversation in many charities these days. For those that can't bear to merge, there are alternatives. Like councils, charities can share a chief executive, a management team or a back office. That way they keep the brand, lose the bother of creating a single new identity and save hundreds of thousands of pounds into the bargain.

All of this will be very painful. So who is going to make it happen? Probably not those who came of age in a more benign era. We need a changing of the guard - new mindsets and real energy for what needs to be done next. This is not the stuff of swansongs. Instead it's high time for a lot of people to take a look in the mirror and consider their positions.

My piece for the Guardian this week

2011-12-14T09:27:00.001Z

We've all heard a lot about public sector mutuals: the government's vision of millions of public sector workers setting up shop as employee mutuals and selling their services back to the state.

In truth, progress has been slow. The Mutual Support Fund, launched at the beginning of December, has been a long time coming. Councils in particular have had other things on their mind over the past year. Overall, it is probably fair to say that public service mutuals have not, as yet, set the world on fire.

Is this about to change? Possibly. At a structural level, it is clear to that the public sector's days as a provider of services are numbered. Selby council, in north Yorkshire, now employs just 14 people. The rest are with external providers. This is the direction of travel and the new localism bill will make challenge to direct public provision a lot easier.

The question now, therefore, is who is going to take on services, update them and bring down their costs most effectively.

Let's be realistic here, the private sector is very good at organising councils' back-office services, mending the roads and collecting the bins. But there are areas where private companies are not so good – like providing social, community and healthcare services that bring together public resources with the energies of communities and individuals. This is, or should be, the "sweet spot", which mutuals and social enterprises can address.

One example of such a service is NAViGO, the ex-NHS service which was overall winner of the Guardian Public Service Award 2011.

But there are big hurdles to overcome for the future NAViGOs. The biggest by far is procurement. At the moment, the norm in public services is to run a tender process for virtually any service, even when one isn't strictly necessary. For the nascent mutual this can feel like climbing Everest. With no trading history or commercial skills, being pitted against experienced competition is a deterrent. Why go to all the trouble of forming a mutual only to get knocked out in round one?

There is, however, a way through the procurement conundrum, one supported by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude – though, strangely, not one you hear so much about. Joint-venture mutuals – new ventures which bring together public sector staff with a seasoned external partner to set up a new company on a 50/50 basis – can run a procurement, not for the contract to provide but for a suitable external partner for the staff-led mutual, which will itself become the provider.

This transforms the staff's position in the procurement from one of nail-biting underdog to one of a judge in a beauty contest between different organisations hoping to partner the new mutual. Potential joint-venture partners can be selected, or dismissed, on the basis of their experience, skills and cultural match to the staff in the mutual.

This is arguably a far more attractive proposition not only for the staff, who also get help in setting up the mutual, but also for the public bodies, which will be able to transfer a lot of the start-up costs on to the new joint-venture partner.

Can this idea fly? Yes, if it is given the same amount of attention and support as the idea of stand-alone spinouts, with all of their attendant risks and complications.

To JV or not to JV...that is the question

2011-12-06T08:45:00.001Z

How are we to get more people ‘stepping out’ from public services into Mutuals or social enterprises? One of the major stumbling blocks – of the many – concerns how groups of workers obtain an initial contract.

While there is nothing in the rules preventing the formation of a mutual or social enterprise by a Council, it is made abundantly clear in a paper on Procurement (just released by the Cabinet Office on its new Mutuals Information site) that the usual rules on procurement will apply to any aspiring spin-out.

This means, in effect, that if you’re a forming up a new venture to, say, run a social care service within your Council, you need to prepare for the possibility that you’re going to have to compete from the beginning with one or more existing providers – with all the tendering experience, financial muscle and reportable track-record they can bring.

There are however, five ways out of this for any group looking to spin out:

1. ‘Shadow’ company. Here you establish the venture, at first, as a kind of virtual-company, working within the Council ahead of a tender two or three years down the track. Staff are seconded in and there is an ‘arms length’ arrangement that mimics what it would be like to be legally separate. The idea here buy some time for the new venture to be gotten into shape for a competitive tender. You're not, of course, your own company, but you at least can operate more freely in preparation for competition.

2. Teckal company. Another approach is to set up a TECKAL company, one that just trades with the local authority and is still under its control . A TECKAL company has to do 90% of its business with the local authority and have an intention to remain primarily for that purpose only. The trouble with these is that they have to remain 'one client' companies in perpetuity - which is a bit of a limiter.

3. Joint Venture. An option increasingly under discussion is turn the procurement from a race you're in to be the provider into a contest for the joint-venture partner to help your staff group into a new mutual that delivers the service. You definitely continue to provide under the banner of a new JV mutual or SE - just not on your own. This will bring third party expertise and energy – but will mean you’re sharing control with a new JV partner.

4. Local Authority Trading Company. There exists 1990s legislation which allows LAs to trade so long as this is within their statutory purposes. This means an independent company can be set up with your staff in it – but that your company is wholly owned by the local authority whence you came. So not really an option for staff set on becoming employee-owned – but fine if the priority is simply to ‘spin out’.

5. Prove there is no market for what you do. For many services this are may well be possible, particularly those which are community-based, innovative or in some way unusual. You need to be confident though, so that the local authority feels safe from any external challenge. Some local authorities have also set up social enterprises in order to develop the local marketplace where they don’t feel comfortable with the range of alternatives to state provision, for whatever reason.

All of these provide a clear ‘way out’ for aspiring staff group of immediate open procurement of the service they run. However, all involve big compromises from all involved. It isn't just a ticket to freedom. The original idea of front-line being free, by right, to lead a spin-out – as happened in the NHS on Right to Request (2008-11) isn’t being envisaged this time around. Right to Provide (as it is being termed) is quite different to what happened with NHS spin-outs. It isn’t so much a right to provide as a right to tender.

What of joint-ventures? Much is being made of this as the real opportunity here. Instead of competing to run a service, what you get instead is a contest to partner with staff to set up a mutual. My hunch is that this is the option that most attracts the Coalition. Why? Because this involves other parties, including the private sector who can bring both cash and business expertise.

At the moment, there are relatively few live examples of such ventures actually happening. One reason for this, I am guessing, is that it isn’t really being presented yet by Government as the choice option for spinning out. The language is all about front-line workers emerging into newly minted ventures that they themselves have created. If the line was taken that joint-ventures were a preferred model, I am sure this would change.

And are they the best way forward? Well, joint ventures certainly solve some problems. The costs of setting up a spin out can be estimates at somewhere between 3% and 10% of first year turnover – and typically come in at somewhere between £250,000 and £500,000, all said. Plus JV is in many respects a more straightforward proposition. A JV, by its nature, can side-step a lot of the origination, developmental and commercial experience issues that dog new spin-outs. A well-positioned JV partner can turn an assault course into a relative walk in the park.

So, what’s not to like? Two things come to mind as possible obstacles. One is that a joint-venture is not the same as setting up your own business. You are not in control in the same way. It’s more akin to running a franchise than setting up on your own. Another is that you need JV partners which make sense for you, that share your values, which bring something to the party beyond what you bring yourself. Yes, a tender process should flush this out, but to even get to that stage, you've had to go through a lot on your own and it can be hard then to share the venture with new third parties that have come through a procurement process, people with whom you have no history.

Where do we stand? I am personally supportive of there being more JV spin-outs. I cannot see where the origination costs can come from otherwise. And, to be honest, I see a certain level of waste when it comes to the origination of spin-out businesses which could easily be absorbed by new JV entities eager to get into the game.

But it is the fact that JVs get around a lot of the difficulties around procurement that make it particularly attractive as a model. Otherwise, one is into all sorts of difficulties: When or whether to tender? How to set this up to give a mutual a chance of winning without breaking EU rules? How to create a clear pathway for staff which is not off-putting?

Therefore a JV will always get my vote ahead of the other main get-out option – the local authority trading or TECKAL company, which tends to more closely resemble its former self than feels comfortable. These entities are perfectly legal and achieveable and there are some great ones around but they do not give employees any more stake than was possible under state control. Which, if we're talking about employee ownership and its concurrent benefits, somewhat misses the point

Cry Freedom - why the stepped out leaders never want to go back - My recent piece for 'Third Sector' magazine

2011-12-05T21:27:00.000Z

During 2011 we at Stepping Out have helped 25 leaders to cross the aisle from the public to the third sector, and their stories have inspired me to write a new book, published this week. How to Step Out’ is a guidebook for people in the public sector who want to take their service out as a mutual organisation or social enterprise.

What can be learned from these freshly-minted converts? Three things stand out. The first is that they have come into the third sector, with all its uncertainties, because of the unique freedom it offers: freedom from the senseless bureaucracy and brutal top-down management of the public sector: and freedom from its alternative - the hollow profit-grind of the private sector. For all of them, joining the third sector is like breathing mountain air after years of choking industrial smog. In the words of one of the newly liberated: “We are free – you cannot believe the energy and value this unleashes”.

The second bit of learning from this cohort of new third sector leaders is that good, old-fashioned leadership is absolutely key to seeing through major change. Convincing public sector workers to give up their ancient comforts for a life of competition in the free market is not an easy pitch. In their move from public sector caterpillar to third sector butterfly these leaders provide a masterclass in how to take people with you. You put yourself out there. You communicate until you drop. You listen. You engage people in the change. You put your money where your mouth is. Again, in the words of one recently stepped-out leader, ‘you have to make your case hundreds of times – then all over again’.

Another thing that can be learned from this group is that third sector providers should be involved in new-style public service provision in a big way. My book abounds with stories of how these organizations have achieved amazing things with former public sector services and saved public money at the same time. These leaders show us that the civil society sector is a viable alternative to the public and private sectors - not just a cherry on the cake.

This is perhaps the most important point to make. The cold logic of long-term austerity – possibly running into the 2020s - means that old-style public services are, sooner or later, going to run out of road. They will either have to stop or be replaced with stuff that is cheaper and better. We have to be part of the answer, in my view. If we refuse to be properly involved, and remain in our historic comfort zone, we will end up as bystanders to probably the biggest privatization of public services in the developed world.

One final thing that really hit me hard when we researched this book was the total unanimity on one question: ‘Would you ever go back to the public sector?’ Nobody, not even the ones who have struggled since stepping out, would ever entertain the idea. This says volumes for what is good about the third sector. You might not see it that way, but this sector, despite all its irritations, is probably still one of the best places in the world in which to work.

Why the Pension Changes Must Go Through

2011-11-27T19:30:00.005Z

It's Sunday evening. I have just snapped off Five Live with John Piennar during a long rant by Len McCluskey of, I think, the Unite union banging on about pensions, how all this is ideological etc.

Like most unions, he's fighting the last war. The 80s were, tangibly, about checking the power of unions. The money spent on beating the miners could have paved Sheffield's streets with gold. This time, it not ideology but economics that are shaping the agenda.

Pensions are the visible tip of a lifestyle iceberg that we are just about now realising is not sustainable. We can't afford the NHS - or at least not the one we want. We can't have the police, armed forces or welfare policies we really want - we just can't. The money just isn't there. It actually hasn't been there for a long time - well before the banking crisis - it just that we thought it was. We simply used a lot of debt and, yes, banking profits (they are taxed) to fund ever growing public services.

The problem underlying all of this is is the productive capacity of our economy. Not just ours, the whole of Europe, bar Germany, and the US all have economies far weaker than the social settlement we have created on top of them. The solutions therefore are not to be found in the politics of protest - though I am glad to see people actually doing something.

Instead they are to be found in deep economic and social reform. There are three important elements here. One is investment. Not just lending to SMEs etc (that much is obvious) but proper investment in high end products and services. This is generational fix but it is one which has got Germany to where it is today. We have the brain power in this country, just a pathetic inability to turn this into profitable companies.

The second is public sector reform. The Government half-gets this. Indeed I come across many Councils which do get it and are moving from being huge corporate service deliver agencies to place-shapers. The role of Government is not to do but to make sure things are done in a way that they people want. It is to intelligently knit things together, not become the biggest employer of people, a situation found in many northern towns today. Where a job with the Council is people's highest hope.

The third is much harder to achieve - a shift in social preference away from debt. Thirty years ago, it was really hard to get a credit card. A mortgage you got on application. Being in debt was something you avoided if you could. Now we allow a disgusting market in exploitative debt to operate on our high streets. These Poverty-Machines exist in every town. One has even opened up in Bury St Edmunds. I can have up to a grand for a couple of weeks at an interest rate of nearly 5%. Why isn't this illegal? We have to regulate this industry and, ideally, close it down.

While I really worry about Britain, wee've a lot going for us - our geography and culture our language, our world position, our history and our creativity. We still have some of the best universities in the world. London is holding its own as a world city. There's definitely much to build on.

But my overwhelming feeling is anxiety. About an imbalanced economy, a fracturing society, a populace grown used to easy comfort, a closed polity and a public sector which is fighting old wars rather than changing itself for a new age.

For all these reasons, these pension reforms need to go through. They are just one element of putting things right.

The Investment Principle

2011-11-19T19:18:00.003Z

I was with a client of ours the other day and we were talking about a joint venture they were looking into doing. Like a lot of third sector organisations, they were big on vision and ideas but a little thin on practicalities. And I found myself saying what I often say to leaders of spin-outs.

Which is this: it's very bloody hard to grow a business without investment. Financial investment. Personal investment. A commitment and a choice to take the risk. An intrinsic understanding that you can only get massive results if you're willing ot make big calls. Let's call it the Investment Principle.

I have, when I think about it, tried to live my own life by it, whether I consciously called it that or not. I seek, where possible, to be an Investor. Why? Because the he stand-out people who I admire most are, for me, those who invest. They take risks with their time. They give freely - but selectively. They put their reputation and money on the line in pursuit of that in which they believe. Their impulse is to make big inputs, sure in the knowledge that exceptional result are only created that way.

The obverse of the Investors are the Conservers. I use this term deliberately. It's a frame of mind as well as a set of actions Conseervers' life-strategies revolve around protecting and maintaining a current position, not in enhancing it. It is defensive rather than speculative, closed rather than open in spirit. Conservers fight for their share of the cake rather than investing in a bigger one.

But this isn't a simple linear split. I suspect the distribution curve is pretty standard with most people being somewhere between the two poles with extreme Investors and Conservers as outliers. My guess though is that the people who make the biggest difference in the world , certainly socially, are almost all on Investors. These people are not 'born'. They make a choice about how to live. They know that the Investment Principle works - and they live by it.

Of course, Investment isn't just a one way street. Investments frequently don't pay off. In people, in relationships, in business. You get burned as much as you get it right. And investments that are not made judiciously, in people or ventures that are wrong to begin with, are not defensible either. Being investment-minded isn't about being a soft-heart. But it is about understanding the powerful link between investment and reward and making this, somehow, a feature in the way you operate.

Why We Should Celebrate Circle Healthcare's Takeover of Hinchinbrooke

2011-11-12T16:30:00.005Z

BBCs news this week was full of the story of 'private company' Circle Healthcare Ltd taking over NHS services. It's CEO Ali Parsa was challenged by Justin Webb on why it requires an outside organisation to make changes which could surey just be introduced by NHS without the need for a new provider.

Webb's question actually cuts to the heart of the matter here. The NHS can't do this. There is abundant evidence to show that it cannot deliver simple economies and is endemically incapable of dealing with lower growth in resource. The NHS could not, for years, balance the books at Hinchinbrooke. This is why, in desperation, it was tendered out. Without this, it is pretty clear that Hinchinbrooke was going to be downscaled or worse.

I say this because I have a bit of an interest. Hinchinbrooke isn't my local hospital but I know it quite well. It serves a series of small towns between Peterborough and Cambridge, both of which are important regional hospitals. It fits into that category of 'district general hospital (DGH)', which most of us rely upon.

The challenge is that the 'business model' for DGHs is under pressure from the double-whammy of regional specialist centres and the need for more primary, community and preventative services. Put simply, if I get cancer, I go to my regional centre (Addenbrookes). For most other things I go to my new-fangled GP surgery where they even perform minor ops. My local DGH gets caught in the pincer.

So, politics aside, this is a difficult business to be in. Which is why poor providers like Hinchinbrooke NHS Trust get found out very quickly. Hence, if we want DGHs to exist, we need for new providers with fresh approaches. The reason I am glad that Circle won it was that the delivery side of the business is half employee owned. The BBC, in its usual binary way, refused to focus on this, instead stressing the fact that it is 50% privately owned and backed by hedge funds.

And how else, I ask, is Circle to find the necessary funding to get Hinchinbrooke off its arse and working properly I wonder? The government is bust, in case nobody noticed. Circle have been able to bring new money to table. In addition, through its co-ownership model it is also bringing employees own energy to the equation, as co-owners of the company. Study after study attests to the benefits even of part-ownership like this.

Surely it's a time to set aside our ancient anxieties about risks and try new providers like Circle? Remember, there is nothing 'safe' in a failing NHS hospital which is losing money, probably causing more harm than it should and on the brink of closure. And there are savings to make, there always are. People who don't deal much with the NHS don't realise how god-awful much of the management practice is, how 1970s it all is internally and just how much scope there is for savings.

I have seen it all first hand and much of it is quite repellent: brutal, authoritarian, super-bureaucratic and self-interested. If Circle can raise standards, balance the books and raise productivity then their staff and investors are welcome to a profit.

What needs to happen to get the Mutuals show properly on the road

2011-11-07T06:10:00.004Z

Last Monday evening, Stepping Out brought together for dinner a group of well-place people from Government, Finance (both social and commercial) and public service delivery, including two leaders of substantial 'spin-out' social enterprises.

The 'exam question' for the evening was 'How do we grow a new sector'? What will it take to encourage more social enterprises and mutuals to emerge and how will we encourage the ones that do to grow? The conversation centred around three themes: finance, politics and markets. All of these, of course, inter-relate but first, finance.

The general view in the room is that financial weakness - in the form of small balance sheets - is a disadvantage facing spin-outs tendering for contracts. There appears to be a truth that when tenders come up, this sector struggles to show the financial ‘leg’ necessary to get nervous public sector commissioners into bed. Instead they bee-line for safer-looking super-providers. Some would argue that social enterprises should be 'gifted' public assets in the form of property to address the balance sheet issue.

But others observe that it’s balance sheet strength, not property ownership that public service businesses need, and one of the paradoxes around finance into the spin-out sector is that there is quite a lot of interested money. The problems are, firstly, that these businesses don't yet have the relationships to bring the finance in and, secondly, that providers have, in some cases, been frozen out by plentiful 'free' money from government grants.

The second theme was politics. This centred around the question of the Coalition's real intentions around the mutualisation agenda. On the one hand, there is clear commitment to mutualisation but the ongoing story of change is mainly one of outsourcing to the usual suspects. While part of the problem is over-rigid procurement practices (which are beyond the immediate reach of government, by and large), there is also another problem, namely that there are quite starkly competing visions of public service reform across different parts of Government, which so far haven't been resolved into a single approach.

So, on the one side, you've got Academies and Free Schools, which is, effectively, guaranteeing a role for ex-public sector providers (heads) and taking a very phased approach (indeed) to the introduction of 'disruptive' players such as Free Schools and the private sector. On the other, you have a view, championed, it appears in the Treasury, of 'Black Box' public services that are simply more efficient and packaged off to the private sector, like the Work Programme and, what some fear, might have happened in the NHS under the first-read Health and Social Care Bill.

The third and final theme was markets. How to translate the narrative of a diverse base of providers of public services - large, small, private and voluntary - into a reality is a question to which there is not yet a truly clear answer. The reality may be that time may provide some answers all on its own as markets shape up. Alternatively, we might end up having to manage markets fairly proactively if diversity isn't killed off and replaced by a very powerful oligopoly which itself becomes very hard for Government to influence.

Therefore, to what extent Government should 'tilt the table' and if so how was one of the talking-points. There is a natural reluctance in many quarters of too much government intervention in markets of any sort. 'Best is best' is a common watchword in the world of public procurement. How to behave in markets is also a big question for spin-out organisations. Are they best, in the longer term, to partner up or even fold-in larger healthcare groups in order to gain efficiencies and achieve long-term stability? Or is this too much of a compromise that would water down their raison d'etre as socially focused organisations?

This one of the unresolved questions facing spin-outs in this sector, particularly as they come up head to head with organisations whose chief competencies lie not in actual service delivery but the winning and fulfilment of contracts, often with third party deliverers.

Overall, like with all discussions of this sort we didn't come up with a clear answer to how we grow this new sector. But we did have some pointers. One was ensuring that organisations seeking to bid can also show that they have access to capital if they succeed.

Another is an important message to Government around the need for a bit more help for this agenda if it's not to die an early death. This help consists of a clear message about pipeline and deal-flow. This translates into decent 'start-up' contracts to new mutuals and social enterprise - so that they can at least prepare properly for a more competitive market in the later 2010s and more proactive market-management to ensure that the public's interest in a diverse marketplace is delivered by Government.

Chairs and CEOs - what makes for a good relationship?

2011-11-04T12:31:00.001Z

A big day is coming up for me. I will shortly make a planned exit from the chair at VoiceAbility. This will end a rollercoaster ride that started in a hired room at Cambridge YMCA in 1994 and ended with a multi-million pound social enterprise that touches thousands of lives every year.

I ended up as chair following a merger that saw the other side's chief executive brought in to lead the new organisation. A good choice, as it turned out. He has performed brilliantly, along with his team. While we couldn't be more different as people, we have functioned well as chair and chief executive. In 18 months together, we have got the organisation growing again after the stresses and strains of merger.

So what is the secret to a successful chair-chief executive relationship? I would point to three key areas.
The first is there has to be trust - no skulduggery, no games. As chair, you are the chief executive's public champion and private cheerleader. But you are also the person who has the difficult conversations behind closed doors. There's challenge in both directions - but always in private. Publicly, you're a team.

The second, is letting the chief executive do his or her job. Too many chairs meddle: they fail to realise that their value comes from being above the action, not in the middle of it. Bad chairs think they are the experts when it is in fact the chief executive who is doing the 70-hour week, living and breathing it all. In my view, it is the chief executive's job to set out to the chair and trustees what a decent strategy should look like. The job of the chair - along with the rest of the board - is to make sure the proposed strategy is robust and on-mission.

The third key to success is managing the board. Most chief executives feel anxious, on some level, about their board - I certainly was. In our sector, boards are afforded a lot of power, so the board is never far from the chief executive's mind. Also, you often see a culture clash of sorts between the executive team, which is small, cohesive and professional-managerial, and the board, which is normally larger, highly diverse and often less purely professional-managerial in its world view. In what can be an awkward interface, the chair-chief executive relationship acts as a kind of airlock between two distinct parts of the organisation.

I make no claims to have got all of this stuff right myself. Indeed, my failings come to mind as much as what I got right. I am not surprised by the fact that the chair-chief executive relationship tends to be viewed in our sector as a problem rather than something to be celebrated. But I think I now know what makes it work: relationship, role and successful management of the interface between executive managements and trustee boards.

Am I glad to be going? Yes and no. Yes, because the time is right for me. No, because I know the charity's best years are still ahead.

'It's the End of the World as We Know it (and I feel fine).

2011-10-26T10:33:00.002+01:00

There's an old REM song, of this title and, today, like many people, with the world economy about to potentially crash into recession I feel, in the here and now, fine. Nothing seems that different. It's the same for many of my friends, be they in business or whatever. The crisis has the same feel to it as famine or natural disasters in other countries. We're concerned, sure, but worried, mostly not.

It's one of those things about economics - the fact that most of us have no idea of the intricate machine that creates the world as we know it. That machine is, so we're told, about to have the equivalent of a massive heart attack which won't kill it but could leave it in a pretty poor state.

So what do we need to worry about most? On a personal level, it is clear that we're looking at flatlining and probably declining personal incomes over the coming years. These will kick in unequally with the middle classes taking a hit but the wider working population probably finding it harder. In turn, this will affect Government income and we could see a haircut on Government spending that makes the Coalition's austerity programme look like a children's tea party.

What does this mean for public services? On the transfer payments side, it means huge cuts to welfare which again hits the most vulnerable hardest and risks social cohesion and, worst case, unrest.

On the delivery side, it means that the whole architecture around health, education, defence and local government spending is vulnerable, built as it is, on the basis of a economy that is essentially sound. If all of this becomes unaffordable, we're into a very difficult conversation about cut backs and the public sector settlement which, again, will make current changes to salaries and pensions seem very modest.

Where this would also take us would be a wider conversation about how we now deliver decent public services. If you go to any conference at the moment about this, there's a lot of talk of 'how we do thing differently?' - then everyone goes home and slices the salami. Or so it seems. This is because, on balance, it's politically and operationally a lot easier than the alternative - which is re-invention.

A crisis of the sort we're probably heading into will, one way or another, make it far more attractive to reinvent than cut back services. Careers - political and professional - will not survive if slash'n'burn is the the modus operandi. For those of us who have long been advocating a reinvention of public services this could end up being, our moment.

So spin-outs, community-based services, co-ops, innovations that allow decommissioning - all of these things could have a political attractiveness that is currently missing. The sadness is that it will take things getting really quite catastrophically bad before that happens.

So, while it could be the end of the world as we know it, there may be one or two reasons to feel fine.

Thoughts on the Suffolk Gene Pool

2011-10-22T15:03:00.007+01:00

No, this isn't a piece on the natural qualities of Suffolk people!

This week, Suffolk County Council appointed a new Chief Executive, a lady called Deborah Cadman. I have never met her but have heard very good things about her and am sure she is highly capable. So what I am about to say now is not in any way about her personally (in the unlikely event that you'e reading this, Deborah).

What I found slightly depressing about the recruitment of Suffolk's new CEO was the narrow gene-pool from which the short list (and no-doubt the unpublished long-list) was drawn. Chief Exec of a District Council. An interim CEO. Head of a regional quango. Etc etc. What we had were a bunch of senior local government people all going for one of the few plum local government jobs currently around (most people are, strangely enough, sitting tight).

So what's wrong with that? Don't we need someone who understands how local authorities work, can deal with politicians etc? Well, yes, I guess so. But, far more than that we need people who can really manage change. When I say 'manage change' I don't mean the usual bullshit about 'doing things differently' that you hear at every bleedin' conference you go to these days. I am referring to people who have a proven track-record in adapting organisations from one set of external circumstanes to another.

Why so? Well, I don't probably need to say too much here but we are looking at flatlining economy and a public sector funded through debt. It has to have money taken out of it in ways that minimise social damage. Paradoxically public bodies need to invest in order to do this.

Of course this requires political leadership and few politicians, when push to it, are either fully cogniscent of the challenge or, if they are, much inclined to do anything. Therefore we need executives working alongside them that can help to move the terms of trade and give politicians the templates they need to take to the public come election time.

Now in Suffolk, we had one such executive in Andrea Hill. She had precisely the right ideas but lacked the other side of the change-management skill-set - namely the people and implementation skills to give proper momentum to necessary change. This, coupled with a misogynistic media witch-hunt did for her.

So this time, we have gone for what we know. A solid local government line up, nobody too flash and a solid track-record in the era just gone. What was missing, in my book was anyone with a massive track-record in the kind of change we're about to go into.

Of course, this would have meant going beyond the public sector. We would have been looking at people who had transformed companies or led turnarounds. For that's where we are now in the public sector - in need of turnaround. Most of the people leading local government today have not done this - they are incrementalists, most of whom only have experience of managing noughties-era growth.

I wish Deborah Cadman the very best in her job. As I said, she comes with an excellent reputation and I have no doubt she was the right choice from the shortlist. I am only sorry that we couldn't have made this choice from a wider range of people, including from other sectors which have undergone role-reinvention.

My piece for Guardian Public Leaders Network 17.10.11

2011-10-18T10:42:00.001+01:00

Many noble words have been spoken in the last couple of years about the future role of public sector mutuals and social enterprises as alternative delivery vehicles for public services. So far we've seen some interesting pathfinders and the rather anodyne open public services white paper which, on its own, will probably not be sufficient to turn a trickle of new ventures into a torrent.

We have also seen consistent references by Francis Maude to the idea of partnerships between emerging spin-outs and the private or third sectors. This is an interesting concept but what might it mean in practice?

Most spin-outs have been standalone entities, often set up using government grants and loans to get them going. Now that state funding is no longer there to the same extent, it will become increasingly necessary to look elsewhere for cash and expertise.

This is where partnerships could come in. One possible vision of the future in healthcare is represented by Circle Health, a social enterprise which is part-owned by its staff and part by its managers and financial backers. Each new NHS spin-out becomes part of Circle with the employee share of the company kept at the same level – around 50%.

Two of the councils which we at Stepping Out are working with are seriously considering seeking partners for the spin-out of part of their in-house services – a joint venture as opposed to creating one that's standalone. The idea will be to ask charities and private sector organisations to compete – with investment and skills – to be the joint-venture partner for the new companies in exchange for a long-term contract and a stake in the company.

Speaking to people on the frontline about this, there are many attractions in the partnership model. If a well-known name is seen to be willing to risk its reputation on a spin-out, it encourages others to get involved. Likewise, staff and managers know that there will be support to fall back on. It is somehow easier to imagine this kind of scenario than hundreds of standalone mutuals and social enterprises spontaneously emerging from a cash-strapped public sector.

Of course, there could be problems, including a potential clash as the public service ethos vies to find a common agenda with the commercial side. This is difficult stuff and nobody should pretend there aren't some dangers but that shouldn't close minds to possibilities.

Given public discomfort about private profit in health and care services, this could become a big opportunity for the third sector, particularly with the so-called Big Society Bank on the horizon. After all, the public service ethos is, in many respects, very similar to that found in not-for-profits. If the better players in the third sector rival private companies in attracting investment for new spin-out ventures, it is very easy to see charities being selected as preferred partners over social enterprises and mutual ventures.

One logical question, of course, is why go to all this trouble? Why not just give charities and companies contracts to run the services themselves? Supporters of spin-outs would argue, correctly, that new spin-out ventures which are employee-owned, locally focused and not just a branch or a project of a national organisation would be a better partner to a local authority. They are more invested in the local area and better at involving communities and individuals in the co-creation of services.

Where this agenda is going remains to be seen. The jury appears to be out on spin-outs. While Cameron and his team remain enthusiastic, there is huge pressure, from the Treasury in particular, to create more efficient versions of what we've got, preferably delivered by the private sector.

For the spin-out agenda to get more traction, it seems necessary that existing players from charities and private companies get involved – and quickly – because the biggest danger for those already out there is that this movement remains small and peripheral. The next year or two is crucial. Partnerships appear to be a sensible way to press on beyond the first wave of early adapters.

Why not Big Six-style public services?

2011-10-09T19:23:00.004+01:00

I had an interesting conversation with my wife at the weekend. It was about a new conservatory. I don't want one, not until our business is in good shape and, even then, I can't say I wouldn't prefer just to whack £25k off our mortgage.

I suspect a version of this conversation goes on in most households at least a few times of the year. Our own position, of course, is one reason why the UK economy is looking so bad just now. If I were feeling a little better about the future, there would probably be Suffolk builders pulling up to my gate on Monday morning to start four weeks' work. My twenty five grand would soon be pinballing around the builders' merchants, homes, supermarkets and pubs of the town.

Instead, it sits stagnating in my offset-mortgage bank account, waiting for the financial bombs to drop. What we are seeing now - the closed shops, bars and cafes (outside London at least), the army of underemployed - is just the beginning of a long period of economic darkness, a long Autumn and Winter for the UK economy.

And we should not really be surprised. UK investment levels have been low for decades. We're relied on historic strengths in services, our language and fortunate geography to compensate for these deficits. Which we got away with for a very long time indeed, almost to the point where our we thought we were cleverer than the likes of Germany, with it's 'mittelstrand' (small and medium sized firms), its very old-fashioned banking sector, its focus on technical education and its social market economy.

What many of us would give to trade places with Germany today, even with its EU obligations? Consistent trade surpluses over many years meant, in effect that it, China, India and others were lending surpluses to consumers and Governments in the US and UK to sustain our public services and lifestyles long before our own economies were exposed as Ponzi-like.

I mention public services deliberately. The settlement we have now cannot continue. We're still running public services like it was 2009. Very little, so far, has actually been cut, in relation to the whole. Hardly any real reform has taken place.

What needs to be done? We are talking about three things. One is the much 'narrated' rebalancing of roles and responsibilities between individuals, the community and the state. This occupies a lot think-tank airspace but I see very little practically going on to recast public services along these lines. In Wigan, Bournemouth and Durham, they are mostly just shutting stuff down, charging for use or keeping them going on reduced lines. The fevered conversation you hear at just about every conference of public sector CEOs hasn't, so far, added up to much on the ground.

Another is breaking-down of large public sector monopolies and the pushing down of responsibilities to the lowest sensible level. Again, attempts to do this (in health) are being stymied by a mix of some badly drawnpolicy, abysmal communication and reflex conservatism on the part of the health establishment. The third is a new market in public services, which, if the Work Programme is anything to go by, looks like a massive slam-dunk for private sector giants, many foreign-owned and wearing the boots in term of their relationship with Government.

Here is where the fork in the road currently lies. I think the Tories' love for free markets is going, before we know it, to see a cartelization of public services into a 'Big Six' - like in the power industry - very quickly. Indeed, by the time we realise what's happened there will be no going back and we'll be stuck with a small number of disliked, unaccountable oligopolists, mainly foreign-owned, charging us what they want.

Ah, I hear you say, might this not actually do some good too. Is the power industry the right comparison? What about the supermarket sector where competition has driven innovation, quality and value? I hear this, and I don't dismiss it either. Genuine competition does bring benefits. One can imagine certain public service markets benefiting no-end from the freeing-up of the market.

But public markets cannot ever be 'free-markets'. Public goods tend to be limited in supply in relation to demand. The distrubution of public money always needs to reflect society's dialogue with itself, and maintain a link to it, through both politics and local public accountability. The patterning of public goods also needs to reflect the long-term goals of a society in relation to its challenges, in our case a challenging demography, growing regional disparity, a fragmented society and need for long-term up-skilling.

Therefore, we need intelligently set up markets which have powerful regulators and rules which reflect our long-term goals. In doing this, they must ensure that markets serve these. Rules are required to guarantee diversity of supply and prevent a handful of firms dominating a market through incessant take-overs. We ensure smaller firms can enter markets.

We say no to any provider, if the consequences of that are that this market is forever lost to a small group over-dominant providers. We ensure that any particular configuration is reservable and that no commissioning decision is going to permanently disadvantage the taxpayer in relation to the provider, however attractive the initial offer.

And, yes, this means being a bit more categoric about mutuals and social enterprises. This sector doesn't really have much chance in a free-for-all. Government commitment to seeing a strong mutual sector, backed by the will to see it done, is what is needed now if the diversity spoken of in the public services white paper is to be more than just a wish-list. Diversity needs to be deliberately created as markets need to be 'made'.

Otherwise we are truly headed, as a country, for bottom-feeder public services which are not going on any level to meet or be responsive to the needs of the country's economy or society. You simply wouldn't see the countries whose economies are going to lead the world in the next 20 years letting go of their strategic grip on public services markets in this way. The paradox of freeing up a system means that we must, at the same time, make it safe through proper supervision and regulation, as our experience in the banking sector has told us.

If that lesson hasn't been learned by now, and its application to public services been noted, then God truly help us.

Why the Transition Fund for the third sector may not be such a good thing

2011-10-08T14:49:00.001+01:00

Has the Transition Fund been a good thing? Obviously, if your bacon has been saved or your demise delayed, you'll say yes. But the answer is more complex: I think the fund has shown the sector at its best - and its worst.

On the positive side, the sector showed great mettle in squeezing a decent amount of cash from a necessarily stingy government. It also showed that, while the sector's star might not shine so brightly in these austere times, it hasn't waned as much as we feared. Anecdotally, I have also heard of great examples of charities using the Transition Fund not to rearrange deckchairs, but to invest in building a new ship.

However, two things have bugged me about the fund. The first is that it has given succour to those who believe they deserve by right to be bailed out. This culture of entitlement is the most unattractive trait I see in the sector. By creating a bailout fund, the government has unwittingly strengthened the hand of those who, instead of reacting to the crisis in funding, have sat on their hands, blocked change and told their chief executives to find more money. And then it has appeared.

The second thing is that for every organisation that uses the Transition Fund to reinvent itself, there appear to be 10 that use it to delay their deaths by a few more months - or until the next bailout fund comes along.

I am sorry, but you can't run a charity - any more than you can run a car plant or should be allowed to run a bank - on this basis: it's wrong. If your existence is in danger, the only legitimate use of the Transition Fund is as an investment in your long-term sustainability.

If it allows you to keep your head in the sand for a bit longer, it is failing to serve its function.
Some readers will think I'm missing the point here. Short-term cash is urgently needed to prevent thousands of our most vulnerable organisations from disappearing due to no fault of their own, and so on.

On one level, this is true: one hears many stories of councils, in particular, treating charities badly. Nobody would argue that there is never a case for financial relief or bridging funding for organisations that hit a difficult patch.

But what has been lost is any kind of mindfulness in the way that money is used: there was no requirement to invest; nothing to be repaid; little accountability (from what I've seen); and no really clear distinction between the most and least deserving. I know this was mostly down to the timescales - but I think this spending was done blindly and not in a considered way.

What will be the legacy of the Transition Fund? Ideally, one would like to think of it as a timely piece of investment that enabled our sector to retool for a new age - as indeed it is for the few who are investing their funding wisely. More realistically, I think it will be viewed merely as an extension to the opening hours in the last chance saloon.

Business as Usual is Not About to Resume

2011-10-03T19:36:00.003+01:00

I had breakfast today with a friend and former Barcap investment banker who confided in me, over fresh cappuccino at the Commonwealth Club, that he was 'deeply pessimistic' about the future of the UK economy - and therefore also quite worried too about the charity and social enterprise sector in which we are both now active.

His view, and it isn't new, is that we all - including him during his time in the bank - grew convinced that we had, somehow, hit a new economic paradigm - one of continual growth. Of course, we know the rest of the story. We were, in reality, living beyond our means for a very long time, all fuelled by the Emporor's New Clothes of debt.

I am not so tribal or stupid to blame this all on Labour as the Tories are doing this week. All of us fell into the same trap. Sure, Labour could have modified it but their OTT spending was matched comfortably by excess elsewhere. We were all at it. Yes, all of us. Consumers too. Charities even. We all grew on the back of a surging economy. A doubling in the number of charities, no less.

We're now faced with not just a couple of years of pain before things perk up - but, probably, a decade's worth at least. There are no big levers to pull. Rates are as low as they can go. There's no oil or Big Bang to spark or soften the blow of an economy in which demand is now at a super-low. Neither is there money for tax-cuts. In fact, there's very little to lift things - that's the problem. The bottom line is that our economy in 2011 just isn't strong enough to support us at the level to which we're become accustomed.

This applies to public spending too. One in every four public pounds is borrowed. Yet the debate hasn't moved on from the 1980s in the minds of some of the defenders of the current system.

Take those people in Stroud last week who successfully got a court order to stop a social enterprise being formed to take forward former NHS services. They think those same services are 'safer' in the NHS. Folly. If we want to keep social and health provision at ANYTHING like current levels, we have to make a diminishing sum of money work a lot harder.

Getting it out of public sector monoliths is the first step in doing this, as we're trying to show with Stepping Out. Putting that money to work alongside community and individual resources is the new name of the game. People trying to 'save' public services need to realise that.

As we finished our cappucinos, my former banker friend ventured that our children will probably be 25% poorer than we were in our pomp. Public services 25% less well funded and so on. We're not used to that. And it will probably be this possibility - more than any other- that shapes public sector reform over the coming years.

Regardless of whether we like it, this means markets. These could be very open ones - like the Tories seem to instinctively go for - or, as I prefer, more managed markets that are regulated to guarantee diversity of supply and competition on quality as well as price.

We said goodbye. He has been chastened by the experience of recent years. But I have too. I grew a social enterprise when it was easy. I wouldn't like to try to repeat that feat today. We have a generation of leaders now who aren't used to coping with decline - and who lack the skill-set associated with it.

2012-20 will be a very different era for charities and social enterprises. Much less secure but possibly richer in opportunities for the well-positioned and most capable.

But for the rest, my friends' pessimism seems very well placed.

Which is the Mark for Me?

2011-10-02T19:48:00.005+01:00

In the next couple of months I will post my first year's results on the Companies House website. One of the most conspicuous things that you will notice (if you look) will be that while Stepping Out has made a pretty decent profit and put 20% of it aside to set up the Stepping Out Foundation, one thing is missing. Salaries. Because, in year one, I didn't actually pay myself. Or rather, I put the money I would have paid myself into paying back loan, reinvesting in the business and setting up the Foundation.

I could have been a social enterprise, had I wanted. It would have been oh-so-easy. Had I actually bothered to pay myself, rather than pay what I owe and reinvest, I would hardly have made a profit at all. A sliver of one. And, if I then gave half of that sliver of profit to a Foundation I could, with pride, declare myself to the world as an 'official' social business.

See where I am going here? What I am saying, I guess, is that it is quite easy to pass muster as social business without necessarily doing a great deal of good for anyone. Just pay yourself a decent whack of what would otherwise be profit and you're away. Then simply declare a small profit, give 50% of it away and give yourself a pat on the back, social businessman.

So why haven't I done this? I haven't done it because to do so would have been bad for our business. Stepping Out, like any new business needed to be profitable so that it could first survive and then see this profit reinvested in the business.

In year one, this was more important than paying me (and it takes an entrepreneur to understand this logic). I have lived, as most entrepreneurs do, on savings and by counting my pennies. I don't take a wage until it's safe to do so. But I know that if and when the business succeeds, I will do well enough from it to compensate for these early risks and privations.

Social enterprise logic - and I hear this a lot - is very different. There are normally fewer early privations. Indeed why should there be? For there is nothing down the road to point to as compensation. Therefore, to be reasonably expected to start a SE, , one has to to put oneself, as Founder, on a decent wage right from the off. But this is hard for the business: The enterprise then has massive need for cash to pay you ahead of secure revenue streams, making survival less probably and funds for reinvestment less likely to be there. In short, social enterprise can cut off the oxygen supply to new ventures which comes from entrepreneur's financial self-sacrifice.

I am saying this because I think it is time we opened our eyes to the fact that the term 'social enterprise' should not be restricted a corporate structure that discourages personal risk-taking by making difficult reasonable long-term reward for founders. Companies starting need to 'borrow' from their founders in every way. Starting businesses on full costs is simply very difficult - and dangerous for the business. It is only right and proper that is repaid generously to founders once the business is a success.

Fans of Ed Miliband please note, this is not 'something for nothing' behaviour . It is not greed which motivates entrepreneurs lany more than it is greed that makes it a requirement for social entrepreneurs to pay themselves good wages from the off. Indeed., how else are social entrepreneurs of the officially sanctioned variety to be compensated for their risk?

You will notice that there is rival 'Social Enterprise Mark' now available. It reads something like 'For Profit Businesses, Creating Shared Value'. It invites for profit businesses that can demonstrate tangible social value through the way they do business to join the social enterprise movement. Of course, at the moment, this is a shadow movement, outside the mainstream. For profit means, for many in this movement, that you're essentially in it for yourself, not social, at least not in the way they are.

I refute this. Why? Because I could, with one stroke of an accountants' pen, be a social enterprise tomorrow. And have a pocket full of money to go spend on a new car or two. But I care about my business and what it is here to do - socially & financially- a lot more than that. My business needs investment. Its Foundation needs cash (we pay 20% of profit into it). As an entepreneur - and yes a bloody social entrepreneur - I want to be free to create long-term value, not hemmed in by a structure that stops me doing that.

And for that reason, I know which Mark I will be using on our new website when it comes out later this month.

Can we Talk About Something Interesting Please?

2011-09-29T06:01:00.002+01:00

Last week I attended a meeting of Suffolk County Council of which there are five or six proper meetings a year. This was the week of a feared global banking meltdown, some pretty grim national figures on the economy and locally, a time of extreme stress as people struggle with the future.

We spent the first forty-odd minutes of this meeting discussing a change in the council's constitution pertaining to the right to speak of various councillors in relation to the public questions which take place at the start of the meeting. This discussion was tedious, to say the least, and I am proud to say that I spent nearly all of it writing on my Blackberry to a constituent whose life is being made hell by changes to council policy around social care!

This is a theme I know I have touched on before. Most people on the Council are comfortable-retired - members of the Jackpot Generation without mortgages and debt and in receipt of secure pensions. They don't have to work, they have defined income and few outgoings. Their kids, by and large, are older and they don't have many worries. And some, of course, are fairly narrow in their field of concern. There could be a nuclear war going on out there - but as long as the bombs didn't land on Suffolk, they would be happier discussing the condition of the roads in Saxmundham or street-lighting in Wickhambrooke.

Now I know what Councils are for. We're not about high-politics. We don't control the economy or affect the state of the world. We are here to worry about the roads and street lighting. But aren't we somehow supposed to bring some kind of awareness of the world we are living in into the room with us? Shouldn't we at least be focussing on how we can help kick-start the Suffolk economy as it goes through a period of strain? Or deal with the massive public service cuts we need to make?

Although the Andrea Hill era is now over, one thing it never was is boring. Each meeting felt like we were discussing the issues of our time. The need for public sector reform. The realities we need to face. That's one reason why Suffolk, for a short time, became interesting news to people on the outside. We were, at least, gripping the issues, as a Council. It made turning up as a Member interesting. There was plenty to say and to take away. The new leadership, while quietly dealing with our 'issues' as a Council has, very adeptly, kept discussion fairly low key.

So what have I done about this? Have I introduced a motion for discussion? No, not yet, but I intend to. Just to have a proper debate about what it is we're now doing as a Council to tackle the mountain in front of us. Andrea is gone - but how we're going to address the problems she correctly identified is as clear to me as mud. There is no strategy that I can see beyond keeping us out of the headlines for a while.

I actually really rate the new Leader of the Council and the new interim CEO. I think this could be an exciting time for Suffolk, I really do. But I think a desire to 'Keep Calm and Carry On' has superceded our genuine purpose as a Council - to be the voice and beating heart of Suffolk. With our membership, that is never going to be guaranteed, but that is what any good elected group actually should be, whatever the weather.

Is the Coalition Serious about Mutuals and Social Enterprises?

2011-09-25T19:09:00.003+01:00

It feels to me that we’re at an important point in the discussion about UK public services.

While there are always debates about the role of government as a provider, there is an emerging question that cuts through all of this – How do we create successful public services when the country’s economy is in a ten-year plus dip?

And if we are to open up public service markets, which I think we must, are these to be more like free markets - or managed ones in which a new ‘social economy’ – to include mutuals and spun-out public services - are given scope to emerge?

The answers will shape just how the social enterprise and mutuals sector shapes up – whether we see a steep or gently rising curve in the number of people leading spinouts.

How does it look to me? Mixed. While the Coalition Government are happy to support the ‘supply side’ around this agenda– by priming the early emergence of these ventures – it is not apparent yet as to whether the commitment is there is to a ‘social economy’ in public services as distinct from a pure free market.

Evidence to date suggest that while the Government likes mutuals and social enterprises, its larger concern is to open up markets - even if this means that new social enterprises struggle to gain foothold against larger, far better funded players, as Central Surrey Healthcare (Francis Maude's favourite mutual!) showed when pitted against Virgin-backed Assura.

To what extent the Coalition – or any successor Government – would be willing to manipulate public service markets - or even tilt the table - to favour social enterprise is still a question to be answered.

While nobody thought Maude should have been on the phone to Surrey telling Commissioners what to do, it surely was clear to him that something isn't working quite right in his intended world of Open Public Service. However, in his bones, Maude doesn't feel comfortable meddling with free markets. He is, after all, a Conservative first, a supporter of mutuals, second.

The hard truth is that for this sector to become established it need commitment on the part of government not only to the supply-side - initiatives such as the Mutual Support Fund are extremely welcome - but also the 'demand'. side.

What does this mean in practice? It means a more actively managed marketplace for public services. It means smaller providers being guaranteed a role as happens in the US. It means the Government saying, clearly, as a policy objective 'We want, as part of our commitment to open public service, a vibrant social enteprise provider sector - and we're willing to take the steps necessary to ensure the market delivers this'.

It is these last 13 words that are missing from the Coalition's current approach.

Let me be clear: I do not believe anyone should get a free lunch. I believe in a diverse public sector which includes the private sector. Most of the people leading spin-outs tend to share this view.

What they want isn't more money or subsidy from Government. Far from it. What they most want is a signal from Government that they take this sector, as a whole, seriously. Whether the commitment is to a much larger social economy sector in public services. Or whether we're going to be left to a system which, at the moment, means that many of our best organisations will struggle to win anything but the smallest of contracts.

That is the real question for those leading this agenda in Government.

The End of the Beginning

2011-09-20T18:20:00.003+01:00

The Guardian has been getting all lefty today over the failire of Central Surrey Health to win a massive contract in its own backyard. This probably have doubled the size of the organization and would have been a feather in the cap of David Cameron’s Big Society.

But it didn’t happen. The private sector won it. They had a big ‘reserve’ - £11m to CSH’s £3m and all the backing of a big global brand. You could say CSH never stood a chance.

However, I say let’s reserve judgment for a while anyway. We don’t know about the bids. Nor was this CSH’s main contract. I admit, had this been their core contract the headlines would, quite rightly, be about the death of the mutuals agenda before it got out of the starting-block.

Let's remember, however, that it was a big new contract which would, I imagine, have been a big stretch for CSH - though probably an achievable one for a well-led organisation. CSH will surely bounce back from this setback. But setback it is. Just as it would have been for the private firm if it hadn't won.

Two things need to be remembered here. The first is that social enterprise doesn’t always win. There is only one system with a guaranted winner – and that is the monopoly that the NHS once was. To be successful as a business, the possibility has to exist that you might one day lose. It keeps all businesses – including social ones – honest and focused.

The second is that we need to be open to the idea that social enterprises may themselves need to partner with organizations which can access high levels of capital. There is a tendency in some quarters to view social enterprises as simply NHS Mk 2, a 21st century version of Bevanism, with the an accompanying sense of entitlement.

This is to miss the larger point that social enterprises need to be the very best and have the commercial prowess that allows their strength in culture, relationships and community to shine. There’s no point on being good on all of these things but hopeless on costs, growth and profit. Social enterprise means being first-rate at both.

Today's set back is not, as some might say, the beginning of the end for spin-outs - but the end of the beginning.

Being a social enterprise means being like any business - but just one better.

Time to Find a Chair

2011-09-19T07:27:00.004+01:00

Soon, a road-trip that started in June 1994 will, for me, finally come to a halt. Sometime in the next few months, I plan to stand down as Chairman of VoiceAbility. Just to remind, I was the founding CEO of Speaking Up, one of the two organisations that came together to form VoiceAbilty in April 2010. Seventeen years of involvement will come to a close.

Of all that time, I probably enjoyed the earlier and late parts the most. I am a natural 'early days' person and my temperament and skill-set is highly suited to start-up phase of organisations. But I also enjoyed my period as Chair enormously, striking a powerful parrtnership with our CEO, Jonathan Senker, who came from the other organisation we merged with, Advocacy Partners.

It was my hunch, correct as it turned out, that Jonathan, not I, was the right CEO for the new organisation. I had actually hit a natural limit to what I could bring to the job while I could see that Jonathan had miles of road in front of him. I could see that he would lead us to a better place.

Which already, in less than two years, he has. While like all organisations we have had to take some direct-hits, he's steered the ship extremely well, addressed our deeper challenges and built a great executive team around himself. Although quite tough decisions have been required, I have been delighted with our progress, particularly when I look around at what is happening to other organisations.

As Chair, my job has been to supply the CEO with the correctly calibrated blend of support and challenge that characterises this relationship, at its best. Not always easy to get right as a former CEO, but I think we have both been pleasantly surprised by how well we have ticked each others' boxes. Of course, I was always going to be a 'transitional chair', helping to seal the merger and our Governance thereafter, then riding off into the sunset, as the new organisation consolidated.

We are now very near that time so the search for a new Chair is on. This is something we are taking very seriously. We all know how important the Chair-CEO relationship is to the overall fate of an organisation. The person who leads our Board will have to be somebody not only of high quality with strong commitment and connections but have a reasonable amount of time to develop the board itself.

Also, we are particularly interested in people with a lived experience of disability or being a carer, though this is by no means essential. And because we have charitable status, we need a person who can afford to do this for no salary.

Interested? This is, take it from me, a great organisation and opportunity. VoiceAbility is a growing organisation with a great staff team and a strong group of trustees. I am leaving because it is right to do so, not because I feel a pressing need to so do. I feel my own legacy, as one of the founders, is now safe and that I can move on now. Seventeen years is enough time. While i still bring something, I personally don't think it is quite enough. So the search is on now for a replacement.

If you think you might be interested, contact karen.jefferson@voiceability.org for a pack. Or if you want a chat with me, I am on @deardenphillips - or leave a message in the comments box.

How Soon Is Now?

2011-09-17T14:25:00.005+01:00

Anyone of a certain age knows the song of this title. Just as most of the men will have, at some stage, had a monstrous crush on Kate Bush (or still have one in some cases). There comes a time in your life when you recall 25 years ago a lot more powerfully than five years ago. For it is these times, between our sixteenth and our twenty-sixth birthday that fix us in aspic.

And I am not just talking music here. There's people too. Many of my key friendships are now about 20-30 years old. I make new ones, sure, but it gets harder as you get older. Knowing someone for 20 years ties you to them harder than a shared hobby, work or a liking for Jonathan Franzen.

For me, time counts. Every year longer builds the heritage, even if the friendship becomes more challenging, as indeed one of two have done recently, as certain male friend have crash-burned rather than smooth-landed into middle-life.

You know when you're in safe company. I met two old uni friends recently, just for a couple of hours, after work for snatched pizza in London and I felt 'home' in a way I realised I hadn't done for quite some time. I confess too that I felt myself taking the genuine interest in their lives that I often struggle to muster on a daily basis. Quite what that says about my 'quality' I am not sure, but I am being frank.

It's books too. My reading recently has taken me deep into the 80s, the time I feel I come from: David Peace's 'GB84', Martin Amis' 'Money', Umberto Eco's 'Name of the the Rose'. I fight the urge to re-read. What's new to find out, I ask?

My political antennae reflect the tuning of the period. I am still politically moderate, my young identity wrought against both Militant, on one side, and Monetarism on the other. And still feel angry by the divisive legacy of Thatcherism while also feeling, on some level, liberated by the energy-kick which her new settlement gave to the country . Twenty five years on I am still anchored in a mental seabed of left and right, good and bad, north and south - even though my boat has somehow accommodated elements of all.

Being able to remember 25 years worth of adult life can either be depressing or liberating. At times, I feel there is nothing really new, that most of what I am ever likely to feel, think or say has already been said. That my life will spool predictably forward, each year like a new Van Morrison album - slightly different to the last one but, basically, the same songs. All that feels new on these days is the high-fear that comes with responsibility and others' expectations.

On other, better days, the super-stable nature of life in one's 40s feels comfortable and assuring. I have a life, a family, a structure, a place in the world. Yes, it's held together by the gossamer-strings of health and fortune, but, save for freak events, my life is probably as steady as life has been for anyone in any place at any time.

The challenge, at such times, is summoning the sense of possibility. Trying to believe that the next Van Morrison album will be different. That something you read might actually make you think afresh about life. That the next person you meet might change your life in some really quite unexpected way.

The Quiet Army of the Professional-Unemployed

2011-09-16T12:19:00.003+01:00

It's not a problem that tends to be discussed in polite circles. But I am going to do it anyway. It's the new Quiet Army of people who used to have good jobs in the public and voluntary sectors who are not working.

These are not people who declare themselves out of work and go down the Job Centre. Nor are they the 'usual suspects' - the drongos who organisations tend to jettison early in a recession.

No, these are people of quality who used to be running things and who have great track-records. The recession is now eating into new territory - and nobody is safe.

How do I know? As a firm with a consulting offer, Stepping Out have experienced a massive spike in people who, for one reason or another, are available for freelance work. I'm talking about emails every couple of days.

Although people we hear fro are really impressive, we just don't have the volume of work to increase our pool just now. But what hits me is just how good many of these people are - they are not people who you'd expect to be prospecting for roles.

This is, of course, only the beginning. We are seeing a structural downsizing of both the state and voluntary sector. The gently rising curve of 2001-10 will, over the next two years, steeply plummet, leaving tens of thousands of people out of jobs. My advice to people in this position is threefold.

One is to consider switching sectors. Although the private sector isn't exactly booming, these firms are still hiring and spending.

Another is to think about downsizing or interim work. There isn't a massive market for senior third sector managers who earn 50k. There are thousands more jobs one layer down where there is a dearth of good people. Being in work is always better than being out of work - and allows a climb-back at some stage.

Finally, I advise people who are really capable to think about setting up in business themselves. It's extremely hard, especially at the moment, but if you can get through the first year, you're probably going to be OK. The rate at which organisations are shedding core people is creating some clear deficits in capabilites which have to be bought-in short-term. If you can define your focus, deal with the knock-backs and early solitude and create happy clients, it's likely that you'll emerge with a business on the other side.

I am considering a blog on how to set up a viable consulting business - but that would perhaps be shooting myself in the foot (which of course I am very good at doing). Another day!

How charities use and abuse consultants

2011-09-07T21:00:00.001+01:00

It's coming up to a year since I set up my consultancy, Stepping Out, and I'm glad to say we've worked with about 25 clients - many in the third sector.

So what have we learned about how the sector uses external advisers?

Broadly, clients come in one of three types: Adventurers, Micro-Managers and Ditherers.

The Adventurers have a clear idea of what they want from you, yet are open to advice. They have a sensible, faff-free process for hiring you that respects everyone's time. They know you bring something new and welcome you into their world.

Crucially, the Adventurers roll their sleeves up too, learning from you as they go, rather than seeing you just as a hired hand. And should the project change, you can have a sensible conversation without them getting in a tizz. Trust rules.

At the other end of the scale are the Micro-Managers. Ostensibly, they want help, but their fixed ideas make them impregnable to advice. When searching for a consultant, they set up such a drawn-out process that many of the better ones walk away.

If they go on to choose you from the 50 consultants they have met, you're then handed a shopping list of stuff to report back on every week. If you can't comply, the relationship starts creaking. Raise this with them and they get very shirty. You seldom make any real money because they're always on the phone to you about something. In truth, the Micro-Managers get little value from external support: they may as well do it themselves and save the money.

But the trickiest group by far is the Ditherers. They seek outside help because they are lost in their jobs, fearful of the future and haven't done any new thinking for a decade. Which is fine, but their organisations are often in such a bad state that, as an adviser, it's impossible to know where to start. But you do start - and then halfway through (and this always happens) they shift the goalposts and you're back to square one.

Ditherers also tend to be easily distracted by day-to-day fire-fighting - and these days, especially, a general sense of despair as the abyss beckons. As a consultant, you end up in a bubble, struggling to gain any traction in the organisation. The assignment ends in a friendly enough way but with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction on both sides. The Ditherers then pick up the phone to another consultant and the whole dance starts again.

OK, these are caricatures and I am happy to report that nearly all of our clients are firm Adventurers. But we come across Micro-Managers and Ditherers in the third sector all the time - more than in the public sector, I have to say. Fortunately, one becomes more skilled at spotting them. Only Adventurers really benefit from external consultancy.

Before they splash out, then, I would invite readers of Third Sector to reflect on whether they are, in truth, an Adventurer, Micro-Manager or a Ditherer. You might save yourself a lot of money - and your advisers a lot of heartache.

Big Judgement Day

2011-09-04T18:18:00.003+01:00

On Tuesday I am going to be a judge at the Big Venture Challenge run by Unltd and the Big Lottery Fund where 41 entrepreneurs compete to be one of 25 selected for a chunky investment package.

As far as these types of competition go, I am impressed so far both by the calibre of the 41 and the way the whole thing is being run. It is professional, brings the right kind of people in as judges and avoids Dragons Den cliches, going instead for a constructive interview process.

The pack arrived last week and I was pretty dazzled by the diversity of stuff we're looking at. Alongside well-known social enterprises in the employment sector there are start-ups and early stage businesses doing everything from clothing for disabled people through to franchising opps for the unemployed.

Well done to Unltd and the Lottery for putting all of this together. It all reads like a compendium of the best emerging stuff in social enterprise right now in the UK, all overseen by judges who know one end of a good business from the other. The fact that the BLF is getting into social investment also deserves polite applause (they will get an ovation when they do it as a matter of course).

Any criticisms? Not really. Well, not massive ones. A few applicants look like they're just plugging financial holes, others looking for that one ;last big slug' of finance that we all probably know won't get them over the line to sustainability.

Others look at bit too fancy for my liking - lots of important sounding people on the board but not a single sale yet to point towards. I do have a bit of a thing about stuff that is web-based. Perhaps it's being from outside London, but some of the ones I see look like they might just work in Shoreditch but probably not in Shaw (that's a small town near Oldham, btw).

How will I approach the judging? Well, one thing to be sure I will be courteous. Anyone hauling their ass in front of a panel deserves to be given a proper hearing. No grandstanding or wannabe Peter Jones'.

Having done it myself before, I know it's bastard-difficult to get things across without some pillock trying to look good by tripping you up.

The only time I went in front of a bunch of smart-alec wan**rs left me with a longstanding distaste for their organisation (you can guess, I didn't get the backing!).

The other thing when looking at these things is to be aware that you can only ever know so much as a panel member. Even when the papers are great, the people and pitches clear, you're left with what is essentially a choice between two punts. I have often been as confounded by the success of certain things as I have by the failures of others I thought were complete bankers.

In truth, however smart, experienced or informed, nobody knows what's going to be a hit. Social investment will always be as much an art as a science.

Why I am in Business

2011-08-31T21:09:00.006+01:00

Today I mark a year in business with a dinner. But not alone! I spent it with my new Head of Delivery, Rob Fountain who starts with us on 5th September.

Year One has been pretty good, though I have to say, tough as hell. It started brilliantly with a substantial contract with what is now NAViGO Community Interest Company – which we helped step out from the public sector in April.

When I look back, I am amazed at how utterly fortunate we were to win that contract. I will always be grateful not only to their CEO, Kevin Bond, for taking a a massive punt on us but also John Willis, the Associate Consultant who travelled every week up North to deliver it so brilliantly for us.

There is no doubt in business that you need not only luck but the right people willing to back you. Kevin could easily have said ‘Where’s your track record?’ or ‘Can you guarantee delivery on this?’ before committing. But he just had a feeling, believed in us and we tried to repay his faith with amazing delivery.

One of the best things about this business has been the clients we’ve worked with. All of them have left behind secure public sector management jobs to lead a new venture. All have taken on more responsibility, stress and leadership in the belief that a better public service lies on the other side of the divide. All of these guys and women are mavericks, people who don’t fit the usual public sector template.

But it isn’t just altruism guiding them. All want to breathe, all want autonomy and to declutter their lives of endless public sector routines. All want to manage and lead in the true sense, not just be a middle-management number.

A year into something you ask yourself ‘Why am I doing this?’. At a values level, I am, in my small way, helping to create the kind of public services I would like my own family to use. Entrepreneurial. Responsive. Customer-centred. Delivered with pride and care by organizations which think and act like great businesses, not vile bureaucracies.

On a personal level, I feel I have set myself free, able to operate in a company I control and which frees me to do the right things by my family and friends as well as by wider society.

This includes setting up the Stepping Out Foundation which in September will receive its first portion of profit from the business. The Foundation will be a small ‘angel’ fund to help very early, community based social entrepreneurs with the seed money to get out the blocks. The money will be small at first and grow as the businesses get nearer to the bigger blocks of funding now available for social entrepreneurs.

It is really aiming at people in the position I was as 24 year old trying to get the early Speaking Up going. Those early few hundred quid meant more than just money. No buggering about with forms, reports, a ‘Dragons’ Den’ – just a cheque and a card to say ‘Good luck’. They showed trust, belief, support and solidarity – which I needed as much as the money.

We already have a bunch of people to back and it will be mainly focused on our communities out here in Suffolk. For while Stepping Out is social in a broad sense, the Foundation is social in a very specific sense and my aim is to grow it over time into a sizeable fund.

Thankfully, this year, I have something to put into the Foundation. Next year, I aim to make enough money to put a lot more in. I hope also to make a bit more for myself. I survived in Year One on half of what I normally make and have reinvested every penny of profit – bar what’s in the Foundation – back in the business. This will hopefully support our growth – but it may also buttress us during any difficult period ahead.

It’s this willingness to put everything into your business – your time, your energy and money you could go out any buy a conservatory with – that makes entrepreneurs different to other people. I know people who would sell their houses in order to save or grow their business.

Personally, I wouldn’t go that far, but I understand from where they are coming. Businesses get under your skin in a way that jobs seldom do. They are somehow an expression of our true selves – and become totems of our independence and spirit.

Whether I will be cracking the champagne or drowning my sorrows in a year’s time I really don’t know. That’s one of the best and most motivating things about being in business. Nothing quite spurs you on like uncertainty. Having one success under my belt already has helped me shrug off the fear of failure.

While I know it would be bad, I also know that I would survive and bounce back, somehow. If failure is a dirty word, you often fail to start in the first place. Knowing you can live with it, is actually quite liberating.

Anyway, tomorrow we start year two. Myself, Rob, our two superb Non Execs, our Associates and our financial backers.

Wish us luck!

Spinning Out Together

2011-08-22T10:12:00.004+01:00

When I set up Stepping Out, I expected it exclusively to be about groups of public managers wanting to set up free-standing businesses. What I didn't anticipate was the appetite for partnerships between groups wanting to spin out and existing social businesses and charities. About half the calls we get at the moment are about this.

Why does it have appeal? Three reasons stand out. The first is that public managers are often well aware that they don't have the full set of capabilities to go it alone. And the idea of doing everything from scratch - setting up accounts, payroll, HR etc - is deeply off-putting. A partner who can bring know-how and some slot-in back-office functions has some appeal.

The second factor is that Councils and other public bodies feel a lot less nervous when a third party is involved. Having a 'name' organisation involved assures Councillors in particular that the venture is legitimate and that if a well-known name is willing to risk their reputation on a joint-venture project, they are safe to do so too. Plus, as risk averse organisations, councils like the idea that someone who know what they are doing will be helping to deliver the new service safely and on time.

The third factor, and this is crucial, is about values. Hardly anyone I speak to in public sector wants to go in with an organisation whose ethos is a million miles from their own. While they can envisage doing business and even delivering alongside an organisation set up purely for profit, the idea of being joint partners in an organisation which is clearly identified as money-making is, rightly or wrongly, a turn-off for most public managers - and, interestingly, Councillors too who need a simple 'good-change' story to tell to the voters that isn't 'privatisation through the back-door'.

How many of these conversations with come to anything we don't know, but I am struck by how many Councils, charities and social enterprises seem to want to work together on spin-outs. It's not a direction I anticipated but one which I can see a lot of mileage in.

What you learn when you work for yourself

2011-08-17T05:47:00.002+01:00

It's approaching a year since I founded Stepping Out. Although it's my second time out on my own, it has felt like a debut because the foundation of Speaking Up (now VoiceAbility) was so long ago and, from fairly early on, it grew very quickly. I was not on my own for that long.

My intention this time is also to grow - but more slowly and with quality not volume as my focus. I also want to protect my life a bit and believe that good margins on a small volume are probably better than smaller ones on a larger one. Growth starts in September with our first employee. Rob came through 150 applicants and I have the blessing of having employed him before. So I know who I am getting. His quality and commitment are both incredible and I cannot wait for him to start.So I won't be a solo act for much longer!

What did I learn during my year as, in effect, a sole trader? I would point, if this is not excessive, to three things. The first is that you realise that your greatest resource is your time. I have become ultra-sensitive to how time is spent. An internal meter now tells me how well my minutes and seconds are being spent. Meetings, one finds, have to have a clear business benefit. Few go on longer than an hour. There is nearly always a focus and a decision. You know when it's over.
Ditto phone calls and emails. People in organisations often struggle to see this - indeed I did by the end of my time as a CEO. I would think little of a three hour senior meeting followed by a couple of interesting visitors - BANG - there goes another day.

The second thing I have learned is that clients crave a personal service they can trust. The experience of most people most of the time when it comes to the services they buy is mild disappointment. Whether it's dealing with BT, going for a meal on a Saturday or finding somebody to help their business, while the choice out there is dazzling, actually finding A1 service is very hard. Therefore the gaps in any market concern not what people obsess about - the uniqueness of one's offer - but the level of service offered. As a small business, you're in a strong position to offer incredible service and great value at the same time. This is what we have tried hard to do with Stepping Out, in a tough market place. And I believe this has helped us to achieve strong year one results.

The third piece of learning is that working for yourself is good for your personal development, confidence and all-round well-being. While you swim in a sea of uncertainty from month to month (I have no idea where income in October will come from), you also know that what happens in the business is nearly all it down to you. I find this reassuring, rather than worrying. Compared to, say, someone in a big firm or council, who has to wait on the decisions of others, I feel my future is in my hands. My 'job security' is a simple function of my attitude and activity, not a string controlled by a drunk puppeteer who neither know nor cares about me.

Further to this, I don't think one can underestimate the psychological benefits of having to get a grip on something, on yourself and push a business forward. Few people who do go it alone go back to a job - and i think this says something. Despite the hours and the effort, working for yourself seems to unlock a lot of human satisfaction. I am always, when I go speaking, evangelical about this, but the looks I get from my mostly-employed audience indicate that it's only something you understand once you've done it. Salaried people, however unhappy, can only see the risks involved and seem blissfully unaware of the risks of sitting inside organisations, going stale, losing confidence and waiting for the hammer to fall. Which increasingly now it does, of course.

So, what do you learn when you work for yourself. Three things: You care about time, you understand the importance of service and you grow as a human being.

So - what's stopping you?

On Cynicism

2011-08-16T05:56:00.003+01:00

I have always been a slight cynic. Not in a sneering, told-you-so way, but in a rather regretful, resigned fashion. My cynicism comes and goes a bit, depending on what's happening and, frankly, what frame of mind I am in. Although I have always consciously worked by 'values', I often find these lofty flowers choked by the weeds of doubt about people and their essential natures.

Of course, human nature is a many and varied thing. I suspect that is what you learn as time progresses. Huge optimism, or indeed pessimism, is misplaced. Talking about human nature in a blanket way is a bit naive. My own journey has been, I suspect, one from being ultra-positive about motives and intentions - to a place where, on a good day, I can spot the subtleties of people's character quite well and reasonably quickly.

As one becomes more acquainted with the light and shade of human character, it is important, I find, not go negative, assuming people are just self-maximisers. Some people are, in many ways, assholes, but these traits often live side-by-side with other, more attractive ones.

When I look at the folk I really like, and seek to emulate, they are not necessarily the angels, but people who accommodate a variety of traits and, in a self-aware way, stay true to their essential nature while not being a slave to it. So I now like go-getting, self-promoting types, as long as this is leavened with self-awareness and a commitment to scraping off the rougher edges. In a way, I have a lot more time for this type of person than the unthinkingly generous.

All of this, of course, comes back to one's relationship with oneself. One of the attractions of Christianity, and of religion overall, is that it encourages us to embrace what C.S. Lewis termed our 'shadow self'.

It starts with the idea that we are flawed - which we all are - but also says it is OK to be this way as long as we take conscious steps to address it. I stop at the idea that only unconditional surrender to God will successfully address this issue - my point is more about the ultimate message that although we are all, to a point 'bad', we can also, simultaniously, not be a lost cause.

Work and life in one's 40s bring one up against one's nature quite a bit, I find. There's the back-breaking financial, social and emotional obligations of parenting and marriage. One is both trying to build a future and to live for today at the same time, aware of the half-time whistle about to blow.

It is tempting, often, to just look after yourself when you're carrying so much with you. You're also, as I have been saying, more worldly wise. You don't have the same blind-faith any more. You know that beneath any surface a lot more lurks, much of it never-to-be-know. And you have to navigate the iceburgs of human nature while appreciating both their beauty and their danger.

Go negative and you sail away from them altogether and you miss the best of life. Most of my 'highs', come through communion with others. But some of my lows have come through a dawning realisation that somebody isn't all I hoped they were and why-oh-why did I believe in them?

Overall, cynicism, while tempting and psychologically comforting is, I think, the wrong way to go. For you, for others, for happiness, for productive work - whatever. Societies based on deep scepticism tend to be low-trust ones and become self-fulfilling prophesies. But blind optimism is wrong too. We cannot base our society, our institutions or our workplaces on the notion that people will always do the right thing. This too is psychologically comfortable, but naive.

Instead we have to get comfortable with the complex reality of our 'grey' natures, the blend of whatever we have been born or nurtured to be. We also need to extend this comfort to our dealings with others.

Being human is, I am still learning, about accepting my own messiness and that of others. It is also about understanding that either delight or disappointment aren't the only two ways to feel about people.

And, finally, that if the cloud of cynicism isn't to settle, it is very important to work out where on the grey scale your key people are, and how you're going to deal with that.

Concrete Issues

2011-08-15T10:28:00.005+01:00

Just back from France. One thing you notice is just how big it is (4 x UK size) with about the same number of people in it. Which makes all sorts of things a lot easier - building high speed rail links, power stations, other 'grandes projets'. Here, you can't move for planning rules and regs, even when the economy is on its arse.

Or at least till now.

A little-noted bit of news amid the riots was a signal from the Chancellor George Osborne that planning rules are to be relaxed in favour of development. There is to be a 'default' position in favour of house-building. Rather than having to prove a need for a new development, house-builders will only have to point to 'demand'. Beyond the National Parks, the presumption will be in favour of development. No other areas are to be afforded any special protection from the bulldozers. The National Trust are up in arms and see it as the end of the world as we know it.

Are they right? What will Osborne's proposed changes mean for places we all live. I can only speak for Bury St Edmunds, where I live. And cards straight on table, I live in the countryside immediately outside. Like us all, I speak Nimby.

So in Bury, there is already a development plan in the public domain - the ' Vision 2031' which will see thousands of new homes built during the next 20 years to the west, north-west, east and south of the town, as well as certain villages.

Without doubt, Bury will become a' bigger place'. But, some perspective is needed here, not least from those loud voices in our commuity whose own homes were green fields less than 25 years ago. The scale of development this time round is no greater than in the 1960s, 70s and 80s which brought us, respectively, the Horringer Court, Nowton and Moreton Hall estates which now form our 'suburbs'.

In truth, Bury although a 'heritage town', a smaller version of York, Winchester or Cambridge, it has never been a museum piece and has successfully adapted to changing times. And, on the whole, the Councii's 2031 plan isn't a bad attempt to repeat this pattern.

However it is not perfect. The danger signs are already visible. House building has, in the 2031 document, crept into 'special landscape areas', including one a half-mile from me. Before Osborne's announcement, it was difficult to see how this was more than a worry to the people living there and those, like myself, who enjoy that particular small area of landscape.

Today, however, it is not hard to imagine emboldened developers in 2016 or 2020 pointing their bulldozers at other special landscape areas - which are plentiful immediately around Bury (and around me!), forming a Green-Belt in all but name.

But isn't controlling this what the Council is for, I hear you ask? Well, it is today but the truth is that Councils will, under Osborne's changes, be incentivised to be far more permissive than is currently the case, especially cash-strapped councils like St Edmundsbury.

You need to worry about this, wherever you are, if you're not in a town. Councils are currently kept in check by a combination of planning laws and voter-pressure. Take one of those away, and we do risk a free-for-all for the developers and little collective say in how the area is shaped.

And if you want to see what that looks like, go to Ireland, where planning is lax and builders do mostly what they like, free from popular control. Therefore, while we cannot be 'anti development' without, to some extent, being hypocrites (think about what your home once was) , we must, put pressure on our local Councillors to commit in writing to containing future development to that laid out already in agreed local plans (where they exist) - and no more.

Plus we have to ask national politicians to think again before giving carte-blanche to development anywhere. The truth is that development has always to be a balance of economic versus social / environmental concerns - while giving neither the upper hand. Councils need to be arbiters of this - by all means told to process things faster - but not tied to one agenda nor the other.

And we must, somehow differentiate between different types of landscape outside the National Parks and SSIs. Not all Green Fields are the same. Protection must be afforded to our most integral landscapes on a par to that afforded to the Parks.

And act we must. In the absence of comprehensive planning laws, democracy will be the only weapon we have left.

The Riots - Viewed from France

2011-08-13T21:52:00.004+01:00

While the UK was, to its surprise, having its shop-windows kicked i I was in Brittany. The only UK daily paper I could get my hands on was the Telegraph which I grabbed as soon as the campsite shop opened.

You get an interesting line of sight from the the country you're visiting. A few years ago, following his election, Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, had to deal with a load of rioting in the outer 'banlieux' of Paris, home mainly to Arab and African people. Calling the rioters 'scum', Sarkozy sent in the riot police in full-on gear to, essentially, beat the crap out of anyone stepping out of line. This is, basically, how the police operate in virtually any other country to our own, in these situations. They are, quite deliberately, scary-as-fuck.

Of course, for anyone who remembers the Miners Strike or indeed the inner city riots of the 80s, our police, for a time, were as racist and brutal as any to be found in Europe. But that has changed and these days the big idea is that the police is no longer a 'force', it is a service, reliant on consent, relationships and all of that.

Which was working out quite nicely until last week when all of the work of the last 30 years appeared to count for bugger-all. Indeed, the absence of a fear-factor for the police - which has always had an effect on me - even as a law-abider I shit myself if I get stopped by a blue-light - seemed to somehow give heart to the looters. Nobody, as they queue-ed up for trainers seemed at all worried that a six foot-six helmeted rozzer with a night-stick mightcome and club them over the head or spray CS gas all over them. Because, of course, that isn't how the police work these days. So people, well, had a laugh. As we all saw.

My biggest laughs this week came when the Telegraph were reporting all these middle-class types being caught nicking from PC World or Argus. One was a female A * student at Exeter Uni whose parents were millionaires. Others were teaching assistants, estate agents, all manner of things. For these people, as with all of them, I am not sure the motivation was actually acquisition, or that purely. I think it was excitement. Action. Being in the middle of it all. Secretly, most of us crave this. We find it, if we're lucky, in our work and, occasionally, in our relationships. But we mostly do without it. Unless it's served up to us on a plate, that is.

The remaining laughs I had were, and this sounds a bit cynical, at the latte-liberals of Clapham and places such-like, brushes-aloft wearing 'Looters are Scum' T-shirts. In my view, you can't live cheek-by-jowl with the underclass (who you spend most of your life carefully avoiding) without expecting at least some collatoral damage from time-to-time. All of these people claim to love the 'edginess' of London. Well, darlings, the edges occasionally get rough and smash a few windows. Get used to it. And if you really can't live with it, well move up here to Bury St Edmunds.

Talent - who needs it?

2011-07-31T06:58:00.000+01:00

All my life, I have had a funny relationship with sport. I have always played it but, in truth, never very well. Despite both parents being accomplished, I never got the gene; I have always been an effortful, though essentially incapable sportsperson.

Why am I telling you this? Partly because I have been enviously watching the British Open and seeing the super-talented make it all look really easy, but also because I believe in application over talent. In some respects, I am glad that while I didn't get the sports gene, I did get the one with the code that reads "prove to them you're good enough". I say this not to boast, but to say that I did quite well on not a lot of talent.

The same goes for me with work. I am well within the normal range in most areas, but I diligently polish the tiny bit of silver I've been handed, whether it's turning myself into a passable public speaker or a writer of columns for Third Sector.

Which brings me to my subject today: talent. I hear a lot of nonsense talked about this in our sector. The consultancy firm McKinsey & Company started it with the so-called War For Talent - a paper it published way back that basically said there's only a little bit of talent about and organisations should kill to get hold of it. By talent, it meant naturally super-performing people, most of whom happen, it seems, to have overflowing self-confidence and an Oxbridge education - the people already running the show. Not folks like me - or you, probably.

I think this sort of talent is grossly over-rated in all sectors, including our own. What isn't sufficiently rated is what I will simply call the right attitude: people with a compulsion to deliver, who, by sheer effort of will, get themselves up to a performing level are, in my reckoning, worth a lot more than the naturally brilliant.

In my life as a chief executive, I've met loads of born-supersonic people who didn't do very well, either in work or life. They always sounded good - that's easy when you give off confidence - but, on cool reflection, were total non-achievers. In truth, they were lazy or wasted their gifts by not giving enough of themselves.

So would I not rather have a team of Derby winners in my organisation than a bunch of earnest nags, I hear you ask? Doesn't true success require both talent and effort?

Ideally, yes - you need both. But I haven't met many thoroughbreds who aren't also draining to manage, and who are willing to give you years of their lives before they head off for new challenges. Talent is often thinking of the next thing, not what it is doing now.

So you can keep your talent. Give me an honest scrapper or grafter; someone who knows they have to prove themself. A person who understands that it takes five years to achieve anything worth writing home about. They are nearly always the better bet as an employee or business partner. These are the people our sector needs now

Should Councillors be paid?

2011-07-26T10:17:00.003+01:00

I sit on a Council and get ten grand a year for my trouble. Yes, ten grand. I actually think that's quite reasonable. Plus we get a 14% pension contribution. The public are often surprised when you tell them. They think, bless 'em that we all do it for nothing. Add on mileage and lunches and it's a cool 12k-15k for a part-time job.

I find myself split on the issue of Councillor pay. While I don't claim the mileage, I feel a bit odd being paid for what is essentially community service. Ten grand is a lot of money for some people. It costs our Council £0.75m in allowances alone, probably a million when you add on mileage, pensions etc. OK, that one five hundredth of the budget, but it is a cost.

Aggregrate the cost of all our councils in Suffolk - there are six district Councils all with about 40 Councillors each, all getting about £5k allowances plus expenses and you've got a further cost of, all in, about £1.5m. So costs of democracy are about, all said £3m for a typical Shire County.

Is this worth it? And could we get more some other way? There are two possible approaches to this. One is to ask whether having no pay or expenses would get us at least as good as we have now. I suspect, looking around the chamber, that the allowance is probably supplementing quite a few pensions. Pull it and I would bet about a quarter would be gone at the next election. However the other side to this is that the allowance does make it possible for low earners to do the role.

Part of me - the mischievous side - does feel attracted to the idea of cutting allowances altogether. We'd soon see how many community champions were left. It would also mean, now that the benches were no longer silted up with jaded Allowance-takers, that the parties would need to go looking for talented new people who were not motivated in any way by the money.

Another possible approach is to go the other way - to have far fewer Councillors, perhaps 25 for the County and 10 each for the Districts - two thirds fewer - but make the job a proper job, rather than a half-job. This would mean a £15-£25k role rather than a £5-10k one - but would effectively make being a Councillor a proper job. The upside would be that the role would attract people who would do it but can't afford to do it and hold down a job - the downside is that it would mean that anyone with another career would be deterred.

There's no really perfect answer to this. There are clearly too many Councillors. There are far, far too many crappy Councillors who do very little for anyone. The party system keeps talented people at bay and protects people who couldn't get a job at Tesco. We know all of that.

But I can't, at the moment, think of a new way to do local government which convincingly rectifies these problems. Fewer, smaller Councils sure. Quotas maybe? I would personally be in favour, even if I lost out as a middle-aged man (but youthful in council-terms). PR for local government? Certainly. But I might as well make an argument for leaving our doors open when we went out to work. All of this is idealism.

These turkeys are smart enough not to vote for Christmas.

Black Box versus Big Society Public Services

2011-07-25T09:09:00.008+01:00

I got a letter on Friday. It was from Francis Maude. Of course, it wasn't to me personally, just the hundreds of others that eagerly signed up to the Cabinet Office's efforts to promote mutuals and social enterprises in public services.

Before and just after the election there was a lot of heat and light about this. Talk was of a million public sector workers moving into social enterprise by 2015. Privately I thought fat-chance but it was good to see this ambition. Then we saw the Cabinet Office struggling to gain traction across Government departments - never easy at the best of times but made harder by the countervailing desire of the Treasury to keep the public services market open with a clear preference for 'pay and play', 'black-box' services. These would be delivered by whoever won the contract. None of this Big Society, 'co-creation of services' nonsense.

Hence the rather rubbery White Paper on Open Public Services a couple of weeks ago. A Green Paper in all but name (have you ever seen a White Paper with a list of questions for the reader??), this paper was clearly about getting something out, not presenting a clear Government position.

What it does for spin-outs can be more clearly expressed by stating what it dodges. In short, the three 'P's. Procurement, Pensions and People. It doesn't tell public bodies that they can give spin-outs contracts and enjoy support from the centre in doing this. It doesn't clear the mud about pension-rights for staff joining a spin-out or going back into the public sector afterwards. It doesn't allow give clear rights to people who want to do this the entitlement to do it, assuming the business-case is there. Compared to the Academies Bill, which made all of the above very clear - with mass spinning out as a result - this White Paper was lightweight.

All is not gloom. The Government's own Mutual Support Programme opens in the Autumn and there are signs that the Department of Health's successful Social Enterprise Investment Fund (SEIF) will also reopen for business soon. Conferences are aplenty, and some have more than just consultants in attendance, notably the Employee Ownership Association's excellent event this month.

Further to this, there are also signs that local authorities in particular are rising from the canvas following the knockout blow from this current year's financial settlement. While a punishing in-year programme has needed to be put in place, absorbing all energy to date, councils are now eyeing the horizon and looking more strategically at the question of how they deal with greater demand and fewer resources long-term.

The answer many are coming up with is that you can only really deliver more and better public services through a more fulsome engagement with citizens and communities. The public service cake used to be just made of one ingredient: public money. In future, the cake will be more complex, combining public funds, private funds, citizen effort and community endevour. The tailored, equitable services we all want will only come with all of these extra element 'baked-in'.

The questions most councils up and down are now grappling with is how to do this. Legacy services are expensive and ineffective but often politically incendiary because of what they represent. Public libraries are an example. The potential for libraries as community-hubs is well-documented but you need to convince people of the need for a new type of settlement for these kinds of institutions to work properly. This includes volunteers on top of paid staff, fundraising on top of public funding, paid for services on top of free ones, a business outlook on top of a social one.

Where I am driving here is that I think the solution to the big question councils are grappling with lies in social enterprise. This defines social enterprise not in the frame of the public-private continuum, but as an entirely new approach to producing the public goods that most of us wish to see in our communities. For this reason, we should see their development as outside the usual EU procurement mindset that preoccupies most commissioners of services. Local authorities should be freed up from worrying about that and worry instead about how they are going to best combine their own resources with those of communities and citizens.

Can't the private sector do this just as well? Cannot a tender spec be written that is broad enough and open-ended enough to allow the private sector to do all of the above? While I don't totally rule it out, it is important, at this stage, to be able to convince all sides - local politicians, the public, staff and users - that we all need to bring what we have to the table. The profit motive, while a noble and good thing - just doesn't work in this sort of context. The trust - barely there now - required to bring about a new settlement, is going to be absent if people believe the profit motive is at work, however well-intentioned this is.

There are another couple of reasons why I think the private sector isn't quite right for leading this kind of change. Firstly, the track record of the large-scale private sector in social innovation, at least the sectors I know - disability - isn't that strong. Investment goes where the money is, even if it's in rebuilding long-stay institutions that undo years of social progress.

Secondly, I think the risks for private investors are too open-ended. You can't nail these specifications down hard enough. Outcomes will need to flex and evolve, not be fixed at the the beginning. It's just not natural private sector territory, at least the large end of the private sector. Certain small players, with a balanced approach to profit versus other goals (like us in fact) will be part of it, I am sure. But the big players- Serco and the like, I struggle to see them engaging.

Which bring me back full-circle to spin-outs. I believe in them because they co-mingle public money, citizen and community effort together into something new and different from the 'black box', 'pay and play' public services beloved of the Treasury. What we're talking about is not black box but big society, good society, call it what you will. And, of the competing world views out there just now, for me, Big/Good Society is right one when it comes to our future public services.

Is capital punishment justified in Norway?

2011-07-24T11:48:00.004+01:00

On a weekend when 80-odd young people lie dead and Amy Winehouse also died I find myself feeling pretty flat. Tomorrow the agent of Norway's killing gets his chance to air his views, and justify his actions, in the courtroom.

That no air will ever again pass the lips of scores of Norway's best young people seems insufficient to prevent his grandstanding. Were I a parent I am not sure I could easily countenance that indulgence at this time. This man should, at this early stage, be forced to stay silent. This is not his time.

I am not a pacifist but I really struggle with the notion of killing. Being able to do it, I mean. There are moments, perhaps in extreme self-defence, when ending another's life seems just about imaginable. But to take life after life, to hunt people like rats takes some kind of deranged detachment.

Each life ended in a solitary moment by a single shot was one nurtured by hundreds of thousands of mindful actions of love by others. Today, the lives of tens of thousands - parents, siblings, friends, teachers, uncles, aunts - will have been changed permanently. Every death does that. Needless, shocking deaths like this are never truly gotten over.

Which brings us onto the perpetrator. If my children had been among those slain, I am sure I would, on the day after, be happy to personally avenge what happened. This feeling would, I suspect, be replaced, in the following weeks, by a desire for judicial killing. But this defies my intellectual belief that good societies do not kill even people like this. Yet while my children had been robbed of theirs, their killer living would be difficult to take.

What I am saying is that after this incident, I am not sure my liberal convictions on capital punishment could stand the test that those parents are going to go through once the shock of what has happened has subsided and grief takes it long toll.

What's holding back spin outs?

2011-07-16T08:53:00.000+01:00

Having spent a whirlwind year alongside spin-outs I would point to three key challenges to doing it.

Finding the right people

Every successful business needs a brilliant team. Most spin-outs have one or two brilliant people and a handful of OK ones. Many are reluctant to improve the quality of senior management as the organisation grows. This will be a particular challenge I believe in the health Right to Request. These are massive businesses in a complex market and organisations don’t often quite appreciate how far their top team and board is from where they need to be.

Managing growth

Growth and quality often run in opposite directions. Few organisations can walk and chew gum at the same time. The trouble is that growth seldom comes in manageable quantities and many spin out orgs are faced either with few prospects or projects which stretch the organisation to breaking point. Understanding in SE organisations about how to manage growth is often fairly low. The project management and change-management capabilities are seldom there. So growth poses a real danger to quality I feel in spin outs.

Focus

Many spin out organisations I come across are less clear about what exactly they are trying to achieve than their commercial equivalents. Or if they are, it isn’t particularly specific. This is rooted I think in the multipurpose nature of these organisations and the desire to find some kind of balance. But there’s often a reluctance to commit to particular levels of growth or profit. Even social goals remain pretty general. These should be articulated, committed to and worked towards with the same focus as private organisations go after profit. For out of certainty comes focus and energy. Spin-outs can lack this I feel.

Spin-outs have been a slow-burn for some time now, certainly in health and social care. Compare our sector to the academies sector if you want to see a real pace of change. Indeed In Suffolk half of our secondaries will be converted to academies by September. A stunning pace of change.

Part of the reason for this is that successive governments have stood full-square behind their creation and have not permitted local authorities to get in the way. Another reason is that Heads tend to be confident, capable people who can lead. For me a lot will come down to the content and message of the Public Services White Paper.

Will the Government encourage councils to offer guaranteed contracts to spin-outs for at least 3 years? Will they offer a simple route through the pensions question? Will there be a small fund for grants to new spin-outs to get them going? This is the support needed for the sector.

What other support might they need? In my experience, spin-out need both hard, technical support in terms of legals and financials and a lot of soft support in terms of coaching and leadership development. Unfortunately in my view, far more resources go into the hard end than the soft end and I think this has to change now that there are clear templates for spin-outs. The principal requirement of the new spinout is to be ready for independent life and to have the capabilities to operate and grow from a standalone position. That is mainly about people.

The right people with the right capabilities. That is where I think the focus should be more than it is now.

42 and....ok with it

2011-07-08T09:30:00.004+01:00

Later this month I turn 42. Not with any particular angst - quite the opposite in fact. My forties so far have been kind to me. I feel in the best bit of my life. Health is good. I feel happy most of the time. I have both a history and a future. My life feels anchored. I kind of know what I'm doing most of the time now. Things don't really faze me any more. Even when things are a bit frantic, I feel calm. After all, nobody's probably going to die.

So far so banal, I guess. But I sometimes wonder whether I am getting too comfortable. The forties are a funny decade. In fact, from what I see, it's not a decade in its own right, but the weird interim between of this period just after the end of your thirties- when you've got hair, status and a future (a place in which I am basking now) and this pretty wild place just before the beginning of your fifties when your hair falls out, your wife decides she doesn't like you and nobody takes your calls any more. A time when you become Part of the Past.

I have, in recent years, observed many a happy early 40-something morph, over a few years, into a troubled 47,48 or 49 year old. They almost always have a marital crisis, even if this doesn't involve leaving their wife or partner. A job or career suddenly feels no longer right and they go through an awful period of transition where they have to define theirselves anew, either through redundancy or simply not being able to face the old job any more.

On a personal level, they become taciturn, a bit unpredictable, given to mood-swings. They drink more. More often than not, they gain weight and look a lot older. If they're really unlucky, their physical health starts to go bad too. Lots of aches, pains and minor ailments.

I am, of course, talking about the famous mid-life crisis. This is as real as day, in my view and it appears to affect most people. I know far more men than women, but I also think it affect females too, but in a different way. The good news is that most people seem to get through it. Health, happiness and direction all return. There's an acceptance, somehow, of whatever it is that was bringing them down. Life, they realise, is too short for staying in a hole. Changes are made, a new phase begins. The cycle of life brings them a kind of peace or concilation with their lot.

Which is why working with people in their 50s is normally so good. Men, particularly, seem to have gotten over their competitiveness by that stage. Their new predisposition seem to be pulling them towards collaboration rather than besting other people. Their edges seem taken off. Emotional intellegence seems greater in older men and they often have a nurturing side that maybe wasn't there in their younger selves.

When I reflect on the future, I know that life will change. I am fairly sure I will go through some tricky period of adjustment as I mentally transit from being still relatively young to truly middle-aged. I think it just goes with the territory.

But I look forward too to what will emerge on the other side. I think I have worked out now that happiness, for me (and for many) depends on long-term anchors in my life, a sense of purpose and living according to the values I feel increasingly aware of with the passage of time. It is also about gratitude. Appreciating what I have and feeling thankful every day. Knowing who I am now will, I hope, help me through the bumps and grinds of middle age and bring me out on the other side a better person than I am now.

So who is scared of becoming 42? Not me (honest!).

An Open Future for Public Services? Think Again....

2011-07-07T07:38:00.002+01:00

This week sees the publication of the Coalition's new Open Public Services White Paper. From what I understand, its content has been the subject of a tussle between the Steve Hilton wing - who see public service reform as a touch-paper for the Big Society (mutuals, community and third sector providers etc) and the Treasury who, I am fairly reliably informed, see BS as a load of old shit and just want to do a mixture of heavy-duty public sector efficiencies and quiet outsourcing to the private sector.

Whatever the truth is, the Bill we see will not be the free-for-all we were promised by the Coalition last year. Why? In one word - NHS. The idea of an open market for public services has, in effect, been put back by the revised Lansley reforms.

Even if the remaining policy is actually more market-friendly than the public realise, the politics has overtaken the policy and it's now virtually impossible to bring out a public services bill that is about 'privatisation', even in its most benign forms. As my friend Nick Seddon of Reform said just the the other day, you don't hear Andrew Lansley or anyone else talking about creating the biggest social enterprise sector in the world any more.

So what will be in the Bill? It will be a nice warm bath for fans of the Big Society I expect. There will be stuff in there about charities and communities taking over services and probably quite a bit about mutuals. And relatively little about the private sector, I anticipate. So a triumph for the forces of civil society?

Well, not quite. The brutal truth about the civil society sector, including social enterprise, is that we probably stood a better chance, as we did in the health sector, if the provider market was properly opened up to all sectors. This bill is, in effect, the work of an enfeebled, cowed Government that feels chastened by public opinion on the NHS and is becoming increasingly led by political rather than policy considerations.

So, rather than sponsoring a powerful Public Service Bill that has the key parts of the public sector properly opened up to other sectors, we will see some opening to civil society organisations which, in reality, will translate into a fairly small overall effect on the whole. If I were David Prentice or Bob Crowe, this is the kind of outcome that would suit me.

The truth is that it is only when you have bold, landmark legislation - like the academies bill that you see radical change. In Suffolk, where I live and am a Councillor, over half of our upper schools have 'stepped out' of LA control to become academies. This is because the centre has been very clear and strong about this. LAs themselves cannot stop them and when you take away the impediments it happens. The speed has been breathtaking. As a school governor I have seen it go from thought to reality in a few short month.

The same is not true in other parts of the public sector. Anyone else in the County Council has to go through the usual impedimentia and it is really still rather hard to spin out- even in a spin-out-friendly council. The academy experience tells us that it isn't the actual doing that is difficult, it is the organisational context stuff that is hardest. Most of the spin-outs I deal with tell us they spend tremendous energy dealing the organisations they are are part of, none of whom are compelled to let them go.

My point here is that in what is still a highly centralised country, legislative drive from the centre makes a massive difference. My fear about this new Open Public Services Bill is that it will not be the landmark White Paper it needs to be but a here-today-gone-tomorrow piece of candy-floss that keeps the sector happy but makes no real dent on the real challenge of public services transformation in this country.

Can the private sector save social enterprise?

2011-07-03T14:41:00.000+01:00

MPs have published a report saying that the government's programme to create public service mutuals needs still stronger support and communication from central government if it is to build on its initial success. It also noted the government's hope that new public service mutuals will be created jointly with private sector partners.

The government is keen for these kinds of partnerships to develop because they bring in private capital to help set up, run and grow new public service business. Each of the "right to requests" from the NHS has cost the government tens of thousands of pounds to set up, so a strong private credit line is a tempting alternative to using public money.

Second, a private partner would bring commercial and practical help. Public sector spinouts tend to be led by passionate managers who can lack the experience to run a large enterprise, and who are expected on top of the day job to set up a new organisation from scratch. A private partner can provide all sorts of business start-up and growth knowhow.

And partnerships of this type would, potentially, expand the number and size of public service ventures. For all the hype, there are still only a small number of spun-out public sector businesses, and many employ fewer than 100 people. But the government wants to see a million public sector workers in mutuals by 2015, which means large organisations are going to have to be created at lightning speed. It is hoped the private sector can help achieve this.

But will the marriage between public manager and the private sector work?

One concern is the compatibility of each side's goals. So far, public sector mutuals tend to be more focused on social rather than commercial aims. Few appear to have share capital financially worth much to staff. They tend to be defined by a passion for people, place or profession, and they often aspire to stay local and be more personal. Every person I have met who leads a spun-out organisation is motivated by social purpose. They identify strongly with public sector values – albeit ones that see a mutual or social enterprise as the appropriate vehicle for this.

A private company, however, will, quite rightly, be mostly concerned with its shareholders' or directors' interests, and that will include a strong focus on growth, either by merger or acquisition and on cutting costs quickly.

These are legitimate goals, and, arguably, the only way to create large organisations. But you can see a potential tug-of-war here, with one side driven by a growth agenda and the other living in fear of becoming remote from its community – and of losing control to a private partner.

Can both sides meet at least somewhere in the middle, with private investors accepting the potential constraints on return introduced by being partly employee-owned and former public managers bowing to some of the commercial imperatives of investors?

As someone working every day alongside public managers, I hope we can find ways to bring necessary investment and expertise to the table. Unlike in continental Europe, this is unlikely to come from the state. So we need to examine closely how to do this while ensuring the values we hold close are upheld.

Why Social Enterprise Sector Needs to Get Off its Pulpit

2011-07-02T16:45:00.006+01:00

In a brilliant piece for the Guardian's Social Enterprise Network, Rob Greenland recently pleaded for us to take a more nuanced view of profit. One which places it in an intelligent conversation about the right level of profit, rather than a binary one which pits 'for-profit' organisations against 'not-for-profit' ones.

This is where a lot of the talk in social enterprise finds itself. You are one or the other. For or against private profit. Like any binary approach it contrasts the good guys with the not-so-good, those 'in it for themselves' versus 'those in it for the common good'. If social enterprise were to have a 'national anthem' it would be Billy Bragg's (wonderful) 'Which Side Are You On'?

But this worldview misses important realities. Firstly, as Greenland points out, it forgets that profit is often the fair reward for risk or effort in the same way that wages are the fair reward for the week's work. If there's proportionality there - and in many businesses there is - profits are as just from an ethical point of view as salaries or any other benefits. Indeed, saying to risk-taking investors that they can't make a profit - as the sponsors of Social Business Day are- is, in my view, ethically questionable. If we don't ask people to work for nothing, neither should we expect there to be no price for risk.

Secondly there is enormous variety within the 'for profit' world. For every Southern Cross, there are ethically run businesses which, when you look at them closely, deliver the 'blended return' that many social enterprises themselves aspire towards: they care for their people, they contribute to their community and recycle profit to produce general social benefits.

Indeed, go back 40 years, before the rise of the City and global financial capitalism, and much of business, particularly in Europe, even in the USA, operated in this way (for a really good account of how US corporations operated, read 'The Puritan Gift' by Kenneth Hopper).

Thirdly, by throwing a ring around 'not-for-profit' activity, the social enterprise sector anchors itself needlessly to a very small base, leaving the rest of the private sector that doesn't behave like Southern Cross feeling left in the cold. This is a real waste. The most interesting space, in my view, is that which is emerging between the hard end of the private sector and the existing world of social enterprise. It involves some ambiguity, some risks and yes, occasionally, it allows charlatans into the tent.

But it is also the most fertile soil that is still virtually untilled. This is starting, thank-heavens. You see it most vividly in initiatives like Liam Black's Wavelength, where private and social businesses help each other, learn from each other and, yes, occasionally do business together as a result.

On a very minor level, you're seeing it with businesses like my own, Stepping Out. This is essentially a private business but 20% of all net profit goes into a new Foundation which is supporting emerging social entrepreneurs. About 10% of Stepping Out's time goes on pro or low-bono work. Stepping Out has a clearly social aim - to change the UK public sector by supporting public managers to become social entrepreneurs - which has equal standing with its other goals.

But my decision, after much agonising, was that I could best pursue this business as a private company rather than as a social enterprise, as currently defined. Why? - you ask. To begin with I had to borrow £25k to get going. This was secured against my own assets. Then I had to work for six months without pay - and work bloody hard too. One screwed-up project or bad debtor and I was dead in the water.

A year in, of the £250k we've brought in, I've personally seen £25k of it, the rest has gone on wages, paying back loans and so on. Well, not all the rest. There's a profit you see. We're not sure yet, but it could be as much as £40,000. Let's imagine it is. £8000 will go on tax, leaving £32,000. About half of that will need to stay on the balance sheet to support our cashflow in year 2. We're now down to £16,000. Up to £4000 will go into the Foundation, leaving, at the very top, £10,000 for the business owner (me). Were I to pocket this, my earnings for the year will top £30k.

OK, I own the business, I hear you say, but that's my point - I own the business. That's the only reward I am getting here. A fair reward, I venture. If the business was 'asset-locked', I couldn't benefit from its sale, its balance sheet would be mainly socialised. There would be big limits on how much I could take out of whatever profit was produced. My contention (or perhaps more accurately my wife's) was that this model was not fair (I won't use her term), except to say it rhymes with forelocks!). In other words, a just outcome for me meant pursuing social goals through a private business.

I relay this story not to show my social credentials. Although I would like you to approve of what I have done, I am not going to lose sleep if people throw rocks. Those that do this tend to be fairly insulated, normally salaried and seldom on the wrong side of risk. The reason I am sharing this now is to underline that there's a world of socially minded people just beyond the outer-edge of the social enterprise sector whose pursuit of profit is neither immoral, self-centred or exclusive.

This group of people believe in balanced businesses that concile a number of objectives - social and environmental - alongside the requirement for profit. At the moment, we are viewed, from the pulpit of social enterprise, as mere 'for-profits'. I think the time is nigh for a big rethink. If companies are giving away a lot of their profits, let's consider bringing them in. Likewise if they are proving their social and environmental impact.

Social enterprise needs to be about progressive business, a broad church, a bit, dare I say it, like the Labour Party which mixes Blairites with the disciples of Tony Benn. Social enterprise in 2011 feels a bit like the SWP, a sect which, in forging its own exclusivity, limits any impact whatsover on the world beyond its immediate membership.

I know there are lots of people like me who feel a deep attachment to the social enterprise agenda of blended return and shared ownership, but are uneasy about the ring of steel thrown around it by its founding organisations. I believe, over time, that risks will be taken and the ring of steel lifted. For me, it can't happen soon enough if a progressive business sector of any strength is going to emerge to take on the darker forces that dog a successful, fair capitalism.

Local Tragedy shows the limits of the Big Society

2011-06-30T14:34:00.001+01:00

On 19 June, I was at a country fair in a park in Suffolk. At 4.30pm, a horse took fright and bolted with an empty carriage, running full-pelt into a crowd. One person died and eight others were seriously injured. Myself and my little kids missed it all by an hour. A truly horrendous event.

The Nowton Park Country Fair was run by St Edmundsbury Borough Council, which also runs the park. I say this because I felt glad the state was there to deal with this. Yes, it is up to the council to deal properly with the aftermath, to oversee the inquiry and, possibly, to pay out compensation. Imagine if this park had been handed over to a half-ready community group with no real experience in event management.

I have been one of the people hammering away for this park to be given to the community to operate as a charity or social enterprise. I am now not so sure that this was the right idea. In truth, we're not ready.

Let's imagine things had gone my way and the park was now run by a social enterprise, of which I was a trustee. It is quite possible that I would have been sent to face the media or, harder still, a grieving relative. Alternatively, I could have spent the next month of my working life mired in dealings with the Health and Safety Executive.

But I won't be. A man called John at the council is doing all of this. And I am really grateful that John is there to deal with all of this properly, not me. Obviously, these incidents are rare - they can't be used to justify the retention of control of everything by the state. But they put up a flag upon which is written "be careful what you wish for".

Few in Whitehall will have heard about the runaway horse in Bury St Edmunds, but the debate about the big society rumbles on. Tories such as Steve Hilton, the Prime Minister's director of strategy, want to bring the big society to life by making it the main thrust of the forthcoming white paper on public service reform.

He wants to see more mutuals, community groups and charities running public services, including parks and playgrounds. Meanwhile, other Tories, many of them outside David Cameron's immediate circle, want a stronger, free-market flavour. Hello Capita, Serco, payment by results and the rest.

Sitting behind the free marketers' view is the idea that the big society can't really be counted on to deliver savings or improvements in public services, a view shared by the trade unions and many in the voluntary sector. Where the right wing of the Tory party differs is in its belief that the private sector can do it better.

As the third sector, we will soon have to decide where to place our support: a vision of public sector reform that puts us at the heart of things, or one that puts the private sector clearly in the driving seat.

Despite the tragedy of the past weekend and it salutary lessons, I know where I am putting my money.

Leading in a New World

2011-06-26T10:19:00.003+01:00

Tomorrow evening I am, along with Liam Black of Wavelength, hosting a gathering of leaders of social enterprise spin-outs from the North of England and Scotland.

It's about 'Leading in a New World - and the challenges of running your own ship once liberated from the Big Machine of the public sector. For most of the men and women present, life will have got a lot more interesting since stepping out. But it will also throw up a load of challenges too. Not least of these is how to carry the whole weight of an organisation, often a pretty big one, into unknown new space.

Since stepping down as a CEO, and working alongside new CEOs and MDs I have learned a lot about leadership. The first thing I have realised is that I wasn't as bad a one as I thought. My shortcomings as a CEO were such that, by the end, I didn't actually rate myself that highly. I couldn't do numbers, I got stressed too easily and I couldn't manage process that well. Also, the job sucked me dry of creativity. I left feeling a husk of my former self.

However, watching the best of the leaders I now work with operate, I realised I wasn't so bad after all. For what I lacked in executive skill-set I made up for in other ways. People seemed to trust me. They knew what I was about and felt comfortable with that. Although I had visible weaknesses I didn't try to pretend I didn't and, somehow, this built loyalty and support, rather than disenchantment. And, even at the end, I managed to hang on to some degree of emotional intelligence, even as the organisation became increasingly systems and process-dominated.

Of all the leaders I work closely with now, the two I admire most are also people whose weaknesses are as apparent as their strengths. One of them will be in the room tomorrow, in fact. What I like most about them is that their values radiate from them. And not just their service-values either. Their core beliefs and priorities as human beings are very clear from the moment you speak with them. They have integrity. They show care. They are not just task-centred, but people-centred too.
In their different ways, they both have an energy and warmth which makes them good to work with. Not always easy, but always stimulating. Both are soft-hearted, but can also be very tough if crossed. But you always know where you are with them.

I think what I've learned over the last year, from both my work with Stepping Out and my observations of Suffolk County Council is that the human side of leadership is absolutely critical. It sounds an almost facile thing to say, but, so often, you see CEOs who don't appear to grasp this important truth. They think it's just about the tangible results, the outcomes. Of course it is, but you don't actually achieve these, organisationally, without the commitment which really great leaders embody.

That's where I think Suffolk County Council went wrong. While our leadership, both on the the political and executive side, had great ideas and the right policies (in my view), real, felt, support for what they were doing was, in the end, limited to handful of their own side. They were perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be aloof, arrogant and focused merely on the task-in-hand, not the people side.

The real challenge when you're leading is that, every day, you have a welter of things bearing down on you. Cross cutting demands. It's solitary work and you often feel low in energy and pre-occupied. You become incredibly pragmatic, at times too much so, because it can cut across your values. Staying the person you are, and the one people need you to be, is, in my view, the principle challenge of leadership for these new CEOs.

Mission Possible in the Kingdom of Fife

2011-06-19T18:56:00.006+01:00

Spent a fascinating day in the 'Kingdom of Fife' last Friday as Chair of 'Mission Possible?', a conference examining the future of public services in Fife. For the unenlightened, Fife sits just north of Edinburgh, on the other side of the Firth of Forth. It contains a mix of legacy mining towns, such as Kirkcaldy and Leven, as well as posher parts such as St Andrews, alma mater of Will n' Kate.

I love going to other countries and getting a feel of their issues. Scotland's are similar to our own but in bold. Public spending is a bigger part of their economy (Fife Council is by far the biggest employer) and levels of business start-up are lower than in England. Coupled to that, Fife has to contend for investment with its better-known neighbours to the south, Glasgow and Edinbugh.

Which sets the scene for Friday's event, convened by 'Fife Partnership', a collaboration of all the public and voluntary sector bodies in the area, all, helpfully, contiguous - and aided by a decent history of working well together. Thanks to devolution, 'local' now matters in Scotland far more than in England, where localism is still in its birth-pangs. Councils like Fife have a general power of competency. It is both felt and appreciated. Indeed, the chances of a Holyrood Minister telling them how often to empty their bins is less up there, for sure.

To the event. It was kicked off by Cllr Peter Grant, the SNP leader of the council. I like the Nats. They have a style of their own which is a mixture of intelligent, pragmatic and modern. They just feel fresher and more vital than the standard-issue Scottish politicians that we are now so used to seeing.

He was followed by a deputy CEO Steve Grimmond, who began his career setting up co-ops in Dundee and, unusually for a senior local government officer, has an acute understanding of the limits of municipalism and the need to view resources as a whole, not just public money to be thrown, from high at society's problems. Steve is the kind of leader I think local government needs - he sees well beyond what is immediately in front of him.

After my speech was the highlight of the event. Occasionally, you stumble across a world-class speaker. One who lifts you, gets inside your brain, pulls out your heart and leaves the stage to prolonged applause.

The person in question was Sir Harry Burns, Chief Medical Officer for Scotland. Not a name familiar 'Down South', but an internationally recognised leader in public health. Burns' presentation compressed 40 years of learning into 40 short minutes.

Scots, he told us, do not suffer worse health only because of smoking, above-average drinking and deep-fried Mars Bars. Indeed, control for this and you still find Scots dying and and in poor health in far greater numbers than elsewhere in Europe. What is happening is that massive numbers of people, many young, are out of control, living kamikaze lives which lead, often, to suicide, alcoholism, serious mental illness and death.

Burns takes a decidedly non-medic view of health. He doesn't believe there's these two worlds, one of 'healthy people', the other of unhealthy'. He thinks we all flit in and out of good health all the time. What keeps us on the right side of health is a mixture of our habits, our relationships and our ability to cope with the world around us. People who are resilient can stay healthy more easily as their stress is kept in check and their lives stay in shape. The opposite is true of people whose life experiences have not protected them so that they can cope with life-events.

Scotland, he argues, has a lot of people whose early lives have not afforded them that protection. So they act-out, they become addicts or drunks, commit violent crime or at worst kill themselves. It is a fact that Scotland's suicide and murder rates make some of the rougher parts of London look like a playground.

The answer to Scotland's health problems, therefore, is not a health service based on treatment but a better, more nurturing society in which early care and support, in particular, is improved. The voluntary sector, he believes, has a vital role in developing the kind of supportive relationships which both protect people and reduce their risks to themselves and others.

Burns' quest for understanding led him to study the accounts of younger holocaust survivors. People taken in by strangers and adopted. Nearly 70% experienced extreme trauma as adults, with many experiencing profound mental health problems. But 30% didn't - and it was this 30% which is of interest. This group were those whose positive life-experiences since had afforded them greater protection from their early trauma. Something was protecting these people. It is this that we needed to recreate in our society.

This led to Burns' main point: that we need to take an asset-based view of people in general. Build on what's there, what's already good, not be forever seeking to treat the problem, like a surgeon excising a cancer. Our whole public investment is based on attacking these 'negatives', most of it doesn't work yet we persist. Even when we know other approaches, particularly the asset-based approaches to working with people championed by the voluntary sector are proven to work.

The action didn't stop there. Harry Burns was followed onstage by a leading Scottish police officer called Karyn McCluskey who is Head of Violence for Scotland, following a successful stint in the Met and other English forces. McCluskey, however, is not your standard copper. She trained as a nurse, is also a published academic and has a bit of the Louise Casey about her, in her impassioned, no-nonsense style.

She started by showing CCTV footage of a gang of hooded lads in Glasgow killing a man with a stab wound to the heart, then another of a man being macheted. The purpose was not, however, only to shock. It was to illustrate the limits to policing. She went on to explain how a community-based programme designed to create peer pressure of a different kind - community pressure - was reducing involvement in gangs.

This was heart-stopping stuff. The police work closely with the community on a scheme which brings gang members into close contact with the recently bereaved mother, of the man who will never work again due the 'Glasgow smile' carved by a machete into his face, like some kind of grotesque clown.

While this stuff cannot penetrate the hearts and minds of the most damaged, it has a huge effect on many and the 'Gang Amnesty' headed up by Karyn and her team - which offers immediate support- a team to go out - to gang members wanting an alternative, has been a success.

This was turning into the best event I had been to in a long time. And it wasn't over yet. Three local people spoke powerfully of how they had successfully mixed the resources within their communities with those of the state and other sectors and achieved powerful change.

Andrew Arbuckle told of how the community had taken disused brownfield land in his coastal town and created a new space which had transformed the fortunes of the area. Dr Margaret Hannah spoke about the Shine Project which has produced an entirely new form of support for older people, building, again, on their assets, networks and capabilities.

Finally, Josie Mitchell, a long-term resident of 'The Broom', one of the worst estates in Scotland 25 years ago, explained, movingly, how the residents there had formed up a housing association which now runs an estate which is a model of successful regeneration. Their very simple aim, now achieved, was to make the Broom a place where people wanted to come and live, not escape from.

Three golden threads ran through this event, which, by the way, put many of the London-based events I have been to of late to shame in terms of quality. The first was that where the state works successfully alongside people, rather than does-unto them, the results are transformative.

The second is that it is key, in an age of austerity, to create a strategy based on ALL of our assets - public, community, private, and then map these, AS ONE, onto our high level goals.

The third key message is that control and command in general - the modus operandi of most public organisations today, doesn't work and has to change.

That starts with politicians - and it has to start now.

Lobbying On Health

2011-06-14T10:07:00.005+01:00

Like many of us I have been adding my voice to the often aptly named cacophony of views on how our health services can be delivered in the future.

The Lib Dems have clearly scored a victory in this debate but I am not necessarily celebrating. While there were big problems and risks in the Lansley reforms-as-were, there was much good too which is now at risk. One of these is the role of non NHS providers, including, if we're not careful, social enterprises. These could be the baby thrown out with the privatisation bathwater.

To this end, I have been lobbying, among others, Norman Lamb, who really understands health and the party to speak with colleagues, particularly their Lordships, who might not be aware of the small miracles being achieved by the Central Surrey Health's and City Partnership Hull's of this world. Achievements any self-respecting Lib Dem should be proud of.

The plain truth of the matter in health and social care is that different parts of the system require different combinations of competition and collaboration. The argument to keep competition out of say, a big city hospital's coronory services in order to be able to deliver a specialism it otherwise couldn't can be matched, just as powerfully, by the case to introduce competition into areas like speech therapy or physio, where only one, often very sloppy, NHS provider, can legally claim public money for its work.

My point here is that different permutations of competition and collaboration, integration and break-up, are required across the system. This point is somewhat lost in the binary discussion in even the intelligent newspapers - and in politics. Their Lordships - who are often above this sort of thing - have been joining in with our own Lord John Pugh sounding off about Stephen Bubb's involvement with third sector capital provider Social Investment Business. This is exactly the kind of nonsense I fear could lead Lib Dem peers to try to kybosh social enterprise health providers too on the grounds that they are are kind of privatised service.

It has been interesting watching this unfold. Cameron is clearly highly sensitive to public opinion and a pragmatist, possibly too much of one. Too many U turns and he'll start to look very weak. Politically the Lib Dems needed to play this one as a win and, for once, seem to have got the politics right after a shocking year.

Lansley, on the other hand, is heading for Northern Ireland, as they used to say.

Social Enterprise the Irish Way

2011-06-11T07:22:00.004+01:00

Just back from Louisburgh, a place which sounds like it should be in Tennessee or Wyoming but is in fact in Co Mayo, Ireland. It was a 24 hour flying visit to speak to the 2011 Finalist for Social Enterprise Irelands's Social Impact Awards.

What a setting. We flew into Knock, an airport built by a priest on a hilltop so that people could come see the nearby shrine. These days it is the gateway to the remoter towns of the west, for one of which I was headed.

I was picked up by the Cex of SEI, Sean Coughlan and we spent a pleasant hour and a half going over the recent election there followed by the visit of our Queen.

Irish politics, if you haven't noticed, has undergone a seismic shift with the dominant party (Fianna Fail) reduced to 19 seats - which would be the equivalent of Labour or the Tories getting less than 80. For the first time, it seems, old party allegiances have been abandoned in a collective protest against the economic collapse and the cronyism of the Irish state.

This, coupled with the Queen's visit, which is helping put to bed the longstanding issue between the UK and Ireland, make this feel like a time of reappraisal, Sean believes - and I agree.

I have been all over Ireland but never to Mayo, Louisburgh is set among mountains and sea. The weather changes quickly,making it a place of ever-shifting colour, light and shade. It never feels the same for long. The event was at the home of Declan Ryan, one of the founders of Ryanair, who is Chair of Social Enterprise Ireland and the One Foundation, Ireland's biggest social investor.

Declan is an aviation nut who now sets up airlines in emerging countries. Unlike a lot of big business guys, he is very unassuming and is the opposite of the 'Big I Am'. In fact, me being slow, it took me quite a while to work out who he actually was - halfway through a conversation in fact.

The event itself is about selecting from a field of about eight, the three strongest candidates for a significant social investment from the One Foundation, an investment that will enable significant scaling up. I didn't get to talk to everyone but at dinner I had a chance to talk to two candidates at length.

One was Sean Love. A former Director of Amnesty Ireland, Sean has paired up by novelist Roddy Doyle to set up Fighting Words. Staffed mainly by volunteers, it runs free creative writing and storytelling workshops for students of all ages to enhance creative writing skills and build their confidence in writing ability and self-expression.

In just over two years the centre has hosted 13,000 primary school children, 6,000 secondary students and 5,000 adults. Ireland is full of 'name' writers and artists, many of whom, with no accolade, show up and deliver sessions. Sean is heavily oversubsribed and wants to scale the programme.

Another was Krystian Fikert, a young Polish man set up MyMind in 2006, while employed with Google, in response to what he saw as the complicated nature of the Irish mental health system. MyMind provides affordable and accessible mental health services within the community, which aims to bypass the need for clinical referral, long waiting lists and high- cost services through ePsychologist, an innovative online support model.

What struck me about the group, overall, was their quality and energy. It reminded me a bit of that first day of the Ambassador programme when 20 of the UK's best all came together for the first time.

They have their work cut out. Ireland's economy is weak. Problems are growing almost as quickly as the pot is shrinking. These guys will depend on the country's new Government being willing to press the reset button in many areas of public policy - such as mental health, suicide prevention, education and the environment.

Which means taking on vested interests such as unions and the media. Easier in a small country where Ministers and MPs are often a phone call away. But harder, given the scale of mountains to climb.

I decided, after a bit of faffing around to waive my fee for this one. Not because I am a great guy but because I got as much out of this trip as anyone got out of me. Most of what I see I have seen before, in earlier version.

This was a bit different. I felt I was with the best of a generation, the people who are going, one way or another, to be the shapers of this country's future. To spend time among them was my privilege.

Sunday Reflections

2011-06-05T17:05:00.004+01:00

Enjoying a calm Sunday after a breathless week. Business has quickened in the last couple of months. Suddenly I am not finding the time to blog, Tweet or follow the daily trail. Big proposal went in Friday. Should it come in I will feel the business really has legs.

One of the things I do to wind down is sort out the garden. Not planting or digging, just mowing and tidying. Then a trip to the tip. I love going there. Am I the only bloke who feels a strange purposefulness in filling my boot and heading down the dump? The one I use is a great place, one of the best in the country - managing to recycle 86% of what is left there. Which, when you look into the vast skips, is an achievement. All those settees, lawnmower, computers, fence-panels and rusty bikes.

Like a lot of us, I think a lot about the long-term future. All the stuff we produce and throw. One of my tasks today was to get rid of a knackered trampoline. All that metal and fabric - in the skip after two years. OK it'll get used again but this shaded my enjoyment of the trip. I look at my boy, three and half, in the front seat. Fresh, clean, beautiful. Then into the skip, Old, dirty ugly. I wonder, as I often do now, whether this is the best of it. What he'll be living in as a 41 year old? Will he be richer, poorer, healthier? Or will the world have changed beyond all recognition, as I fear it will? That's when I stop thinking.

I think what got me going this week was watching 'Megacities' by Andrew Marr. He goes to Dhaka, Shanghai, Mexico City, London. Half a million people enter Dhaka each year. Mexico City is several times the size of London. Nine billion people will be 15 billion within a generation. How's it all going to work with both oil and water running out, not to mention a warmer world? Will my boy be ok?

Yet our politics can't really cope with any of this. It's too big. And as individuals we seem only able to respond when the crisis is in the now, just like in WW2, where we faffed around as a nation until 1939 when it took the prospect of invasion to get ourselves organised. We could see tragedy in the middle distance but until it was right up to our eyes we did very little.

There's a point you get to in adult life, I think, where you've got to decide what you really believe and will build around. I know a lot people who are convinced greens. Their views are unconventional. Stop growth. Prevent population growth. Create a basic-income for all etc. All of my life, I have tended to rail against the utopians, whether green or red. Their lack of pragmatism has always seemed futile and to play into the hands of the enemy - witness Labour in the 80s. That was the crucible in which I grew up. Pure but Losing. Then seeing the place I grew up left to the dogs. For this reason, politically I always preferred people like Blair who accepted certain things - as not to would, as progressives have always done, hand power to the wrong people.

But I do have my moments of doubt. At heart I want a high trust society in which we are drawn closer together than we are in England in 2011. I am a big admirer of what Alex Salmond is achieving up in Scotland, an interesting combination of economic nationalism, green investment and a social ethic I find really appealing. It is positive, hopeful and interesting. It challenges the givens while working within the grain of Scottish identity and values.

Which brings me back to where I started - Sunday. Back from the tip, listening to Jarvis Cocker on 6 Music, kids out, looking out over the beloved greenery of Nowton Park feeling lucky to be alive.

Is Cinderalla back at the Ball? My latest piece for Third Sector magazine

2011-06-02T17:06:00.001+01:00

Times have changed for the leaders of the voluntary sector. Cast your mind back 10 years, to 2001. It felt then that, like Cinderella, the sector under New Labour was being spirited from a life cleaning ovens and sweeping floors and invited to the ball. The government wanted to engage with the sector, and to spend money on it. Its prince saw how well those in the sector understood the problems of the time - and how we could help him to build the new kingdom.

The 2000s were our ballroom years. A group of talented leaders emerged who inspired confidence and admiration. They enjoyed the privileges of the court and an increasing familiarity with those holding power. As the prince swung our sector around the dancefloor, we were eyed with jealous suspicion by some outside the gilded circle. What price, they asked, were we paying for this proximity? But the riposte was that while we sometimes got too close to government, we had credibility - and a massive bounty to show for our trouble.

Then midnight struck. A new, more sceptical prince came to power. Our gown immediately turned to sackcloth, our chariot back to a pumpkin, our horses back to mice. We were unceremoniously cast out of the kingdom. Even our name, the 'third sector', was denied and replaced with a new one of the prince's choosing: the 'big society'.
The reason, of course, was that the new prince had different, more ascetic tastes. The ball was over and he had inherited an impoverished kingdom. He decided the third sector had become part of the furniture, no longer reflecting its roots. So he took away most of our money and told us to get by without state handouts.

And his loving gaze passed over us and moved to the fields beyond the palace walls where 'real people' tended the fields and helped the needy without regard for goings-on in the court. They didn't ask and they didn't get. These were the real heroes, he declared as he slammed the door, giving us just enough corn to get by until we could support ourselves.

Of course, we were cross. Before the new prince's ascent to power, we had done our bit to win his heart. We had responded with enthusiasm to his new ideas, even the ones we had doubts about. Some of us even came up with plans to make them happen. Alas, to no avail. Cinderella was politely, but firmly, sent packing.

That was last year. So what is happening now? Having banished us, the new prince, I sense, realises that, without the third sector's goodwill and know-how, his own 'big society' - led, in theory, by the yeomen in the fields - will struggle to get traction.

The penny is dropping that, while Cinderella may have gorged herself on the palace's fine food and wine, she has left a hole that needs to be filled. Indeed, she now finds herself invited back on the quiet. Not held as close, nor treated as lavishly and indulgently.

But definitely back

How do we stop abuse in care?

2011-06-01T12:22:00.004+01:00

If you didn't watch last night's Panorama, then watch it on Iplayer. It concerns the treatment of people with learning disabilities by one of the UK's biggest private social care providers. Panorama shows people being physically and verbally abused by staff who are clearly out of all control.

I would like to say that this is shocking by its novelty. But the truth is that I have seen similar things with my own eyes, albeit less often. And I have, throughout my time in advocacy, frequently come across stories of such goings on. The truth of the matter is that mostly goes on without senior managers knowing about it.

I don't have to think hard to recall one home I worked in. Presided over by a powerful personality, M, who clearly had 'issues', staff and residents alike were afraid of her. M was a bully and, on her bad days, a bit of a sadist. People would sit in their own shit if she felt they had done it to 'piss her off'. People's genitals would be laughed about as though they weren't there. On one occasion, she struck someone, not hard, but enough to know where they stood. Families even were intimidated by her. She had everyone in her thrall.

I was just a relief worker - this was one of many places I worked as a 23 year old. Having nothing to lose, I complained about M to senior managers verbally. Nothing happened. I put it in writing and threatened to go public. M was suspended. Then others came forward to substantiate and add their stories. People who themselves had joined in with M in her constant goading. By the end of it, M was lucky not to go to jail. Thankfully none of the other staff lost their jobs. They were all, in essence, decent people led by a monster.

This episode taught me something very important about people and leadership. Without great leaders in those places I worked, they quickly become hellish as staff take their cues from whoever is in charge. Which brings me back to the role of private companies in public services. I am categorically not one of those people who thinks that profit cannot be honestly made out of providing good care and support. That is nonsense as experience every day tells us. Nor is the answer for care to be socialised. The NHS, let's remember was only last week lambasted, again, for letting elderly patients effectively starve to death on its wards. And one of the last big learning-disability scandals was at Orchard Hill, an NHS facility.

No, it isn't just about public-private. It is about mission and leadership. It is about focus on what matters. If these places are run according to imperatives beyond providing best-service, things slide. The best places I worked were, bizarrely, run by the same group that employed M. Two miles down the road, their other place was and still is exemplary. I would place my own child there. What made it work was strong, empowered, proud local leadership backed, yes, by management with good values.

This is one reason I prefer spin-outs to either retained public sector or outright privatisation. Ownership and control we know have a positive effect on behavour. So too does focus and specialism and a strong sense of social purpose. We will, of course, one day see a scandal in a spin out. But I think in organisations which lose their sense of purpose through an excessive focus either on profit or too much public-sector politicking, when eyes leave the ball, the chances of scandal are all the more extreme.

My thoughts today are with the people on the wrong end of the kicks, shoves and hair-pulling in that programme. Several people today are in custody and hopefully those people are now safe. But, rather than just put this down to 'evil people', I hope this whole affair helps us think more carefully about the kinds of services - and the requirements of leadership - needed to keep people safe. Most people in social care are good, decent people. So too are most managers, right up to the top. I have no doubt that the company involved will respond in a concerned and reasonable way. I just hope that this also addresses some of the deeper reasons why these things happen.

What kind of leadership do we need in Suffolk now?

2011-05-23T10:17:00.002+01:00

I listened to Andrew Marr's interview with Barack Obama yesterday. For me he embodies what leadership is all about. Clear, strong values. Calmness in adversity. Sensitivity to human feeling. An ability to raise others and paint a big picture - but also a clear eye for detail. Toughness when required but also persuasion as the main weapon.

When I was a CEO, I didn't always rate myself as a leader that much. I could, I think, inspire people, I could build a picture - but I never felt sure enough of myself as a manager of people. I need to be liked that little bit too much. People, I think, found me just the wrong side of flexible - a bit of a pushover. I also flapped quite a lot, sometimes not very privately either. Painfully aware of my weaknesses, I always felt like an actor who had only learned half his lines.

I know this isn't unique. I know all CEOs feel, to some extent, frauds waiting to be unmasked. I know few that ride that delicate balance between having good relatonships with colleagues and having the wrong sort of dynamic - either not being sufficiently 'above the fray' or so far above it that people can't relate to you.

The best advice I ever had was to be myself. This meant, of course, accepting that I was never going to be a Barack Obama, but it also meant that I was going to be authentic. People tend, I found, to respond well to that. By following the contours of your personality, rather than a template for leadership, colleagues found, eventually, a way to work around certain predictable patterns. Interestingly, by being more frank about my weaknesses, support mechanisms developed where they didn't before. By being more human, I didn't I find become less 'CEO-like'

Which bring me on today's matters in hand. In Suffolk, we are currently without a CEO. She is on long-term leave pending the outcome of an investigation into the organisation's culture. Her style was a funny mix of visionary, inspirational and confrontational. I make no bones of the fact that I like Andrea Hill. She is smart, interesting and brave. But she's got a very different 'leadership face'. Which, in my experience, has been to show no weakness, to meet fire with fire and to be fairly brutally honest in her assessments of people and situations. She doesn't sweeten any pills.

The net effect of her style was mixed. On the one hand, she drew some great people into our Council who have been rainmakers. She also gave our Council clear direction, energy and agenda. On the other, she was a divisive figure who seemed, to staff, to be scary and remote, cold and unsympathatic. My guess is that she needed a 'front' just to get through some very difficult times - but that in creating this may have made matters more difficult for herself. That a little more of herself shown would, ironically, have taken some pressure off her.

Obviously, nobody knows what happens next. It's a matter for HR and the leaders of the Council to decide what happens. My fear is that if she doesn't come back, the Suffolk experience may become a cautionary fable for Councils who might seek to do things differently. But perchance she does return, I think she would do well to review a leadership style which, while inspiratonal to some was difficult for many to deal with. And that it was the many, in the end, that saw off some of the ideas with which she was most closely associated.

Why Social Enterprise needs to throw open its doors

2011-05-17T21:14:00.002+01:00

Clients actually never ask me the social business question. They either assume that Stepping Out is - or don't really care about our structure.

The truth of the matter is that Stepping Out isn't, by UK legal definition a social business. There is no asset lock. The Directors own 80% of the company and can do as they please with 80% of the profits. The other 20% - of both the company and the net profit will go to invest in early stage social entrepreneurs working at community level. That is when there is a profit to distribute - a moot point for many in the social sector.

While I can't contest the social enterprise legal definition, I will say now why I think enterprises like mine should be allowed Guest Passes to the fold. Firstly, our commitment to redistribute profit goes well beyond minimalist CSR. Secondly, our time - the other key asset of any company - is given away generously to in-need clients. Thirdly, we are not profit-maximising and seek a variety of returns from this business.

I have said this before - there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands of firms in the UK just like ours which are, in essence, privately held but which subscribe to a broader view of their existence and indeed have the track-record to demonstrate this. Capitalism as a whole is, with many risible exceptions, slowly walking in this direction. At the moment, these companies have nowhere to go. CSR is largely working at the margins. For companies making substantial social contributions - but without the means or capital structure to go the full hog to social enterprise - there is very little formally there.

I believe that, in time, the Social Enterprise movement will see this gap and ride into it. It is not only a great opportunity for them but a chance to create real and productive alliances between progressive firms currently separated by the somewhat arbitrary lines set out the legal definitions of social enterprise.

Why the NHS still needs reform

2011-05-10T07:56:00.002+01:00

The debate about the NHS is frustratingly binary. Public vs Private. Managers versus Doctors. Front-line services versus bureaucracy. Planning versus chaos. Gosplan versus the Wild West Discussion on the Lansley Bill, even among the better Parliamentarians and commentators, seems to sink to this level.

Part of the problem is that the challenge of how we improve healthcare in the UK is fiendishly complex. Hardly anyone knows enough about all areas to really have a total grip on it. Furthermore, the issue of the NHS is related, as nowhere else, to larger ideas about national identity and the binding of our society.

Reforming it, therefore is a hellish task. Some basic truths about the health service cannot be escaped from. Firstly, it is, globally speaking, relatively cheap. Secondly, it is unusual in that it is provided through taxation and is free at point of use. Insurance or payment haven't, so far, entered the picture, unless you decide to opt-out altogether. Thirdly, as a system, the resources are allocated, for historic reasons largely, more to acute and hospital based services and less to community, primary and preventative services.

Despite big political disagreements about means, there is some consensus on ends. We need to make the health service better at helping people help themselves to stay healthy, less about treating them in hospital when they are sick. Resources need, over time, to shift from one to the other. We also need health and social care to be less rigidly separated as the two needs tend to come together, particularly with an ageing population.

There, however, it all breaks down and gets very binary. The way forward for the right is to create this change by splitting the purchase from provision of services and by opening up the market to any willing provide. Coupled with this, people should be allowed to both choose their provider and 'top-up' their service, like Fast Boarding, if they choose. This, goes the argument, drives efficiency, innovation and customer-focus. More bang for your buck.

The argument from the left is that all of this disrupts an ecology of co-operation, integration and professional and public involvement which has developed since the formation of the NHS. Competition, they say, puts people who need to work together e.g. GPs and community services or community services and Foundation Trusts, into competition with each other. The patient - who is guided down 'Pathways' between primary, community and hospital care, will suffer as agencies fight over the funding and, inevitably, act in organisational self-interest, rather than that of the patient. Furthermore, there is huge fear over the consequences of co-payment and the idea of a 'two-tier NHS'.

As a self-confessed wooly liberal, I see both sides of the debate. I also work closely with health and use health services quite a bit. I can see both cases. What I do not doubt, however, is that no-change, is as unacceptable as some of the more far-reaching aspects of the Lansley Bill.

I illustrate this with a personal story. One of my children is three and a half and has 20 words, about as many as a typical 18 month old baby. A year ago, he had none. We referred him to Speech Therapy. Apparently there is a waiting list. Then we got him seen. There was another delay. Then a couple of cancelled appointments. We get 1970s style letters telling us when we will be seen, inked in biro. No choice or quality of communication. The therapist herself is excellent but in the year since referring our child, he has been seen twice.

Had I not the commitment I have to the NHS, I would have taken my child private six months ago. A queue for speech therapy at this age is just going to compound the problem - creating more work down the road - and possible education/ SEN needs.
There is clearly a resource issue. But on top I sense a complacence too. This service is the only one funded by the NHS. Nobody else can do this and get NHS money. If I wanted my son's notional share of the budget of this service to take to the market to buy a service from a speech therapist or practice I couldn't have it. And there is no way I could augment this money with some of my own if I needed to, god forbid, because that would give my son some kind of bizarre advantage over some other child who may well also reach his fourth birthday unable to say more than a few words.

Clearly, there is a need for some system-change here. I would be deeply surprised if the budget for speech therapy was such that if was not possible to work harder. While we need more planning to ensure under-funded areas do get funded, we also need more freedom to ensure that the money works harder so that people who need services benefit from some of the things we take for granted in other areas of life e.g. choice and the freedom to use our own share of public sector resources in the way we choose, even if this means adding some of our own.

It is this kind of change that I am trying to encourage in my own work. I don't think the NHS should be a free market. There are real dangers in losing control of the system to a profit motive, as in the US where spending is out of control and outcomes extremely poor. We need system-planning. But this doesn't mean we can't have a lot of providers and it doesn't mean that users of the health service having to put up with a 1940s, nationalised industry approach to provision in which the forces which do drive forward innovation, quality and customer-services are systematically nullified.

My piece in this week's Third Sector on the need for soc ent to take over state services

2011-05-06T10:59:00.001+01:00

I go to a lot of sector events these days where nearly everyone, even quite sensible people, are banging away about how the coalition is taking us to hell in a handcart. Amid redundancies, closures, vital projects lost and more redundancies, I can understand this. To a point. But some perspective is needed here. Blaming the coalition is to seriously misread the issue.

Two things need pointing out. First, this was coming. As a sector, we had been pumped up by 15 years of uninterrupted economic growth, which left us deeply vulnerable to changes in the economic weather. And by 2010, any new government knew it would immediately face two flashing red signals as it pulled out of the station - the economy and the runaway costs of the public sector. It is fantasy, in my view, to believe that charities wouldn't be getting an equivalent hammering with a fourth Labour government driving the train.

Second, the world is changing faster than many in the sector understand. Many people - most often my generation and above - forget that we are facing overdue structural changes in the way the UK addresses social need. They still see the 'voluntary sector' as a useful crack-filler for an all-embracing public sector. We're an 'and' solution, not a serious alternative.

That model is broken. The brutal truth is that, unless you're incredibly fortunate, you can't get a service from the state unless your problem comes in a box they recognise. Try being mentally ill and alcoholic. Learning-disabled and deaf. Or a perpetrator and a victim of crime. You'll find very little out there for you - except a bit in our sector, if you happen upon it.

The logic of a complex society is that we need a greater diversity of solutions for a population that has become far more multi-faceted than that of our grandparents' time: all sorts of organisations doing all sorts of things with all sorts of people.
We also need to support stuff that helps the sector's activities match up to need rather than being only, in effect, a supportive gesture. This can't be done 'in addition'. It needs cash that used to fund the state.

That is what we are, somewhat chaotically, moving to now. It's messy, it's difficult and it isn't helped by the economic situation or the lack of a proper plan from government. But underneath all of this there is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for our sector to redefine itself as the first point of call for people in need.

And this should be the default position. Government grew as a provider when nobody was willing or able to take on that role. By the same logic, it needs now to revert to providing only where a civil society organisation cannot or will not do so. It can still plan, oversee and ensure a level field.

But one provider normally brings only one solution. The United Kingdom, in the 2010s, is not a one-solution society. A million flowers need to bloom. The price for this is a far smaller state than most readers of Third Sector are comfortable with.

What now for the Lib Dems?

2011-05-06T09:50:00.003+01:00

I wasn't up for election yesterday. If I had been, I may well not be a Councillor today, despite having done OK in the role. Such is the nature of local elections - local issues are not what decides them.

This election has brought into sharp focus the challenge for the Lib Dems. The charge that the party is a 'human-shield' for the Tories has been borne out - they have come out without a scratch, while the Lib Dems face their worst results for 30 years.

When the party went into coalition last year, most party members endorsed it. The party was, in reality, trapped - but armed with a strong agreement, felt able to go into confidently into Government. However, the cuts - and their consequences such as the need to ask students to pay for their own education - have been the ubiquitious theme of the last year and we, not the Tories, have taken all of the political heat for them. The party's opportunism around fees - and its rash promise not to raise them - is now a burning large as a trust issue. Furthermore, Clegg's early view that all Lib Dems should 'own' the Coalition, now looks naive and we are seen to have 'played along' with the Tories rather than playing a strong hand as distinctive voice within the Coalition, as has been the case quite recently on health, which could provide a model for the future.

A second big problem is the North. In large areas of Northern England, the Lib Dems, not the Tories, became the natural opposition after the near-wipeout of the Tories in the 80s and 90s. Now that has been reversed, with the Leader of Hull Council, Carl Minns, actually losing his seat. The typical Northern Lib Dem voter is anti-Tory and has pulled away from the party in reaction to the Coalition. Interestingly, while Lib Dem members OK'd the Coalition, its voters probably would have vetoed it, given the chance, something which is only now being fully appreciated.

So what next? While there are odd calls for Clegg to go by angry councillors, this won't happen. It's too early and it would destabilize the Government and, ultimately spell doom for the party. There needs to be unity. And while there are whispers of an SDP-type split, I also see this as highly unlikely. Such things are years in the making and, for now, Labour provides a reasonable alternative home to disillusioned Lib Dems.

However, neither can things go on as they are. The Lib Dems in Government need to carve out a distinctive voice and be able to present themselves to the British public as a brake on the Thatcherite tendency in the Conservative Party. They need to be credited, politically, with stopping the Tories from privatising public services willy-nilly. They need to find some stronger themes than social mobility to campaign upon. And they need to look like a party that is listening again. This may mean admitting a mistake on fees early - in order to lance that boil. Clegg has the skills to do all of this and he is still the right person to lead the party - until the end of the Coalition.

After that point, or even going into the next election, the party needs a new leader, probably one who can pick up the lost voters and who can credibly join forces with Labour in the ev
ent of a hung parliament. Labour needs to win only 50 more seats to become a credible governing force again - but will still be short of a majority. I can't see them working with Clegg - ever - but it is possible to see them partnering with Tim Farron or someone from the mainstream centre-left. The Orange Book is now all but finished-off, outside Parliament at least.

And for me? I have never made any secret of my centrist views. If anything, I am still, at heart, a Blairite, as many, from all parties, still are. I want a Government which improves public services by diversifying supply, creates a dynamic but compassionate society and is modern and progressive in outlook, rather than backward-looking or statist. I had hopes for Cameron but he has reverted to type. David Miliband would have been supportable as Labour leader. Clegg, for me, has it about right.

But that will count for nothing if he remains politically toxic in the run up to the next General Election.

Can partnerships between mutuals and the private sector actually work?

2011-05-04T10:06:00.004+01:00

What can be understood from yesterday's news that the Coalition Government will be scaling back plans to outsource large parts of the public sector to private firms? And what does this mean for other sectors?

The important message yesterday was, as usual, behind the headlines. The Government isn't necessarily looking simply for a phalanx of new non-profit providers. There just aren't the numbers, the expertise or the available public capital for the flea to take significant bites out of the elephant.

No, what the Coalition really wants are new ventures which are part-mutual, part-private. A bit like Circle Healthcare which is owned 49% by its staff and with significant minority shareholdings for venture capital backers and the senior management of the company itself.

There are three reasons why this makes sense, from the Government's point of view. Firstly, this brings private capital into play instead of public funding being required. Remember, each 'Right to Request' spin-out from the NHS has cost the Government tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds. A private partner with a long credit line can bring much-needed capital to a cash-strapped public sector.

Secondly, a private partner would bring expertise. Public sector spin-outs tend to be led by passionate teams of people who, certainly early on, lack the commercial nous to run a business at scale. Plus they have to set up all sorts of things from scratch - such as back-office, HR etc - which is simply very hard work. A good private partner could provide all sorts of help to the newly stepped-out organsiation. Thirdly - and this is the big one - partnerships of this type could be set up quickly and at scale. Average times for spin-outs, from conception through to execution run, from my experience, at 18 months to two years. Much of that is due to the internal approvals process, but much is due to the fact that the poor people leading it have to do this on top of their day jobs. It is a long firewalk, meaning few people have the energy and time to do it. A partner could make this easier.

So, there's the case-for. But will this work? There's a few big questions here. One concerns the nature of partnerships between mutually-owned and for-profit organisations, particularly those from the world of private equity. One, essentially, is driven by a range of goals, often including social ones, the other mainly by short-term bottom-line. Who wins out - or rather how a compromise is arrived at which satisfied both sets of owners is an interesting question. The truth of the matter is that commercial capital will not settle for sub-optimal returns given the risks involved here. So where the goals of mutualism - or social goals - will fit in remains a moot point.

Another big question concerns the meeting of cultures. Although this sounds less significant, I don't think it can be underestimated. Every single person who I have met who leads a stepped-out organisation is motivated by social purpose. They strongly identify with public sector values, albeit ones which see social enterprise as the appropriate vehicle for this. Culturally and politically, they are mostly people of the Left, who are sceptical about the values and motives in the UK private sector. Essentially, you're talking here about mixing oil and water.

A final question in my mind concerns the scale of ventures. Most mutuals or social enterprises tend to be defined by geography or function. A passion for people, place or profession is often a big element in these ventures. They aspire to be local, to be connected, to be human-scale. The dynamic of the private sector is around scale, either by organic growth or takeovers. The natural tendency among providers with private partners will be to seek to maximise value by taking over other organisations by merger or acquisition, strip out costs, find economies and so on. You see this right across the health and social care sector now, leaving us with very large providers, hugely efficient but also somewhat remote and soulless, with ownership often based overseas or in sovereign wealth funds.

While some degree of mutual ownership would mitigate all of these three problems, I wonder how far this would be the case - given who will hold the purse-strings and whether, in the end, even this approach, while well-intentioned, might lead to a fairly poor set of outcomes, when viewed from a social point of view.

Piece from today's Guardian on social enterprise spin-outs

2011-05-04T09:51:00.001+01:00

What is it like to lead a service out of the public sector into a social enterprise or employee-owned mutual?

I recently spoke to four freshly-minted leaders of social businesses or mutuals. What they have to say is inspiring, but also reveals the major challenge ahead for the government, as it aims to create new employee-owned ventures.

Three big themes emerge. The first, emphasised by all, is the importance of leadership from the front.

One leader, a former director of local authority adult services who does not wish to be named and who now leads a new social business, warns that spin-outs will struggle unless senior players are prepared to put themselves on the line. Another, Andrew Burnell, chief executive of City Health Care Partnership, Hull, formerly part of Hull primary care trust (PCT), underlines the need for leaders to be resilient during a process of extrication which, for him, was "a drawn-out affair, difficult and at times challenging to one's sanity and patience".

Then there is the opposition, both overt and covert, from trade unions and, on occasion, from top management. This often takes a personal toll. Burnell felt that his passion for spinning-out led to him being labelled, as "blinkered". The former council director, meanwhile, found that his motivations came under attack. He also believes he was treated as a threat to a comfortable council monopoly: "I was disappointed but not too surprised at the deep municipalism that pervades a local public sector," he says.

Clearly, doing this isn't for the faint-hearted, even those who heed Burnell's counsel "not to take 'No' for an answer".

A third, more positive theme, common to all, is the increase in productivity, innovation and energy that being part of a social business engenders. Scott Darraugh, director of Social adVentures, which was part of Salford PCT, says things are now more productive. "There has been a cultural shift within the team. Staff are driven to take ownership, and that has to be better for the people we serve".

Kevin Bond, chief executive of Navigo community interest company, formerly North East Lincolnshire mental health services, says his new organisation has managed to make significant savings over the next three years without diminishing its service to the public – and has engaged staff and users in governance in a way "never possible before".

What can we learn from these leaders? The vital factor appears to be the benefits of freedom both strategically and operationally. Getting away from a much larger public body seems to have a powerful galvanising effect.

But warning signs abound. A trickle of spin-outs has not yet turned into a flood. Few councils, it appears, are looking seriously at this option, choosing instead to cut their inhouse services and tender them out.

What could speed things up?

First, public bodies need a "playbook". At the moment, according to the former director of adult services, councils don't know how to create and nurture spin-out businesses. Then, further assurance needs to be given around how pensions will work, how public bodies can avoid legal challenges if they create a spin-out and how the creation of spin-outs can be financed. And there is a real need for leaders – hundreds of them. There is no doubt that such people exist in the public sector. But the challenge is to convince them that spinning-out their service will do for them what it has for these four leaders.

It remains in the balance whether potential leaders of new mutuals are encouraged and nurtured – or made to walk through fire before stepping out.

• Craig Dearden-Phillips is founder and chief executive of Stepping Out, a business helping parts of the public sector become a social enterprise, and is a Liberal Democrat county councillor in Suffolk.

On Suffolk's Situation

2011-04-29T12:09:00.003+01:00

To readers outside Suffolk, this is about the CEO of Suffolk County Council. I am writing about her because she has been at the centre of Suffolk County Council's direction in recent years and has, almost from day one, been a controversial figure.

It is fashionable, especially if you're not a Conservative - and possibly now if you are - to publicly denigrate Andrea Hill. Everything she says, does, believes and wears tend to be conflated into a big soup of hostility, to such an extent that some Councillors (who should have known better) have described her as a 'hate figure' on the streets of Suffolk.

The truth, of course, when you separate things out is more more complex. So let's look at that soup - and its ingredients. First let's deal with the simple stuff. There is, without a shred of doubt large slices of misogyny and snobbishness in all of this. I can' honestly imagine a man in her position, earning what she does, getting as much stick. There are council CEOs all over the UK who get more who none of us have ever heard. Then there's the poorly concealed irritation that a youngish woman from an ordinary Essex background can get a job normally reserved for the grey-headed, Children - normally sons - of the Revolution.

Other ingredients are more subtle and complex, concerning her personality. Again we can break this down into character and style. Lined up on one side I can mentally list countless people I know who have worked with her and found her to be an inspirational manager. She is viewed by many as brave, thoughtful, principled and smart. My own experience of her is really positive. She strikes me, as an experienced CEO, as someone who clearly 'gets it' in her analysis of public services. Furthermore, I actually like her. In person, she isn't the hard-nose people make her out to be. While resilient and strong, I know that, like any decent human being, she really struggles with the negative attention that she receives. Who wouldn't?

Part of Andrea Hill's problems have been the fault of politicians. She, not the Leader, was the public face of the Council following her selection as CEO in 2007/8. Some put this down to her desire for attention. While I am sure there is some small truth in this, certainly early on, I think overall she has been put in an unfair position - the public face of the Council but unable, like a politician, to respond and engage as only the Leader can. The last leader, Cllr Jeremy Pembroke, was a good man, but treated the role as a chairman-of-the-board role. Which, in good times, worked OK - just. However, the Council has, since 2009, needed much more visible and clear political leadership. The absence of this has put Andrea Hill who, while a talented manager is no politician - into the frame more than is normal or right for a CEO.

But my purpose here isn't to lionise Andrea Hill. It is to say that the truth is more complicated than it seems. I do have my criticisms of her, made in other blogs. I feel her public style has been too confrontational, too dismissive at times. I don't think she has managed to get enough support for her more radical policies beyond the very top group in the Council. She has possibly underestimated the potential for rapid improvement in public sector organisations run by politicians. And while her 'political management' skills in terms of dealing with the Leadership are supreme, her ability to respond to the public mood isn't strong. But, after all, she is not a politician, so this isn't actually a proper criticism.

What next for Andrea Hill? Although, like us all, she has her faults, I have felt that she had the right idea and was courageous enough to speak frankly about the need for change. Compared to many of the non-entitities you see as CEOs of councils, she is intellectually and in vision-terms, plainly superior. Until recently, it seemed that she would lead a programme of change which would be historic in UK local government terms. As such , she had my quiet support. Since coming into local government in 2009, I couldn't believe how poor most services were and how a deep municipalism seemed to conspire against a public desperate for better services. Andrea Hill understands that and came up with a plan to make that better.

What recent events have shown is, at best, that she lacked the political skill to get the big changes through and at worst, depressingly, that there is in fact no appetite for radical change in local government and that she made a big misjudgment in trying to be so radical. Neither , in my view, were they true, are not something to incite the kind of oppobrium she has received. What we probably have here is an ambitious CEO who may have over-reached herself. Not a firing offence in my book.

What will happen now remains to be seen. A regime which has washed its hands publicly of her strategy has, in effect, disowned her, and if I were her I would be considering where else my talents might be used. I would be surprised if she wasn't, given that the little political cover she did have has just been removed. Without explicit support from the leadership, I think her position is tenuous. As a Lib Dem politician, I shouldn't really say this, but I did actually think she was, while she, had top level backing, a good thing, overall, despite the negatives.

I hope in writing this I have separated the soup of criticism into its separate elements and shed a little light on what I believe is a complicated situation.

Dick Turpin's Gibbet - and the nature of contentment

2011-04-28T16:28:00.000+01:00

Just had a great day in York.

We got the train from Knaresborough where we have a really brilliant swop - just by the viaduct and gorge. Took Wilf on my own to the National Railway Museum - he's a bit of a train and bus geek - and then, as we were coming out, I saw an open top bus and just jumped on.

While my intention was simply to engage Wilf, I spent my next hour transfixed by this enthusiastic member of the Historical Society taking us back through time and York's history. Vikings, Romans, Dick Turpin's favourite boozer followed by his gibbet.

The hour flew by. I didn't take my phone or watch and, for once, felt quite timeless.

They say the key to happiness - or contentment - is gratitude. I find it quite easy to feel grateful - blue sky, healthy kid holding my hand, most of my hair, wife still interested, Bolton in the Premiership, good business with promise and a column in the Guardian next week.

Enjoy it while you can, whistled the wind in my ears as York passed my heightened eyes.

New Broom, New Strategic Direction - What next for Suffolk County Council

2011-04-26T20:09:00.002+01:00

Bit of a local politics blog this. But don't switch off, it's interesting! Suffolk County Council has been in the news all year for its big plan to divest all local services to social enterprise, private businesses and voluntary organisations. Under its radical CEO, Andrea Hill, Suffolk was going to be the first English Council to respond to financial constraints not with simple cutbacks, but with Organisational Transformation.

I use capitals here deliberately because this was as much part of the plan as outsourcing services. Under this analysis, the Council's whole modus operandi was outdated and needed to be changed quickly - and by force if necessary.

This was all going fine until a series of events this year which, cumulatively, led to the New Strategic Direction being, for all intents and purposes, junked. Firstly, the CEO herself was caught in some unfortunate and largely unfair media spotlight. Secondly, the Council decided, in its wisdom, to intro the policy by cutting road crossing patrols for kids. And thirdly there was a series of resigniations: the Leader of the Council, the Director of Resources, the Monitoring Officer. Following this, there was the tragic, potentially related, suicide of a senior manager in the Council.

Then an election. Odds-on favourite, and close ally of the Leader, was, to everyone's surprise easily defeated by the backbench Chairman of Scrutiny on a promise to review the new direction and to tend to organisational morale said to have hit rock bottom. His first act on getting elected was to restore crossing patrols and to order an external inquiry into the management culture of the organisation. The new leader, possibly wisely, sees stability and a pause for reflection, as the most urgent current need.

As a Lib Dem Member of the Council, I am supposed to welcome all of this. And I certainly do welcome the pause for reflection and the assertion of political control after a difficult period in which leadership seemed to disappear from view. But I wonder whether, despite the confrontational communication of the New Strategic Direction, it was actually, the right overall policy for the Council long-term. By placing services outside the Council it gave space for new providers and a diversity of supply which is still sorely lacking. If the outcome of all this is to stop this movement to new providers, I think we will have lost an opportunity.

What can be learned from all this? On reflection, this is a big lesson to anyone seeking to bring in fundamental change. While alignment between the top team is essential, this isn't enough. The middle of the organisation has to be brought on board. While the New Strategic Direction enjoyed some support, both from Councillors and Officers, this was always a minority. Culturally, it always felt like a very tough line - get on board or miss the boat. It felt very confrontational and unyielding.

This is where leadership gets tricky. Part of being a strong leader is being that figure of granite and conviction. People tend to like this. But another element of leadership is getting alongside people, including opponents, acknowledging feelings and fears, and seeking to bring them with you. My hunch is that not enough of this went on, leaving a large constituency of the alienated.
There will always be detractors, but if this becomes the majority, you can find yourself in quicksand should circumstances change, as they just have in Suffolk. There is almost no residual support for a strategy a lot of people felt didn't hadn't embraced them. Leadership, if it is about getting people to follow you, is a test that some leaders, particularly those with a tough message, struggle to pass.

I really do feel for anyone trying to lead change in a crisis. It ain't easy and the medicine is always pretty awful. There is also a reality that institutional self-interest has to be tackled - and that this hasn't been tackled in the past. You see Lansley struggling now, as the leaders of Suffolk did, with ideas which, essentially, took change too far too fast for many of the key stakeholders - including the public - to deal with.

Interestingly, my hunch is that, once the dust settles the new leadership will embark on a path that isn't much different from the New Strategic Direction set out by Andrea Hill. It will have a different name. It will be slower, more consultative and done with less pzazz. But the essentials of it - divestment of council services, the build-up of community capability and a new role for the council as commissioner rather than provider will, over time, prevail.

Fighting Deep Municipalism: Guest Blog from a Leader of a new social business that has stepped-out from a Council in England

2011-04-19T10:22:00.003+01:00

At an early stage in my thinking I resolved that leadership from the front was important.

It would have been easy as a director to allocate the task to a more junior member of the team and indeed my observation is that spin outs trying to do social care at some scale will struggle without senior players being prepared to put themselves on the line.

Having taken this step it was remarkable to see how many staff were reassured by the fact I was not asking them to do something I was not prepared to do myself. This is powerful stuff and I'll have a lasting memory of the buzz created by the possibility of making something new and providing a safe route out of the organisation for staff who had been subject to death by a thousand cuts over the years.

The buzz was also about the creativity that was unleasehed. People were coming up with ideas about how services could improve in ways they had not done before because they could see they would have a stake in the new company with representation on the board and a share in the benefits going forward. The idea of a bonus scheme was popular and there was a good sense of realism about the need to change, develop or close buildings and services that were well passed the sell by date.

People were up for a change in their roles and recognised the need for terms and conditions around sickness in particular to change. I was struck by how many people were fed up with the few who took advantage of the current system.

The process brought home to me how distant from the front line my role had taken me. I worked with people two or three layers below the senior team and it was a revelation, which rekindled some of that old fire that had over the years been refined into a politically acceptable glow.

The process also brought out some visceral opposition from those ideologically opposed to enterprise that could be viewed as private sector doing the public sector's work regardless of it being not for profit. I was disappointed but not too surprised at the deep deep municipalism that pervades a local public sector. The grip too of unoins that were in our case not representative of 2/3ds of the workforce. Unless its ours and we are in control its not going to happen.

From day one the conversations about control in the governance of the spin out were challenging. These were more hints than demands but eventually we resolved as a company and with some senior colleagues in the council that being completely separate was really the best way in our situation.

I was publically accused of trying to feather my own nest on more than one occasion and it did cut to the bone. Here was me, a dutiful public servant of 25 years standing trying to come up with yet another innovation to get us out of a mess and offering to take a career change risk to find that I was personally villified - more than ever before. It made me think I must be on the right track!

I've been humbled by the support of my family, the hands of friendship from colleagues in the social enteprise and private sector, the risks taken by people coming with me, the values and support of some noble politicians, the support of financial backers and the willingness of other authorities to take on the enteprise's ideas, without which we would not have survived the first few months.

It's as if you cannot be a prophet in your own land. Stepping out is divisive. Those that get it and want it can be seen as a risk or a threat to the remaining system rather than the pathfinders seeking solutions that will also reduce the burden on what remains.

The Backwoodsmen have spoken

2011-04-19T02:04:00.002+01:00

Yesterday, in Suffolk, something small but important happened. The ruling Conservatives on Suffolk County Council elected a new leader. Not the person we all expected, but a backbencher, and Chair of Scrutiny, Cllr. Mark Bee, who has expressed reservations about the Council's much publicised New Strategic Direction or 'Virtual Council' strategy.

His first act as Leader has been to reprieve all of Suffolk's crossing patrols and to pledge that no public service will be divested until all options had been fully explored. You could smell the rubber on this particular U-turn. If this is a flavour of what is to come, it is quite possible that the New Strategic Direction could very quickly become the Old one.

So how has this come about? What has turned Suffolk from daring outsourcer to protector of crossing-patrols in 24 hours? Very simply, the power of the Backwoodsmen - shire-Tory Councillors who, for the last six months, have been getting in the neck at Parish Council meetings. This breed are often not deeply political. Many are One Nation types who don't like anything fancy, and prefer to see the Council out of the news. Others are big community players who like to be seen on the side of the people. For the Backwoodsmen, the New Strategic Direction has always been a challenge.

But what tipped the balance? What caused them to elected a new Leader totally unassociated with the current direction of travel You could say that the media campaign against the CEO of Suffolk, Andrea Hill, has not helped. However, what really did it was very simple - crossing patrols. Last month, in order to save £180,000, Suffolk County Council decided to pass responsibility for its crossing patrols to unspecified others - Town Councils, Boroughs, communities, schools even.

This wasn't, of course, about saving money. It was a Big Statement, to say, this is what we are doing - and it's up to communities now to pick up where the state is leaving the stage. Many of us sensed that, regardless of the merits, this was Bad Politics - and a really daft way to get people signed up to major change. But the Administration pressed on, despite an outcry. Rather than pull back and say 'We're listening', they said ploughed on, leaving many on their own side, privately, very upset.

Which brings us back to politics. Good politics is, often, about the successful management of change. Getting people on board early. Giving people a chance to feel heard. Offering them influence over what is in their domain. Responding to emotion and being prepared to give a little in exchange for full backing. The reason why Suffolk's New Strategic Direction is now vulnerable isn't so much its content - much of which is laudable - but its political management. It has been presented in a confrontational fashion and politicians haven't done the necessary work both inside the Council and beyond to see the policy through to implementation.

What will happen next? Like many Councillors, I am pleased to see a clear commitment to listening. However, I also worry that moves to shift services into social enterprises and charities will stall. I worry that the cuts we need to make will come from procurement from large global corporates, and by closing services, rather than intelligent divestment. And I fear the effects of any profound change in direction in between elections. For those organisations seeking to partner with the Council, these cannot be easy times.

So, the Backwoodsmen have spoken. Who says backbench Councillors have no power?

Guest Blog - Scott Darraugh from Social Adventures on stepping out from the NHS

2011-04-18T19:30:00.003+01:00

Since stepping out of the NHS and going-live as a new social business, it's been quite a couple of weeks ! The whole things as been like running the London Marathon wearing a Gorilla costume.

Friday (1st April) last week has been be the most surreal day for my career to date !

9am we all received P45's from NHS Salford which was emotional for me and the team after 10 years for NHS service. Some members were visibly upset. And to be honest I did have a lump in my throat at that point.

At noon I signed the contract with NHS Salford for the next 3 hopefully 5 years. Next stop was HR to collect the crate with our HR records. The whole floor was deserted bar 2 ladies one collecting name badges, laptops and mobile phones and the other handing out records to the staff moving to the local authority or acute trust. By the time I got back to the office the first quarter's cash had hit the account !

Then to the local pub to celebrate !

I did for some strange reason think that this would be a moment where things would somehow get back to normal (pre right to request) where life would be again just be about developing and delivering services. Errrm no! I now find myself the expert in VAT, HR law, negociating new deals with suppliers and organising a new payroll system !

But does it feel different ?

YES things are somehow more productive. There has been a cultural shift within the team. People are driven to make a difference to take ownership and I believe that has to be better for the people we serve. With the right to request comes lots for new responsibility, responsibility to service users to deliver great service and to employees to be a healthy and happy place to work.

Reflections and Being Older and Younger

2011-04-09T20:41:00.003+01:00

It's Saturday evening. A stunning day of weather, the best of the year so far. Warmth from the sun. A cool, gentle breeze. My perfect weather.

All a perfect antidote to my 'Saturday hangover'. Not drink-related, but the fogginess and heaviness I often feel after a long week. I had these all the time while a CEO and now, as Stepping Out hots up a bit, they're coming back.

'You're not 30 any more', my wife helpfully reminded me this week, as I emerged, punch-drunk from a long evening session on Thursday. She is keen to point out that my powers at nearly 42 are not what they once were, a message I am of course equally keen to avoid.

However, the body at 41 is, in many and subtle ways, different to its 25 year old self. Even if, like me, you try to eat the right stuff, keep fit and go to bed at a decent time. I can't get on the floor these days because my knees bloody kill me. Nor can I really cope with anything more than a glass or two of wine, let alone a bender.

Mentally I feel less creative, slower somehow a lot of time. It can be 10am before I feel properly able to do anything. And this is a bloke who, as I said, looks after himself, keeps the stress to manageable levels and doesn't do late nights. God help me if I wasn't.

Back to today. The garden is, as often happens to people as they get a little older, becoming more absorbing. I have recently become quite fascinated by my new lawnmower. I just can't get enough of it. The stripes it produces bewitch me. Strimming has, in recent years, become a pleasure rather than a duty. I get lost in it, like I sometimes do when reading or writing my blog. Breathing cool, fresh air under a cobalt sky on an English spring day feels like one of life's treats, to me anyway.

The children have been great today. They're at a good age - 3 and 4. So much easier than just a year ago and capable of a lot more. We play hide and seek in the park, they searching for me then me seeker. Hiding is such fun, I find. It takes me back to long evenings as a kid playing an elaborate hiding game called Kick Can, where a team of hiders play a team of seekers.

As an under-10 I was allowed out pretty much all the time. These were the days before parental anxiety. The truth was that a lot more kids in the 70s did die in accidents, murders etc than today. But I wouldn't have swopped my childhood freedoms for al the X boxes in the world. I loved my adventures, still remember then like yesterday.

Will I let my kids roam the same way? I actually hope I do. As long as they keep their mobiles switched on.

Big Dilemma

2011-04-05T14:18:00.002+01:00

As some of you will know I live in one corner of a big public park. The park is run by the Council - but for how long into the future we don't know. In preparation for the day, the Council has wisely set up a 'Friends of' group which could, in time, evolve into something more.

So last night I missed bedtime stories and trooped down, Big Society-style, to the park to the Friends meeting. I had extra motive because, without saying very much at all the Council had put whackin' great fences up around my favourite meadow in some hare-brained attempt to earn revenue from grazing - except no revenue actually comes in till 2017 because the grazier has paid for the fencing.

Anyway, nuff said there. The meeting was composed of various people from the community, mostly older and all, I would say, not high in confidence around their role as a group. The dominant force in the meeting was the man from the council, who, for the most part, was letting people know what was happening.

The interesting bit here is the future. The park is a great place but financially not that viable. It has buildings in it which if sold could raise funds - an endownment effectively - for the park. Equally, they could, with investment, be made into rustic retail and garden-centre type operations which, in turn, would generate revenue.

But who would do this? The Council themselves probably don't have the skills. But neither too do the community. This isn't an area full of up-and-at-it professionals who will lead a new social venture, attract the investment, redevelop the site etc.

So who will do it? I suspect an enterprise bringing all of the parks in West Suffolk under one umbrella is the likely answer - some kind of spin-out which can attract revenues which the council can't. Then comes the question of where the commercial skills will come from. Because one thing is certain. The man from the council will still be at the centre of things and we could be no further on.

My dilemma therefore is this: do I work with and on this gentleman, bringing him along to appreciating that the park is not his park, to share power a little more and, yes, let commerce play a role in a sustainable future? Or do I argue that parts of the park need to be sold off now to create an endowment - and probably put the man from the council out of the picture?

Interesting one - any thoughts?

Why names matter in the charity world- my piece for Third Sector magazine

2011-04-04T15:16:00.001+01:00

What's in a name?

Well, quite a lot in the world of charities. You see this when mergers or takeovers come on to the agenda. For many charities, keeping their name above the door is one of the red lines where a stampede towards merger judders to a halt - even if this increases the risk of the charity going out of business.

I used to think this was plain daft. Having taken an organisation I founded into a successful merger, I just couldn't get my head around people who would, when pushed, rather lose their organisation than their name. But a couple of things have made me think again.

The first is that our own merger - that of Speaking Up with Advocacy Partners - didn't see a takeover of one organisation's identity by the other. We forged a wholly new identity that drew on the heritage of both organisations. Trustees and staff got involved and we all celebrated the result. Feelings of loss were offset by a bigger sense of our new start - as VoiceAbility.

The second prod to think again was a realisation that names and brands matter deeply in the charity world, more perhaps than we imagine - and not in a trivial or petty way. Names carry important messages about values, heritage and identity to which staff devote their careers, users offer their trust and funders invest their cash. The potential loss of a name, therefore, can feel like the loss of something very important.

A takeover doesn't always make sense either. Carelessly taking over an excellent local charity is like mixing a fine Bordeaux into a case of Aussie Shiraz and expecting it, somehow, to influence the resulting blend.

Rather than create a disappointing mix, might it not be far better for both sides to agree to move the Bordeaux to a larger organisation's cool, well-maintained cellar where it can both be enhanced over time and increase the value of the cellar as a whole?

One way to do just this is through a group structure in which one charity operates as a supported subsidiary of the larger body. It enjoys the benefits of operational independence while buttressed by the capabilities of the larger player.

Another is a formal strategic partnership in which infrastructure and fundraising support is traded for access to the smaller charity's talent for innovation. None of this happens without trust - but for trust to take root, both parties, particularly the smaller one, must feel they aren't going to be swallowed up. If a merger is just about being absorbed into a bigger brand, with none of the old identity intact, it actually makes sense for the smaller party to fight on alone.

None of this is a case against mergers. It is a case for saying that there are ways for larger, stronger organisations to work with smaller ones without scorching the delicate ecology that makes the small charity an attractive partner in the first place

Do we really need to employ staff in 2011?

2011-03-26T12:15:00.005Z

Frequency of blogging is a pretty good measure of how maxed out a person is. So, from me, not much blogging of late. So what's to say on a Saturday lunchtime in a few moments snatched while the children devour 'Octonauts' on Cbeebies?

Well, I am, overall, in mostly a good place. Sat on my usual fault-line between productive, happy busyness and meltdown. I have to say that I am very pleased to be in business. Nothing quite matches the freedom it brings, despite the uncertainty and solitude. Also it's unforgiving in a way that organisational life just isn't: You fuck up and people don't call you in again. You are only as good as your last job. Quite a simple and effective motivator.

But perhaps what I am enjoying most is the lack of responsibility for the performance of others. This, above all else, is what really did for me as a CEO. Somehow, I was accountable for whether 200-odd people did a fantastic job or not. While I could accept the fact that it was my job to set the culture and processes up as best I could, it was the idea that it was the employers' job to be fix mediocre performance from staff, including all of their problems at work, that probably finally did for me.

Today, if someone lets me down, it's their fault, not mine, and they either take it or they don't work for us again. And their own problems - be it health, happiness, dying aunt, complicated love-life - are nothing at all to do with me. While I can and do care, I don't have to manage these problems as if they are somehow my own.. .
Right now I am working an Associate model. It's perfect. I get highly capable, committed people who are keen to prove their worth and earn well. They don't look to me for answers to their own delivery problems. Quietly, whole sections of the UK economy is moving over to this model. And, interestingly, everyone who does it seems happier than in the strange dance of being employed.

Am I calling for the casualisation of the British workforce? No, because many people need the securities and rights that employment brings. But I am saying that as an entrepreneur growing a business today, I don't view an expanded workforce as part of what I am doing. A few committed individuals perhaps, all of whose pay would be linked to results, but nothing more.

In fact, I believe I could build my own business to as large a size as I like with about five FT people. The thought of employing more than this chills me, as I know I would be taking on the problems of the world and his wife - and neglecting my customers in the process.

No thanks.

Guest Blog by Dan Gregory on the future for Mutuals

2011-03-23T17:41:00.001Z

As the battle to command the future of our forests, our NHS, our libraries and our banks is being fought, we can map some territorial advances against the predictable axis of left and right. The conventional options open to those in power are either to retain assets and public services within the boundaries of the state - the traditional preference of the left - or throw things open to the market - much preferred by the right.

Frontline implementation of these choices falls to the likes of public sector asset managers, budget-holders in local councils and HR professionals. For asset managers, the practical levers which reflect the strategic political choice can be summarised as ‘keep it or flog it’. For budget-holders or commissioners of public services, it’s in-house provision versus cuts or going out to tender. And for HR professionals, it’s who to keep and who to make redundant or transfer elsewhere.

But since the global financial crisis, increased pressure on public finances and the election, we have witnessed increasing interest, if not consensus, around the idea of mutuals. Whether this means social enterprises, employee-owned businesses, or a commitment to the Rochdale co-operative principles (or all the above), Government Ministers and opposition MPs, think-tanks and council members have been calling for the mutualisation of our banks, public services, post offices, port authorities, forests and other assets and services - which until now have been ideologically tugged back and forth between public and private.

Meanwhile, out in the mundane world of local public sector administration, there is little real excitement, consensus, discussion or even understanding of mutuals. Many don’t recognise what it means. So in the longer term, perhaps this rhetoric may help open up awareness of a further enticing option for those who have lost faith in the failures of an unresponsive state and the unfettered market.

But a handful of our local public servants and administrators are interested. So what does this mutual ambition mean in practice for these asset managers, budget-holders and HR managers? Which button do you press to get yourself a mutual? The unspoken truth here - which is beginning to crystallise as the test of this government’s ambitions for mutual solutions - is that the standard levers available to those responsible for delivery probably won’t lead to the creation of mutuals. Keeping services or assets in house certainly won’t and going out to the market, well, unsurprisingly, means the market will decide. So how do you 'do' the mutual option? Where’s the lever?

Giving or transferring an asset or a contract to a mutual, social enterprise or charity isn’t straightforward. There are rules which guard against the sale of assets at below market price, protecting the financial opportunity cost to the taxpayer (at least in the short-term) of giving something away. Giving a contract to your preferred mutual provider would often simply be illegal, under competition law.

Yet there are ways which it can be done. Imaginative and pioneering public officials are experimenting with asset transfer, framework agreements, competitions for a mutual joint venture partner, exploiting the possibilities of individual budgets and looking to transfer publicly held shares to groups of staff and other individuals over time.

But each of these require imagination, trust and – while very few doubt the new found appetite in Whitehall for letting power flow away from the centre - an awareness that the centre still has a role to play in loosening the reins. This means understanding what really goes on at the frontlines and that good old fashioned practical policy interventions can be absolutely essential to turn a strategic ambition into something real.

‘Nudging’ may have a lot to offer. But what will it take to get Steve from Wiltshire County Council Social Services Management Unit to reach for something other than his conventional levers? If a group of passionate, committed and entrepreneurial staff knock on the door of the Deputy Resources Manager in the Lewisham Borough Council Strategic Commissioning Directorate and say “We want to mutualise!” isn’t the response still most likely to be “I’m sorry there doesn’t seem to be any reference to that in the HR handbook. Your notice of redundancy letters are in the post”?

The cuts, redundancies and new ideas, such as shared back office services, are already overwhelming enough for local public sector staff. Mutuals are simply not on the menu for public sector leaders confronted with need to make changes. There are few precedents and culture can be hugely risk averse. In practice, what are the incentives for HR managers to blaze a trail without a map? Where are the tools, guidance and maps for public sector budget-holders and managers to enable mutualised services to develop?

Yet speed is essential. Some opportunities have been lost already. Budgets for the next few years have largely been agreed - and they tend not to include a contingency reserve for staff coming forward with an idea for enabling new ways of delivering services through a mutual. If the Forest of Fangorn, for example, goes up for sale in the autumn, then United Land Inc. will probably submit their bid before the local community have agreed who is chairing the meetings. So delivery on commitments from the Government, such as the Mutuals Support Programme to launch in April, and the Right to Provide enshrined in a meaningful way in the Localism Bill, are much needed, and fast.

There are already 132,000 fewer public sectors workers in December 2010 than the preceding year and, on 31st March 2011, many thousands more will be made redundant. The Right to Request, which provided a relatively clear path to PCT staff to set up a mutual (as well as the financial support, pensions deal and uncontested contract which looks unlikely under the Right to Provide) is set to move 25,000 into mutuals. Compare this to Francis Maude’s ambition for 1,000,000 public sector workers to mutualise.

So to meet this ambition, and with time, opportunities and some of the best talent already jettisoned, the Budget will be an opportunity to judge the Government's understanding of, and appetite for, bridging the gap between ambition and action, rhetoric and reality, policy and practice.

We should look out for any promising words around the public stake in the banks, the future of the remaining arms-length bodies, the future of some of our valued national assets, and keep an eye on public service reforms. But far more importantly, we should welcome any practical steps that will truly enable the HR professionals, asset managers and budget-holders to look beyond the options they currently have at their disposal and set the warm words alight.

Dan Gregory is an independent advisor, who has worked for a number of years to support investment in mutual and social enterprises, developing policy at the Treasury and Cabinet Office and delivering in practice at the grassroots.

Are you fired with enthusiasm?

2011-03-17T22:13:00.000Z

One afternoon recently I received three phone calls in the space of an hour: the first was from my former PA who had lost her new job; the second was from my brother, whose council job has been put "at risk"; and the third was from a talented charity director who has been told he's not part of the organisation's future plans. Yes, the long-awaited tsunami has hit our sector. If you haven't been swept away yourself, you will know someone who has been, or is clinging on to a branch as the waters rip by.

The legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi famously said: "If you're not fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm". Until now, this has never been particularly true of the UK voluntary sector. You could survive without showing much zip. However, the tables have now turned. Indeed, the financial situation in many UK charities is now so dire that even bouncing enthusiasts may not escape the crosshairs, along with the doomed RIPs (Retired-in-Posts). Our sector has, in a year, turned from a cosy armchair to a bed of nails - a staggering turnaround in such a short time.

So what if it's you next in line for a P45? The first thing is not to waste time and energy on arguing the toss. Tussles with your employer about "Why me?" will only sap your energy and confidence. Just accept your time is up and move on. Thank your employer, ask for a cracking reference and wish the organisation the best. Hold no bitterness and leave with a smile on your face.

The second thing is to inform your network. Fact: people who have strong networks find good work quicker than those who don't. Not because their friends find them a job - far from it. A network is a web of trust and reciprocity. It gives you vital information you might otherwise miss. And, crucially, it helps to hold you together while you adjust to your new situation. In times like this, a network is also a life-support system.

The third thing is to use redundancy as an opportunity to assess what you're actually doing with your life. Were you really in the job you were born to do? The world is full of people who say that losing their job was the best thing that ever happened to them. Countless new businesses, careers and lifestyles have grown from being rejected by one's employer. This could be you.

Of course, none of this softens the blow when it happens. It's hard to avoid taking redundancy personally, and keeping your self-belief high will be the biggest challenge. Of the three jobless people who called me that afternoon, two do not worry me at all - they are glass-half-full people, ardent networkers who, I know, will be back in work very quickly. The third, however, is in a major wobble and is taking it all very personally.
S
o whatever happens this spring, keep the faith, use your network, see the opportunities and - yes - stay fired with enthusiasm.

Any Willing Provider must mean Another Bleedin' Monopoly

2011-03-12T16:31:00.002Z

What will Any Willing Provider (AWP) in public services actually mean in practice? In three words, it will mean: lots more competition.

To some, especially in the public sector, this spells duplication, chaos, a race to the bottom and bullying private companies, squashing the rest. To others, particularly in the private, social enterprise and voluntary sectors, it means diversity of supply, innovation, choice and efficiency, as organisations vie for new business.

The truth about the future is that either camp may be right. It all depends on how we go about the process of opening up public sector markets. So how do we end up with the good side of competition and avoid the bad?

Three things are important here. The first is how far we go to ensure diversity of supply – and avoid monopoly or oligopoly. Large, single providers – public or private – can be appealing to councillors and their local commissioners. They offer simplicity, accountability, early economies of scale and a logical "joined-up" approach compared to the "chaos" of the market.

As competition dawns there will no doubt be many providers, both larger and smaller, seeking to offer so-called integrated approaches in particular communities, which are, in fact, a byword for long-term monopoly. Once the commissioning bodies are dependent on the new arrangements the provider can turn the handle, raise prices and lower quality as much as it wants.

If this happens, it will be an expensive route back to what we have today in most public services: costly, unmoveable, low-quality, low-innovation services. The solution, of course, is for the principle of diversity of supply – allowing no one to become dominant – to be an absolute non-negotiable in local public service markets.

The second point is how markets are set up at local level. Just letting the market rip without any rules of engagement or quality thresholds for new entrants will be a recipe for disaster. It goes without saying that the public have to be protected from cowboy operators. Again, a proper job for local councillors and authorities.

More importantly, heavily capitalised organisations need to be prevented from dominating markets at the expense of small and medium players – as in the US, where 25% of public sector contracts are set aside for these firms. In UK healthcare, for example, we could introduce this rule to ensure that smaller and local providers have a guaranteed role in the healthcare economy.

Linked to this, we have to set up markets to ensure that any partnering between large and small organisations is fair – and that companies that abuse their relationships with smaller providers face blacklisting. Again, this is a legitimate role for councils and their councillors as "consumer champions". Don't get me wrong, private sector partnerships with social enterprises and charities should happen – they just need to be fair. Rules of engagement, with teeth, overseen at local level, will guarantee this.

The third factor that will shape how AWP operates at local level will be the fate of the private members bill on social value in commissioning, which is currently making its way through parliament. This bill will pass into UK law that local commissioning and procurement reflects the total "social value" to a community of a bid, as well as price and quality. Without this, we may face a "race to the bottom", as price factors overwhelm all others in the minds of financially pressed local authorities.

So AWP may be a good thing, if it delivers a genuine market. But only appropriately managed competition, a rock-solid commitment to diversity of supply and the hard-wiring of social value into local commissioning will deliver this. It is clear to many of us in the social economy that a simple free-for-all will lead not to AWP but back to another monopoly provider. Not what any of us – including the coalition – intended.

Craig Dearden-Phillips is founder and chief executive of Stepping Out, a business helping parts of the public sector become a social enterprise, and is a Liberal Democrat county councillor in Suffolk.

What to do if you're fired

2011-03-12T16:27:00.000Z

One afternoon recently I received three phone calls in the space of an hour: the first was from my former PA who had lost her new job; the second was from my brother, whose council job has been put "at risk"; and the third was from a talented charity director who has been told he's not part of the organisation's future plans.

Yes, the long-awaited tsunami has hit our sector. If you haven't been swept away yourself, you will know someone who has been, or is clinging on to a branch as the waters rip by.

The legendary American football coach Vince Lombardi famously said: "If you're not fired with enthusiasm, you'll be fired with enthusiasm" Until now, this has never been particularly true of the UK voluntary sector. You could survive without showing much zip.

However, the tables have now turned. Indeed, the financial situation in many UK charities is now so dire that even bouncing enthusiasts may not escape the crosshairs, along with the doomed RIPs (Retired-in-Posts). Our sector has, in a year, turned from a cosy armchair to a bed of nails - a staggering turnaround in such a short time.

So what if it's you next in line for a P45? The first thing is not to waste time and energy on arguing the toss. Tussles with your employer about "Why me?" will only sap your energy and confidence. Just accept your time is up and move on. Thank your employer, ask for a cracking reference and wish the organisation the best. Hold no bitterness and leave with a smile on your face.

The second thing is to inform your network. Fact: people who have strong networks find good work quicker than those who don't. Not because their friends find them a job - far from it. A network is a web of trust and reciprocity. It gives you vital information you might otherwise miss. And, crucially, it helps to hold you together while you adjust to your new situation. In times like this, a network is also a life-support system.

The third thing is to use redundancy as an opportunity to assess what you're actually doing with your life. Were you really in the job you were born to do? The world is full of people who say that losing their job was the best thing that ever happened to them. Countless new businesses, careers and lifestyles have grown from being rejected by one's employer. This could be you.

Of course, none of this softens the blow when it happens. It's hard to avoid taking redundancy personally, and keeping your self-belief high will be the biggest challenge. Of the three jobless people who called me that afternoon, two do not worry me at all - they are glass-half-full people, ardent networkers who, I know, will be back in work very quickly. The third, however, is in a major wobble and is taking it all very personally.

So whatever happens this spring, keep the faith, use your network, see the opportunities and - yes - stay fired with enthusiasm.

My piece on public sector spin-outs in the Guardian 2.3.11

2011-03-02T21:40:00.001Z

Where are public services going, after the prime minister's announcement last week that almost all are to be opened up to competition?

In February, the government announced a second wave of new "right to provide" initiatives, in which public sector staff step out of the public sector, often in large new ventures, in order to sell their services back in. These people will join some 60 new staff-led healthcare organisations that, by 2013, will employ 10% of the non-hospital-based NHS workforce.

But will this model of divestment to socially motivated ventures take hold? Or, as many suspect, is "right to provide" a warm-up act for the government's real long-term aim: outright privatisation of the public sector?

The question of whether the model will work depends on the unions, the government and the law. All three pose challenges for new ventures.

First, the unions. At present, most remain hostile to social enterprise. They see it as a slow-train to privatisation – and the erosion of hard-won gains for staff. Little distinction is made between socially inspired ventures and those that are profit maximising. A new social worker co-op and the big global outsourcers are all, for now, in the same bucket. Every new stepped-out venture I speak to has struggled to get the unions to see social enterprise as different, despite the protection of assets and guaranteed representation for staff on the board. This has to change if the floodgates are ever to open.

Second, the government. Up until now, most new social enterprises or co-ops have been offered a three- to five-year contract. This, in effect, gives the new venture time to reshape itself for the competitive market. They need this. A business emerging, say, from the NHS or a council is freighted with costs, practices and cultures that require a period of non-competition to sort out. They also tend, understandably, to lack commercial skills and early access to capital.

Here's the rub. If, under the new doctrine of Any Willing Provider, emergent ventures have to immediately go head-to-head with experienced private operators, they will struggle. With no trading history or funds to invest, they have little to bring to the table. The government, then, needs to give breathing space to emerging ventures and, for a short time, keep competition at bay if they are to stand a chance.

Which brings us to the law. European procurement rules states that if a public body commissions a service, rather than provides it, competition needs to be fair and open. While this hasn't yet stopped Right to Request in the NHS, and while certain courageous councils, such as my own in Suffolk, are finding ways to commission new staff-led ventures, the truth is that there will be legal challenges from the private sector which will claim to be "frozen out".

Should these new ventures be helped? Yes – studies indicate that they raise productivity and innovation. Arguably, they also generate social capital in a way the private sector finds difficult to emulate. So how do we remove the barriers?

Help is needed from the unions. Co-operatives and staff-led ventures resonate positively with politics of many union members and activists, but it's a conversation that isn't really happening as defence lines are being marked around state-run services.

Assistance is also needed from the government. Its £10m in support is useful, but the test of the government's sincerity is whether or not it acts to ensure that new co-ops and social businesses get the space and support at the start in order to be ready to play seriously in an open market two or three years down the line. This means continued short-term protection and a robust defence of the policy when it comes under challenge from other sectors.

Well Said Ed

2011-02-27T17:33:00.002Z

Ed Miliband recently said the most sensible thing I think I have heard from him since becoming Labour leader. He was making the point that as a nation we have to innovate and grow our way out of the schtuck we are in - and this means some leadership from the state.

While I am loyal to the Coalition and, broadly, blame Labour for losing control of public spending after 2005 and failing to reform the public sector, I think that this narrative only takes us so far as a country.

Yes, Labour did pass up a historic opportunity to renew our infrastructure, to renew our economy and tackle our deepest social problems, but they also did some good too. The country has felt some benefit from that increased public spending and Labour's commitment to the poorest children was impressive, albeit partly maladministered.

It is important that the Coalition, in its attempt to move away from statism, fails to grasp that the state's unique role is to set the right long-term goals for the country - and invest accordingly.

What does this mean in practice? In a word infrastructure. Both physical and human. On the physical side, we need universal fibre optic broadband. Everyone needs to be online by 2020 because not to be is to be at a profound disadvantage, even now. We need massive investment in both rail and electrical points for new petrol-free cars. Finally, we need the infrastructure to unleash a massive new wave of entrepreneurship that will, over time, absorb people who need jobs.

Which brings us onto the human infrastructure. We under-invest as a nation in our people. I agree with the educationalist Sir Ken Robinson that people's talents are very different and that investment for each child over ten needs to be focused on building on that child's capabilities and talents, not on churning out five good GCSEs'.

The academically brightest from all classes need to be nurtured, separately if necessary. Other childen need all the help possible from a young age to develop their talents. To push academia on all children is as silly as it would be to try to make all adults enjoy a physics tutorial. I personally am in awe of the skills of many of the people I know who I may have done better than at school but who knock the spots of me as electricians, mechanics and so on. Jobs these people have talent for. Eton helps it's kids to find their talent early. Why then can't this be case for all children?

Then there's welfare. Like anyone who has spent a career working with the least advantaged I am concerned about the fate of the most vulnerable. We can judge our society by the way we treat the most vulnerable and I am currently worried about the way some groups are being hit by reforms. But I think it is of equal importance that reform on the scale that is being attempted isn't derailed because of the problems it will cause to particular groups, so long as we can address these as we go along. Britain has massive numbers of people who don't do any paid work. We have to get this sorted out and I only believe, having seen many attempts fail, that we have to ensure that nobody receives any out of work benefit without having to do some work, even a few hours a week. And not after six months - immediately. We have to become a nation of grafters if we're ever to be competitive - and as psychologically healthy as we should be.

Finally our Universities. We have some of the finest in the world here. Many are now international brands. opening branches overseas. However only a few UK universities successfully leverage the research and development that takes place in them. We need to become like the Americans whose universities fuel their exceptional levels of innovation and industrial performance. There, academics are often entrepreneurs, or working closely with them and the venture capital industry. We need to emulate this here.

What's the role of the state in all of this? Potentially massive. Not as a deliverer of all the said infrastructure, far from it. But providing the strategic leadership, creating the environment and, yes, providing the long-term capital that makes it possible for others to invest.

Personally, I would rather see a centrist government leading all of this. I think that the next Labour Government will default too quickly to top-down statism, rather than an enabling approach, particularly if it is still as dependent as it is now on the trade unions. But, for me, the Coalition, needs to show this long-term vision now. The narrative so far has all been about deficit-reduction and the Big Society. We need a much more powerful narrative about the destination and the things we have to do as a nation to get there.

Let the Pain Begin

2011-02-25T11:05:00.002Z

Last week Suffolk County Council voted through its cuts. 1500 jobs are to go but most of the time was taken up with a debate about £175k for lollipop men and women. The Council, in its wisdom, are ceasing their funding for these symbols of community and stability and saying to people that it isn't the state's job to get their kids to school.

For me this is Bad Politics. On the one hand, the Council is trying to engage the public in a conversation about the new contours of responsibility between citizen and state. Let's talk about new approaches is the message. The public come back with 'Sure, but don't cut the funding for road crossing patrols' and the Council, despite thousands of signatures vote them down. All pretty depressing.

What I took from this awful afternoon was two things. One is how the party system is killing local government. Instead of a balanced and measured approach from Councillors that reflects community concern, they all just line up behind their parties and do as they are told. That this will come back and haunt a few of them, sure, but most are in safe seats in a Tory shire. They don't need to listen.

The second is the nature of people in representative roles in local government. The lack of diversity is astonishing. There are no black people in a chamber of 75. Women are fairly thin on the ground. Young people under 40 - hardly any. People in actual paid work - a handful. People with college degrees - perhaps a quarter. People with specialist knowledge - a smattering. This means that officers tend to be the source of most intellectual and managerial drive within the council.

What do we do? I don't know. The party-system means that people who are capable but essentially non-partisan struggle to get onto the council. More independents would be a massive help. So too would be conscious attempts by all parties to find people who are young, non-white and female who can serve. The Council is the only place in my life where, at 41, I feel a bright young thing. That can't be right, surely??

On being Tough Enough

2011-02-23T09:46:00.002Z

I have always found it hard to be 'tough'. I was often found out as a CEO when either I couldn't make a decision or, more likely, failed to confront a problem because it meant confronting someone.

In business I am also finding this hard. My intention, going into this, was partly driven by my need to work exclusively with people who I like and who share my values. And this is proving so - mostly. But business is business, I am finding, and where money is concerned, most people, I find, more than match my ability to be tough.

So some mental readjustment is taking place here. I am, by nature, a pleaser. I like to be liked, often to a point where I represent a risk to my business - or the one I am leading. At 41, changing your approach is much harder than at 31, but I am, I think, having to do this if I am to build a good, profitable business.

What grieves me a little about this is that my primary traits - building good relationships, high trust, win-win approaches - rely, to a point, on thinking 'we' not 'I' in any given situation. They also involve leaps of faith, jumps into the unknown, throwing yourself to the winds etc. The reality, I am learning, is that I probably need to be a little more mindful of the realities of life at times, without losing what I like about myself and the way I operate.

Yes, I have had a difficult time with somebody and yes, it did hurt a bit. And yes it was my fault as much as theirs. But I take it all far too personally and need just to dust down, shake hands and move forward, without being all emotional about it.

Such is business, I am finding.

Why Cameron is MOSTLY right today in the Telegraph

2011-02-21T15:50:00.002Z

In today's Telegraph the PM sets out his intentions around opening up public services to competition. The starting assumption is to be competition not centralisation and it will be up to those who seek a monopoly to explain themselves, not those trying to create a market. Personal budgets will be extended and, where possible, services will be local and professionals 'empowered'.

Before I say where Cameron hasn't got it quite right, let me be clear that he's mostly correct. Whatever the Guardianistas say about co-ordination, planning, corporate takeovers and postcode lotteries, there can, I am afraid, be no way to raise productivity, innovation and meaningful choice than to introduce the market into monopolies. Thirty years ago people were saying the same thing about telecoms and other nationalised industries. The truth that cannot be hidden is that you can't expect monopolies - public or private - to serve the customer or client. They serve themselves. Period.

So what has he got wrong. Two things. Firstly he talks about empowering professionals. What I think he means here is allowing them to run free of targets, excessive paperwork and nonsensical interference. However, what a lot of people know is that you only empower clients of public services by taking professionals' power away. Put another way, it's only any good giving people personal budgets if they, not the professionals, decide how to use them. A trifling point perhaps, but having seen many good people's lives unintentionally ruined by 'professionals' in health and social care, I am not sure talk of giving them more power actually makes sense.

Secondly, Cameron needs to be very clear indeed that he intends not to replace one form of exploitative monopoly - the public sector - with another - the large corporate sector. The capital available to large corporate players in health and social care compared to that available to social enterprises, charities, local organisations and so on is massive. In a competitive situation it will be easy - as we are seeing in Welfare to Work - for the scale private sector to bag everything, kill or subordinate the competition and then turn the handle on a helpless and increasingly dependent Government commissioning body.

Only first-class market-making, protection for SMEs, capitalisation of the smaller sectors and social clauses and tough regulation will make it possible for other sectors to compete with the large beasts. Of course, partnering between private and other sectors must be encouraged. But this has be just that - partnering, not subordinating.

Otherwise, we'll just be swopping one type of expensive crap for another.

Which Way for UK?

2011-02-20T18:57:00.003Z

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the future of our country of late. Perhaps it's having small children. Or maybe its getting older and feeling less optimistic. But worried I am.

Why? Because I don't see clearly where the country's really going long-term. Where it's future prosperity is coming from. How we're going to generate enough jobs. How we can look after a nation of ageing Boomers. How we can avoid losing out big-time to the Chinese and other more ambitious nations that appear to have a long-term vision. How we can find a new cog of the value chain to climb onto next, when emerging nations have already caught us up educationally. How we can breathe entrepreneurialism into a culture in which people want easier, more chilled out lives but without a significant drop in living standards. And all this on top of a possible eco-crisis within 50 years.

The political parties, including my own, seem at a loss on all of this. The media don't engage in these questions and you're fairly deep into the think-tanks and academia before you really scratch at this stuff. Elites tend to spend most of their time on essentially here-and-now issues. News, essentially.

So what do I think? It is clear to me, as someone brought up in the 70s and 80s that the current level of prosperity we enjoy is probably some kind of high-point, even now. I always struggled to understand how we managed to have so much, given how little we actually now produce - and how most people's jobs consist, more or less, of talking to each other. We've got away with this because real productive work has migrated and, for a long time, we had the baseless wealth of the financial sector carrying us. This didn't just go in the pockets of the rich. Nearly a quarter of income tax was paid by people from this sector., meaning our public services were also funded in a way that couldn't last.

What do we need to do? The country, I think, needs to realise that we can't live on our past success. We have the English language, a fortunate time-zone and a legacy of leadership of which we are proud. We've also, despite a chronic lack of investment and poor industrial relations (compared to our European neighbours) built an economy which hasn't fallen grossly behind. We have been saved by our inventiveness, our skills as a trading nation and, yes, our financial services. All strengths going back to the Enlightenment.

Although it would be foolish to say that these strengths won't help us in the future, we can't rely on them alone or simply muddle through and adapt, as we always have I am firmly of the view that we have, across all parties, to agree some long-term goals for the country. We need a new consensus about the future that all the parties can sign up to. Of course, we can fight about how to get there, but the basics must be agreed. They did this after the war in many countries. In Germany in particular there was clarity about the country that had to be built. Japan too. But also France and other victorious nations. Except Britain.

We now risk doing that again, but this time the competition is altogether of a different order. I could list 50 things but here's 15 things we have to agree on if we're going to have a chance as a country 30 years from here:

1. Raise the retirement age to 72 by 2025 and 77 by 2040.

2. Keep the public sector at no less than 38% and no more than 42% of GNP. Limited public sector providers - most functions delivered by private and social enterprises. Cashable personal budgets - or vouchers- extended to many areas of public provision: social care, long-term health conditions, welfare, education.

3. Structure the tax, benefit and migration system to keep population at 60 million.

4. Maintain much smaller UK military forces than at present but join them up with a European force, including a European nuclear defence system.

5. A written constitution which devolves power and income generating powers to LA level.

6. Reduction of Corporation Tax to zero for ten years for companies investing in deprived regions. Nil Corporation Tax for ANY new company for one year.

7. A national Start-Up Bank to capitalise new businesses - easily accessible start-up funding.

8. The NHS operating as a set of principles - free, accessible and high quality -but not as a unitary organisation, but a diverse set of organisations seeking business under good regulation.

9. The state to provide 'first-in' investment into green tech and underpinning of our capabilities to lead in renewables field, in biotech and digital. Tough new UK environmental laws to provide stimulus.

10. Conversion of our Embassy and Consulate networks into commercial outlets for selling UK services and products rather than their current mainly diplomatic function.

11. Vocational training for most children from age 14-18, including work-placements from 14. Streaming of brightest children at 9, 11, 12 and 14 from all backgrounds so that these enter highest level of education possible at 18.

12. Make all out of work benefit immediately conditional upon doing half-time community work so that nobody gets out of the habit of working, loses confidence etc.

13. Repositioning UK as part of Europe which in turn is part of a multi-bloc world - US, China, India, Europe, the BRICS. Allow early Turkish membership and encourage long-term Russian engagement in EU.

14. Liberalisation of drug laws in the UK - most crime is related to drugs in the UK. Reduction in prison numbers from 90k to 45k by 2020.

15. Change the laws around assisted suicide to operate in the UK so that choosing one's time of death becomes socially normal. This will end unnecessary suffering and help to use limited health resources more efficiently (i.e on the young and those with potentially many years of healthy life ahead).

A bit of a hotch-potch I know. And controversial in party. I could go on but that would be too long for even the most patient reader. But there's themes here: a strategic state - but not one that just lets the market rip. A concerted attempt to become world-leaders in key areas - and to market ourselves. Taxation and spending at sensible levels. Devolution of power at all levels. Dramatic unilateral action on the environment. Break-up of monopolies, state and private. A liberal criminal justice policy. Britain in Europe. Huge encouragement to entrepreneurship and enterprise at both the micro and macro level. Improvement of work-ethic and end of something-for-nothing culture.

What this makes me politically you can judge for yourself. When I look at the list, it isn't hugely Liberal, Conservative, Socialist or Green but has elements, possibly of all. I find some of my own ideas quite unsettling - but then again I can't see many good alternatives to certain problems.

Views welcome, as ever.

On the motivations of entrepreneurs

2011-02-19T07:10:00.003Z

Stepping Out, my new business, has had a good first six month. We have won business, delivered it to high satisfaction and, yes, made a bit of money. Not that much money, but enough to keep body and soul together.

Although I have run social businesses before, I haven't run a standard company but what strikes me is that for all the talk about profit as the differentiator, how little profit enters the head of for-profit entrepreneurs on a daily basis and also how damn difficult it is to make a profit in any business.

Profit net of all costs and taxes is actually a fairly pootling portion of the total amount a company has to turn over in order to survive. That these amounts are the cause of such debate among the for-profit/ not for profit sectors feels, to me, to miss something.

The reality is that business, in whatever sector, is primarily about doing things extremely well. I find that private entrepreneurs are not,on the whole, driven by money. This is a bit of a myth. They are normally passionate about an idea, they love owning and running their own business. Often they forgo profit to help customers.

I am, these days, less convinced than I was about the real differences between social business people and private operators. At least the good ones.

Off to Brighton for a week now. Swopping our house for a week - a great way to have cheap holidays - and protect your house while you're away. Looking forward to some good running and time with my children. And perhaps some discreet blogging if I am allowed.

Big is the Word..

2011-02-14T15:06:00.004Z

You can't move for the Big Society at the moment. It's everywhere, like the Very Large Bloke on the bus, trying to edge past but, without meaning to, putting his armpit in your face.

Clearly, it's time for the other Big Man (in Downing St) to rescue the Big Society following the loss of Lord Nat Wei to employment of the paid variety. Cameron's intervention was a sure sign that there was nobody really Big enough (or both willing and able) in the current line-up to sell the idea to our Sceptical Isle.

Personally, like most people of the centre ( I am pro Big Society. I recognise its critique of the creeping state and its desire to place power back in the hands of communities and individuals. Love it. It's what I'm all about too.I see every day of my life how much more could be achieved if we didn't have so much State.

But changing the country is a bit like changing a massive company. Culture shifts slowly. You need to work very hard on gaining agreement about what's wrong and then start working up ideas, then solutions about the new world. More than any other policy, you can't just pour this stuff on, like Brill cream, and remould society.

Which is why the left's objections sound so powerful. How can you volunteer in a library asks Ed Miliband, when it's closing down? He's right, of course. It takes ages to develop the skills and confidence in communities to take things over.

I am working with a group right now to take over a community centre with a £35k turnover. It's taken months just to get a business plan. And these are quite capable citizens. As a response to cuts, Big Society looks painfully inadequate. Cameron has now started to address this but the damage, I fear may be done.

I have to go to Council this week to vote against Suffolk's budget. Nearly all our youth services are going, and the libraries have a three month stay to allow community bids to run them. We have put in an amendment listing equivalent savings, most of which are cashable. Unlike Labour, we're thankfully not going down the 'cut's aren't necessary' route.

However it is good to see Ed Balls back isn't it? He's great value on the economy, even through he's a Deficit Denier, and he knows how to put one on the Coalition.

What I fear no politician can current tell us is much about where our country is going long-term. We have got by so far by climbing the value-chain as our old industries migrated overseas. While I am sure the tree has many more branches to climb, I am not sure how many jobs that will sustain.

Indeed if we didn't have the English language, a fortunate time-zone and a knack, as a country, for inventiveness, I would be very worried indeed about how we are going to make a living in 30 years time, as China and others supplant us in science, technology and, one day, financial services.

When I am in my old people's home - or more likely my Elective Life Termination Suite - I will probably be looking out on a world which is not longer US and Europe dominated, but in which, like Australia and New Zealand now, we're a quiet corner with the real action thousands of miles away. I just can't see even British soft-power surviving more than a generation.

How 'Big' a society we will be by then is one to ponder. However, we will, beyond a modium of doubt, be a very Old one.

Love Of Mankind

2011-02-05T16:28:00.004Z

Like a football match, work-days are also games of two halves. The morning was spent dealing with a very challenging issue in an organisation in which I volunteer. I emerged into the afternoon feeling like a squeezed dishcloth, hoping for the day to be over.

The afternoon, however, provided an incredible contrast, as uplifting and reviving as the morning was difficult and upsetting. The difference was a group of three young people from Walthamstow, east London, who, together, have founded a new organisation called Love of Mankind. While the name sounds a bit OTT or religious, it is actually the English translation of the Greek word Philanthropy. Love of Mankind is one of the first - if not THE first- philanthropy foundation set up in an English FE college.

Three of its four founders met me at the Commonwealth Club in London. Saima, Abu and Shezad all attend George Monroux college in Walthamstow. They are all 18-19 and have set up LoM with the intention of it being both a way to generate funding for social projects, to place local young people in top firms for work experience and to raise the standing of their college by establishing the Philanthropy project as a Department in their college.

Two things really grabbed me most about this particular group. The first was their savvy in putting together a group of supporters from corporates, the media and social sectors. They used their time with me to extract, in a very charming way, my best contacts in the media and venture-philanthropy world, plus a commitment to write 350 words for their blog. They turned up with prepared questions, focus and a welcome respect for getting all done in the time. I was impressed just by that.

The other thing that grabbed me was their bold appropriation of the idea of philanthropy. In the UK, we tend to associate philanthropy with old white billionaires who try to fix their legacy by giving away some of their money. Well, these lot are under 20, British-Asians with no money of their own - but the chutzpah to set themselves up as a philanthropic foundation for their own part of London. I just like it.

There was one potential elephant in the room which I broached early on - what would happen when these three bright sparks went to university or whatever. To that, they replied that they weren't planning on doing this - the £9000 fees appear to have put off at least these three. All were carrying on this this after college, one, possibly, on a near full-time basis. This, for me, differentiated them strongly from the many sixth-form societies who fancy a bit of CV enhancement on their way to the Russell Group.

This lot, I sensed, were of a different order and quality. I will be very surprised if all of them do not become very successful entrepreneurs, either commercial or social. You get an eye for that quality, even in young people. When I think of the slightly hopeless-case I was at 18-19 and compare myself with them I cannot but be impressed. Given the lack of silver-spoons, they showed incredible confidence, breadth and ambition. I take my hat off to them - then go home to happily do the fifteen things they have persuaded me to do for them!

How to Close a Charity - piece from Third Sector mag

2011-02-03T12:11:00.001Z

I had to close a charity once. It was seven years ago and I had just taken over as chair after the loss of the chief executive and the chair within weeks of each other.

One look at the books and the remaining staff and trustees, and I realised it was game over. Not only had we run out of money, but also of the energy and desire to carry on. We were dead men (and women) walking.

I remember it well because it was the week I got married. Between suit-fittings and trips to the barber were meetings with suppliers, customers and staff to tell them that the end was nigh. People were surprisingly nice, their mood helped by the fact that we were not yet totally insolvent.

It was not a great time, but we brought things to a satisfactory close with money still in the bank and all of our people well looked after. We even managed a champagne-free celebration of all we had achieved.

To carry on or to quit? I suspect a fair few charities are facing this question right now. After suffering a nail-biting Christmas and new year, for many the moment of truth might have arrived.

What can be learned from my experience all those years ago? The main thing is not to look only at the bank account - that will be bad news anyway, I presume - but also at energy levels. Are you, and others, up for pulling through? Or have you run out of the physical and psychological resources to carry on?

If the answer is positive, you are still in the game, however bad things look. Approach your bank and your funders. Use whatever you have left in the bank to get help with a credible turnaround plan. Talk to your staff about the reality and plead with them to stay. Speak to potential merger partners (though you may have left it too late). Get your face in the media and tell the world that, like Gloria Gaynor, you will survive!

However, if your collective batteries are flat, then admit it and get on with bringing matters to a dignified end. Don't wait to run out of cash completely. Instead, pay off creditors, and inform funders and users. Help your staff to find new jobs and find alternatives for users. Your last pulses of energy should go into doing all of this - and doing it well.

As we pulled down the shutters for the very last time, yes, tears were shed. We were young people who had aimed high - and missed. And, yes, we felt guilty. Although we had been blighted by a run of bad luck - the loss of our leadership, a slam-dunk Employment Tribunal, the near-appointment of the wrong chief executive - we still blamed ourselves.

Seven years on, however, I can see events for what they were. We ran out of road and made the correct call. By being honest with ourselves, we ended up doing right by all concerned. Sometimes it is simply time to call it a day. The organisation is no longer a good use of other people's money. Keeping the patient artificially alive is not the right judgement. Let it die with dignity.
And then have a bloody good funeral.

24 Hour Party People

2011-02-02T21:24:00.002Z

This week I attended a 24 hour 'simulation'. Sounds a bit rude doesn't it? Alas it was a 'game' looking at health and social care in 2012 in 'Crafton', a fictional city in central England. 50 of the UK's top people in the field, all of us 'in role'. I was very excited to be going, it sounded like it was going to be a ball. Worth 24 hours away from the business.

Was it worth it? Well, a bit. But perhaps my expectations were too high. What felt like it should have been a creative exercise felt like a bit of a technocratic conversation captured, I felt, by the mindsets that helped get us into the mess we're in today: a highly bureaucratised, professionally dominated, managerialist approach which costs a fortune while delivering very mixed results.

The triple-whammy is well understood: shrinking resources, a changing NHS and a social care time-bomb. The answer, broadly speaking, is a new settlement between citizen and state, personalisation of resources and a massive pooling of budgets in the public sector. This would see rapid shrinkage of acute health services and much more investment in the community sector so that people could help themselves and each other a lot more easily. 'Difficult' people and families who currently absorb tens of millions in every area on a plethora of public would have much less spent on them - but with better results. Preventative projects would forestall all sorts of problems before they became expensive.

The challenge at the moment is that most resources are deployed in ways that are difficult to unpick. Dis-investing in stuff that exists is very difficult, especially when those services contain highly qualified, relatively powerful people. Having seen this group work, over 24 hours, on Crafton's issues - I came away depressed. The group didn't seem to have a sense of the potential of people do to far, far more for themselves and each other. Nor did they grasp the importance of political and civic leadership in making the debate. At times, I felt I could be at any gathering of top managers over the last few years. Lots of talk of 'pathways', 'flows', 'joining-up' and so on. Often very technical and based on the idea that bureaucracies are highly improvable.

I shouldn't be too critical. These are people who are in the front-line, managerially speaking, and I respect them. They are bright enough to earn plenty of money if they chose to. Most have commitment oozing from them. But I came away depressed. It might have been me. I wasn't exactly full of ideas myself - but I just felt outside the culture, like having to speak in a second or third language. Perhaps I am just not really part of that world. Yet I do meet people, all the time, who are on my wavelength, just not that day.

Next time I am asked on a 24 hour simulation I may just simulate being too busy.

On Leadership and Negotiation

2011-01-27T18:15:00.003Z

Every once in a while you learn something now. A penny drops. Having spent most of the last week or so among people leading out social enterprise spin-outs from the public sector I realised two things.

Firstly, that being a leader means you have be strong as a bull. This inspires people to come with you, scares the shit out of people who oppose you and wears down those that would throw marbles in your path.

Secondly that when it comes to negotiation, it isn't all about win-win. It's actually often a zero-sum game. A lot of these guys are cutting good deals from the public sector because they are intransigent buggers who just won't budge beyond a particular line. It works. Think abou the Chinese, elderly carers, Bob Crowe. After a while, these people set the parameters in the form they want them. So much for meeting half way.

Is all this new to me? Of course, not entirely. But it somehow escaped me that to be a good leader, it isn't enough just to be inspriational, well intended or courageous. You've also got to be as tough as old boots. Further to this, you've got to unreasonable when necessary and, yes, intransigent in pursuit of what you want in negotation and we willing to say 'Fuck the other side!'.

As a leader I was never that good at either of these. While I had stamina I tended to be a pushover and in negotiation my own desperation for progress and consensus would overwhelm a focus on result. Seeing some of these guys in action reminded me of where I struggled as a leader myself.

Views from the Bridge of the Big Society

2011-01-23T17:27:00.005Z

I have deliberatley crafted my life so that I have a line-of-sight on how things are playing out. So what am I seeing, in January 2011?

THE COMMUNITY? At the ultra-local level, during three evenings spent in residents' kitchens and peeling community-centres, the cuts are beginning to be noticed. Councils are proving a bit Neanderthal, as everyone expected. So rather than cut a few posts that nobody will notice, they pull their funding for lollipop men and ladies. These people work for about a fiver an hour and are, literally, highly visible. One major accident and there will be clamour to get them back. Let's hope it doesn't happen!

LOCAL GOVERNMENT? One level up, in the Council, they are scratching their heads about how to approach the cuts intelligently. Although in opposition in Suffolk, I have decided, where politically possible, to help where I can. Few Councillors or senior officers know anything about social enterprise or charity sectors. So I try, where I can, to help them think through how to engage in a way that enables SE and charities as alternative providers - rather than eviscerating them as has happened in many parts of the UK (e.g. Nottingham City Council wiping half of its homelessness budget in one go - clever).

IN THE SE AND THIRD SECTOR? Among the third sector and social enterprise sector, blood-pressure is running high. Many organisations are realising, fairly late in the day, that they are out of road and urgently looking for a way out. Few people I know are not in some kind of merger or deep-partnership conversation. All talk of 'independence', seemingly forgotten as CEOs and their Boards face the Void.

THE WIDER PUBLIC SECTOR? As PCTs begin their death-throes, before our eyes, they are, like any endangered being, going through the stages of grief. Disbelief has been replaced by anger and, in some cases, some fairly shitty behaviour. Particularly towards some of the new Right to Requests, which, unlike them, will escape the grave. While I think Lansley is daft to do away with them in one go, I can see why he thinks they are a waste of space. Not a lot I have seen leads me to believe they are adding much value.

THE COMMENTARIAT? The wider commentariat and policy community - of which I am a sort of partcipant-onlooker - is either obsessed with the cuts and what this all means - or working out how we turn the language of new approaches into a tangible approaches. The problem is that many of the best solutions - like the stuff being pioneered by social enterprises and charities - are SO radical (e.g. Partciple's stuff ) that you can't just jump to them immediately. You need bridges over the ravine, not just beautiful stuff growing on the other side). Politicians are left trying - and often failing - to think about how to transition in a managable way.

MY VIEW? Indeed it were possible to bridge from Public Services Mark I to Mark II in a straightforward way, replacing one set of ideas, people and systems with another, we'd all be in clover. In truth, we're looking at replacing a Machine with a new Eco-System, some of which is beyond the control of anybody. The future quality of life will, in reality, be very tricky to create, even with their fulsome participation. If the Big Society is right in one regard, it's that change won't happen in the way it always has in the past.

Are you a Social Enterprise Yourself, Then??

2011-01-17T20:20:00.003Z

'So is Stepping Out a social business'? I get asked this quite a lot, occasionally by potential customers. It's a fair question. The simple and honest answer is 'No, it ain't'. The profits, or rather those that it makes, go to me, the sole owner.

How do I defend this, when I'm going around preaching the virtues of social enterprise? Well, firstly, as you know, I feel that social social enterprises are defined too narrowly - namely by how you use profit and how much of your business you own. Let's focus on this for a second. How many businesses do you know that operate in the social space that are particularly profitable? The whole discussion about 'reinvesting profit' is normally pretty academic for most of these businesses. Truth is, there ain't much profit to begin with.

So then we're discussing ownership. Ownership is a literal, legal thing. You own something when it has value. This can be either monetary value or the other things ownership brings - like control. Owning something normally involves one or the other of these benefits. For me, it is mostly the latter. Ownership of Stepping Out brings me control over it. When I need other people's help with this business in terms of finance or especial commitment, I will share ownership. At some point, I may even share this with employees. But when it is appropriate, fair and just to do so, not when the CIC regulator or trademark says I do.

By fixing on profit and ownership, the social enterprise mindset overlooks the crucial question of how social entrepreneurs tend to use time. We do not tend to have built up capital so time is still our principal resource. I give away about a quarter of my own time each month. I see it as my contribution. I don't want any praise for this, but it's my decision. It is, however, time which isn't going on building the profitability of my business. It is time taken from the normal business of business to do my tiny bit.

Extending the tent to the many people who use their time and resources for social purposes - people who use time as well as money in an entrepreneurial way would be, for me, welcome. Because the brutal truth would be that if I registered Stepping Out as a CIC, I would need to give up virtually all of the things I am doing outside of work in order to get my 50% of profit required to eke out my life. Yes, there'd be profit to give away - but next to the benefits of my donated time I am unconvinced it would be a better way forward.

Overall, there is more to being a social entrepreneur and enterprise than being owned by other people and giving half of your profit away. It's about how you use your time too. This is the one resource you have to enrich either yourself or others. How you use it is one of life's biggest decisions. It should therefore be part of the modern account of how we describe the social entrepreneur.

Losing My Religion? The Theology of Social Enterprise

2011-01-12T14:28:00.005Z

Debate about the essential nature of social enterprise, like that of the existence of God, will, I think never end. The theology of social enterprise, like the God-debate seems to hinge on the question of whether or not it is 'real' - as in distinguishable from other things which already have well-established names such as 'charity' or 'business'. Attempts to nail the issue include the Social Enterprise Mark and SE even now has its own legal form - the CIC - though note that a SE can also take other forms - a bit like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Like a lot of people I find this debate pretty deathly. If I hear two people talking about it, I steer clear. It's a debate that will always be with us, I fear. Essentially, like religion, social enterprise comes down to whether you believe in it or not. It's about faith as much as reason, passion as much as logic. Like a religion it is full of contradictions and oddities. Even its believers do not agree on everything. Our Catholics prefer a strict interpretation of the scripture which tells us that only firms that are not in private ownership count among the Faithful. Our Protestants seek to open the door to everyone who believes in the idea of business run for multiple goals and that your state of mind matters more than what some old priests tell you.

Of course we all live in a real world, a world that, by its nature, craves definition and clarity. We have responded by making social enterprise something that the public can see, touch and feel. However in doing so, we have, possibly, robbed it of some of its subtlety and grace. We have closed its walls to the many who feel like social entrepreneurs but who, now, can't be - because they own their businesses or only give some of their money away, not the lion's share.

For me, a Social Enterprise Protestant, this is sad. People who seek to create social good through their own businesses deserve a place in our church. I would even welcome people who simply do their business in an ethical fashion rather than one which puts profit ahead of all other things. Welcome, then Johnson and Johnson, Richer Sounds.

I already hear the high-priests in my ears making the very good point that such a wide net devalues the religion altogether. By admitting everyone, we reduce what we're about to nothing very much. I can't really argue with that from a day-to-day point of view. To create a backable brand we probably do have to draw the line tighter than feels comfortable.

But, taking another lesson from great religions, I think it makes better longer term sense to think of SE a bit like a very big religion - like Christianity - which has lots of sects and believers - many of whom have very different ways of going about things. The underpinning beliefs, yes, are common, but that's what they are - beliefs. In our case, the underlying belief is that business for and with a social purpose. We all go at it in different ways - but the core of SE, like the Christian core, is based on, yes, a state of mind, an outlook (business for social purpose) and some basic beliefs, not a single core form. But they all live under the same 'Christian' label - and are much stronger for it. Why can't we be a similarly broad church?

Our challenge, long-term, I think, is to be less Catholic about SE, to have our own 'Reformation' and, ultimately, create the biggest business sector in the world. Diverse and plural - but progressive and dominant. It means going beyond today's pressure to be distinctive - but it may well be better long-term.

How Productive are You?

2011-01-11T08:37:00.009Z

While there's a massive literature on time-management and how to be more effective at work, I am often struck by how little discussion there is of this among third sector and SE professionals. We see at as something possibly to teach our staff and we laugh at the public sector but we tend, in an unspoken way, to assume that we are optimally productive.

But are we? I'm certainly not. Well, not all of the time. I spend a lot of time on low-priority stuff. I waste time on stuff I enjoy rather than needs doing (like this). I procrastinate for England. I often fail to prioritise for weeks on end.

Yet I do also get it dead-right sometimes. These are the times I make a monthly list of priorities, decide what has to be done, and plough through it all. This rids me of distraction and gives me energy. I find a kind-of sweet-spot of focus, energy and momentum.

My biggest inspiration was years ago reading Stephen Covey's book 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'. Despite the god-awful title, this is one hell of a book for someone trying to raise their game. I read it on a beach in Goa ten years ago where I had gone after one of my many burnouts while developing the early Speaking Up.

It grabbed me for three reasons. First, it told me what I needed to do: choose a small number of high-impact priorities, write them down and pursue them exclusively. Second, it taught me that I needed to work consciously on improving my character. Being not just myself, but my best self. Thirdly, I got from that book a clear sense that it was down to me what I made of my life - it was about choice not predestination or script.

One of the biggest take-aways from that holiday was my annual, monthly and weekly list of must-do's. I used this until relatively recently. I like to think that I internalised the habit but the truth is I may have gotten a bit too pleased with myself and put this trusted tool aside too early. My productivity is certainly no longer what it was.

Kids and age have a bit to do with this. But there is no real substitute for knowing, every day, what you are going to achieve, writing it down and committing to it. All a bit American for some people I know but I bet it would add 15% to most people.

Black Dogs and Social Entrepreneurs

2011-01-10T22:12:00.004Z

I am one Follower short of 40. Come on, someone, please make me happy! I have been blogging for a couple of years now and it does build up very slowly. But I get enough people saying they like stuff to keep me motivated. And, yes, I enjoy it. Its the nearest thing I do these days to therapy.

I am going through one of my lulls at the moment. I'm not in a bad way, particularly, but a bit out of sorts, not quite my normal self. If I was being dramatic, I'd call it mildly depressed, but I am not so I won't. I've talked about mental health on here from time to time, mainly to say that I consider myself someone with relatively fragile mental health. I have limits around stress than I have to keep within. Anxiety is never that far away and its cousin, depression, have popped up in my life at regular intervals.

Thankfully, both of these have eased over time. I spent much of my young life feeling properly depressed. I even called it that then. But this was the 80s and kids didn't get 'depressed'. But I know I was, and it was more than just too much Morrissey. This was the real deal and really I should have got myself some pills or something.

As it was, I didn't and my teens turned into my 20s then BANG the real fun started and, at 21, it all turned into a horrible mess and I got really, quite seriously ill. To people around me it wasn't terribly obvious. However, I knew it needed sorting if my life was going to be worth living. Thanks to some very good pills and probably the best therapist in Northern England, I got together enough to build from there. The rest of my life, despite some fairly unpleasant hiccups has been a story of gradual improvement, including very long periods of feeling utterly well and, yes, happy. But the Black Dog doth return, or in a smaller, Terrier-like form, from time to time.

Why return to this? Well, I guess I use this space, partly as indulgence. To say it how it is. To show who I really am, behind the stuff I am known for. And, perhaps least significantly, to emphasise that having a shitty episode or three in your life doesn't mean you can't go and do stuff that others say is pretty good. Indeed, it can be spur, even if not always for the right reasons (recognition, compensatory self-worth etc).

Indeed, I'll never forget a conversation I had with a guy who worked closely with loads of social entrepreneurs who said that he found, time and again, that many of them had been through mental pain, and, in many cases had been abused. Their reaction to this - the re-directed anger, the guilt-made-good - was often, he observed expressed through social entrpreneurialism. Was he right? I don't know, but I will never forget that comment.

He was right about me, that's for sure.

Going with the Flow

2011-01-04T18:18:00.003Z

Another Year. I am 42 this year. It's the first year I have actually felt 'Not-OK' about saying my age. For a long time I have been a Young This or Upcoming 30 something That. Now I would only just count as a young football manager or maybe Prime Minister. The number of things to be Young-At seem to diminish by the year. I feel accepting of this, but a little depressed.

So what of ambition? Writing in the Observer on Sunday, Tim Lott speaks of middle-age as liberation from needing to show that you are 'it'. He feels pleasantly free of the need to prove himself. Which is fine, actually, very nice - in a sense. But what if that turns you into a bit of an idle knob-end? Someone who used to do lots of good stuff and now, frankly, can't be arsed because he doesn't need the approval any more?

You do notice it though, this loss of drive for uber-attainment. You kind of realise that achievement, a bit like money, gets you high for a bit - then leaves you feeling just like your old self again. Recognition used to be a big one for me. It got me proper-motivated, willing to walk through fire. Now I've had a little fix of it, I'm not particularly bothered any more. It's done my confidence the world of good. Which, given my formerly super-size inferiority complex (now about average), was probably for the best.

Is 'can't be arsed' liberating though? I am not so sure. One's neediness, I find, simply displaces itself. You get money, it goes to making a difference. You make a difference it goes to recognition. You get recognition it goes to..something else. How many middle-aged blokes do you see in the quiet desperation of the the car showroom or the ill-judged shag? In my case, the same old stuff needy stuff whirrs round, begging for the busyness of life to drown out the noise.

When do you feel happiest? In my case it's when I am throroughly absorbed in doing something. Work is often that something but writing does the same job, as does running and reading. The social scientist Czensenzilaghi wrote about 'flow'- that state of being where we are in the 'zone' and we lose self-awareness. That's, for me, the place to be. I love it, I feel most alive there, even, far more so than when I am trying to enjoy myself. Which seems like a paradox, somehow. Out of ourselves, we are our best selves. It's true enough, though.

Hunkering Down...Then a Fright!

2010-12-24T15:02:00.002Z

I always enjoy the end of the year. I make it a rule to stop working by 23rd at the latest and not to start again till at least the 3rd Jan. There's something about the ritual I like, the mid-winter break to refresh, refuel and go back to base.

This year's Christmas has been enhanced by the final purchase of a car, something about which, with my mild OCD tendencies, I was taking too much time and energy in the research. I located target vehicle up in Leeds so popped in after a very pleasant lunch with superblogger/Tweeter Rob Greenland. After a protracted but friendly negotiation I emerged ten grand poorer but with a three year old Ford people-carrier that down south would have cost a grand more.

With its blacked-out rear windows and 'panther black' metallic paint, it looks kind of like a bullet-proof taxi, designed perhaps for a developing world politician. But I love it - and love the fact that I didn't pay over the odds for it. Three years business and family motoring for me then I will palm it off to my missus as a the local runaround till 2020.

That out of the way, I am settling down to the peace of pastoral Suffolk. I live in a quiet village just south of Bury St Edmunds but it feels well out of the way. I can go running for ten miles round here without seeing anything except hedgerows and fields.

My peace today was disrupted a bit when my boy, Wilf, woke up with breathing difficulties. He's had a bad cough for days but this was something else. The GP's first words were "He may have pneumonia and I might need to admit him to hospital'. My face dropped. Within an hour we were on the Xray machine at the West Suffolk and wondering which of us would be doing the bedside duty on Christmas Eve. It turned out that the lad has a very nasty chest infection which could turn to pneumonia very easily but he's been given super-strength antibiotics - and sent home with us - with strict instructions to take him straight to hospital if he takes a turn for the worse. Poor little lad doesn't know what's going on - but he's comfortable and, I think, improving a little.

Couldn't fault the NHS today. We got an appointment super-quick on the electronic system run by the Swan Surgery - one of these large GP practices you get these days - and from there we got booked straight into Xray and I got a call from my GP early afternoon telling me what was happening. My wife used to babysit for our doctor when his kids were small. Bury St Edmunds is like that. People tend to stick around. This is one reason, I venture, why the place feels like it works. Had we been living in parts of London or inner city Birmingham, I doubt we'd have had such an easy time of it.

My son is feeling well enough now to be demanding my attention so its goodbye from me till...probably 2011. Thanks for reading this year. Hope it's been worth your time.

Is Nick Boles MP right to call for 'chaos' in public services?

2010-12-20T09:33:00.004Z

You may or may not have caught the Cameroon outrider Nick Boles MP opining in recent days about the creative beauty of chaos within public services. What he was saying was that you need to remove most of the institutional processes involved in the planning of public services to make the vital Great Leap Forward we are all seeking.

I have some sympathy with this view, particularly since I have become a Councillor. The modus operandi of local government, and indeed the whole public sector, often resembles what I imagine Czechoslovakia was like circa 1982. Just replac iron-ore or butter with adult social care and you've pretty much got the same meeting. Lots of preoccupation with 'co-ordination', joining up' etc, not much on delivering the right service at the right time in the right way. That somehow gets lost in the mix.

So I have some time for Boles and his world-view. We do need to throw out a lot of the outdated nonsense which passes for good planning and governance. However, we also have to be bright about this. Planning is necessary. So too is Governance. We need enough grit and wagons to salt the road. If Nick Boles slips on the ice and bangs his head, we need to ensure that somebody gets to him quickly enough and takes him through the right procedures - ones he knows he will receive whether he falls over in Westminster or Walsall.

There is, whatever anybody says, a role for planning, even in the internet age. I am currently reading an amazing book about the development of management thinking in America called 'The Puritan Gift' by William and Jim Hopper. The book charts the way Puritan values of thrift, hard work, honest and, yes, good planning, gave America the management model through which it established its 20th century dominance.

By way of example, the book details the meticulous planning that went into the Puritan migrations to New England, the most successful in history up to that time and, following that, the Mormon migration to Utah. Huge efforts were taken to learn from previous failed migrations. Enormous time was taken to ensure that risks could be mitigated. Planning is not all bunkum.

What would the Puritans of the 17th century make of the situation in today's public services? Well, my guess is that they would do three things. Firstly, they would be unimpressed by the way we have separated out the delivery of things from the managing of them. In their day, the planners also had to implement and the processes were iterative. Today's leaders would be forced to actually put into practice what they espoused as operating principles.

Second, they would, I believe, like Boles, be deeply bemused by the level of activity taking place in the name of planning, co-ordination etc which actually did not serve much real purpose. Like him, they would seek to tear apart much of what passes for
necessary administration and planning.

Thirdly, however, unlike Boles, they wouldn't, I venture, be seeking to leave a vacuum into which an informal market kind of sorts things out. They wouldn't be happy with that because it forgets the important roles of both planning and leadership. You do not regenerate communities by merely stepping back. Neither do you achieve it by saying 'You do this, not us'.

My guess is that the Puritans would take a highly pragmatic view: getting rid of many of the current structures which clog up the way we are governed but, at the same time, being zealously organised in their long-term planning for the creation of a strong economy, a capable citizenry and the levels of social capital needed to sustain all of this. Not for them 'creative chaos' - just creative planning.

Is Lansley wrong to abolish PCTs?

2010-12-19T12:07:00.003Z

The Observer today is full of angst about Andrew Lansley's health reforms. In short, everyone inside the NHS - managers, GPs, hospitals - seems to think that abolishing PCT's - the 'bulk-buyers' of health care for local people - and giving the task - and funds - to GPs is a risk too far. GPs, they say, want to just do their core job - not that of commissioning and procurement of services. And what will happen in areas where GPs don't take this on? At the moment, I'm working quite a bit NHS people and I hear similar things from people to whom I speak. To far, too fast, is the over-riding message.

That the NHS needs further reform isn't, in my mind seriously in doubt. To see the way things are done is to see a tangle of groups, sub-groups, mazy reporting lines all of which suck power and energy away from otherwise talented people. Throw in a tetchy operating culture, the clinician/management tension, the primary/acute divide, the special pleading from all professional quarters and the presiding overlord of the Strategic Health Authority and you've got a viscous treacle through which even a boiling hot spoon will struggle to pass.

And all of this costs a fortune to run - so I can see why the Secretary of State, like his zealous Cabinet colleagues want to just get rid of it all - PCTs, SHAs, the lot. As Andrew Rawnsley said today, they have all read their Tony Blair and want to use this term to get radical. But the question to be asked here is whether, in trying to avoid Blair's cautious approach, they risk going in the other direction - and wreaking havoc?

In the case of health, my own view is that the Coalition would have been foolish to leave the NHS to itself entirely. The problems listed above are real and hinder productivity, innovation and change. The NHS was given extra funding without being properly reformed. Yes, we saw some good come of that era - Foundation Hospitals, unprecedented capital spend and an end to some of the worst aspects of the pre-1997 system. But we were slow to diversify supply of healthcare, too worried about the reaction of the NHS establishment to devolve funding to the lowest possible point.

However, while I would be happy to abolish the Strategic Health Authorities tomorrow, I am less convinced that PCTs should go. They play an important function in many healthcare economies. When they go, their function will need to be picked up elsewhere, probably by consortia of GPs which themselves will require an organisational infrastructure. An alternative to abolition would be to reshape the Governance of PCTs to make them more GP-driven organisations.

This wouldn't be a gigantic shift. The PCTs no longer provide many services themselves. This, quite rightly, has been taken off them and given either to social enterprises, an NHS Foundation Trust or the open-market. What remains is relatively small, quite focused on locality with a history and skill-set which is useful in getting the mix of healthcare right in any given area. And unlike GPs Consortia on their own, they include the voice of patients, other professions and sectors. It is easy to forget, especially when we think about our own GP, that this group inevitably have interests which they will, almost certainly use any spending power they have to defend.

The other reason I would defend PCTs at the current time is that they do mitigate the risks incumbent in any system going through change. Payment by outcomes, Any Willing Provider and a much tighter cash environment are all big waves crashing, simultaniously, on the healthcare sector between now and 2013. Individually, each of these will have positive effects. That I do not dispute. But there will also be unintended outcomes, which will need to be managed. The PCTs - were they left in place be in a good position to help to manage the new ecology of healthcare at local level. Now that they too are in the mixer, it feels like there are no fixed institutional points around which to implement change - or manage risk.

Right across Government, similarly bold experiments are taking place in welfare, education and criminal justice. Local government is also having to reinvent itself in the face of unprecedented cuts. In all of these areas, there are huge potential gains to be made - and I applaud the Coalition for being courageous in what they are prepared to do. However, the change, in each case will need parts of the system to remain in place - rather than caught themselves in the vortex - to ensure sound implementation and to deal properly with any intended outcomes.

Are Mutuals Fit for Purpose?

2010-12-18T07:43:00.002Z

Mutuals and co-ops once passed me by as an idea. The only co-ops I really knew about for a long time were vegetarian wholefood joints staffed by pony-tailed graduates and Christians. These places seemed desperately worthwhile - and very low on consumer-values such as atmosphere, service and range.

So I put co-ops into the 'nice but ineffective box' in my mind. The recent push for more mutuals has prompted me to look again at this format. To this end, I have read two superb books in the last month. One is 'Spedan's Partnenership' by Peter Cox, all about the rise of John Lewis. The other is David Erdal's book about Loch Fyne Oysters, which was taken into employee ownership following the death of one of its founders.

Both books helped to smash some of my misconceptions about employee-ownership. Firstly, these firms do not have group decision-making on all issues. Votes are not taken on which cleaning firm to use or even on many key management decisions. Expertise is respected in all areas - including management.

What's different though are three things. The first is accountability -and therefore culture. In an employee owned firm, the senior team reports back to the shareholders - who are also employees. This creates a very different dynamic inside a firm to one in which managers report to external owners. Managers are there by consent of the managed.

Secondly, employees are more involved in decision-making than in a typical firm. The culture of the all-powerful CEO is not typical to employee-owned firms - and the default position is that everyone's ideas have value.

The third is motivation. In an employee owned firm, everyone has 'skin in the game'. This creates a healthy peer-pressure to perform and deliver. There is now mounting evidence that employee-owned firms are more productive and resilient than their privately owned counterparts.

There's all sorts of info in both books about how employee ownership structures can be created, even when the firm starts out private. The most popular is for shares to be taken into a trust for employees rather than given out individually. But Loch Fyne does both, as they believe it makes ownership more tangible. Erdal's book is a touching, convincing account of how this works in practice.

What does all this mean for public services? Perhaps the strongest message I got is that for the magic of employee ownership to work, it is vital that employee ownership is as near-total as possible. Many of the mutuals setting up are only part-employee owned, the rest spread among users, other stakeholders etc. In the view of these writers, and mounting evidence from people like the Office of Public Management (itself a mutual) is that any dilution of ownership also dilutes the benefits too.

This week I attended a gathering of the 'Pathfinder' Mutuals at the Cabinet Office. All are finding their way in a public services environment in which they are, in different ways, an anomoly, often struggling to fit. These are the Early Adapters which others will watch and follow. What stands out is their determination to succeed in a tough environment. Ownership is undoubtedly part of the magic-mix which keeps these excellent people in the game, despite the odds.

All power to them.

A Day at the Auction

2010-12-13T15:40:00.002Z

Continuing the frugal theme one more time, I am, for the first time in years, in the market for a car. Not any car, however, a 7seater job to fit my young family and serve as a credible business car too. Giving professional colleagues lifts in my own has become a bit tricky due to the smell of damp in my Focus. Seeing an elegantly dressed consultant wince a few weeks ago on sitting down next to me, I decided that enough was enough.

The next task was to research the market. I found that by far the cheapest place to buy was the auction. You can find out what the trade pays for cars this way and, by posing as an Arthur Daley, you can pick up a nice set of wheels for a song. Armed with this knowledge - and the excellent website WeBuyAnyCar.com, I took off to Colchester last Tuesday in search of a bargain.

The auction itself was a cheerful places full of rough-hewn blokes, mostly dealers, armed with their catalogues (none of this internet bullshit) nodding up the prices of Astras and Beemers. The cars - thousands of them - sit gleaming, all buffed up like prize dogs about to go through crufts. The auction room has three 'lanes' and the cars parade through, each taking about 45 seconds to sell, an unending monologue from the auctioneer 434344444444445doIhave46464646?46?46?46?lastime?gone(hammer).

The whole operation runs with military precision, like a civilian Dunkirk, the cars driven in slowly, hazard lights on by an army of grizzled, quite elderly men. A huddle forms around each car before the bidding then, as quickly as it arrived its gone. Now my target car comes. I had set myself a budget of ten grand. They start on ten. Damn. It's proving a popular car. It goes eleven, twelve, twelve seven. A popular vehicle. I drop out before 11 grand and go home empty handed.

That's the thing with auctions, you might not win. I get back, go online and before I know it I find a dealer that has the car I want. It's up in Leeds but I'm going there next week. I figure the grand I pay extra might be worth it if I avoid another day's faffing around. Next to the Arthur Daleys I don't really feel quite up to the task anyway. No social entrepreneurs here!

Is Frugal is the new Black?

2010-12-12T11:14:00.004Z

You will recall that frugality is one of my lead-values. In many ways, this is a good, virtuous thing. However it does occasionally get me into trouble. Last week I managed to disgrace myself at my London club (£170 pa - bargain), leading to a potential exclusion from said establishment.

It all started very innocently. I had been running back to back all day and on my way back from the bathroom at about 2.30pm I realised I was starving. In the corner of my eye, I saw the lunch from a conference being closed up and beginning to be cleared. My eyes fixed on a glistening piece of salmon, only moments away from an encounter with a black plastic bag. So over I went, grabbed a plate and piled the stuff on.

'Excuse me?', a young, female voice sounded, in my ear. 'Are you with the Cement Mixers Convention? (not the real name). 'Errr, no' I replied, through my salmon. Stood in front of me now was this pretty 20-something, berating me about not nicking food. 'But the event's finished', I pleaded - this was going in the bin'. ' Not the point - you could have at least asked'. In this last point, she was right. So I shuffled off, humbled.

This, however, wasn't the end of it. Fifteen minutes later I was approached by the Maitre D' of the Club who reminded me of the difficult position I, as a Member had put the Club in the eyes of his client. Not content with bollocking me, the prissy 20-something had dobbed me in to the management. I offered to pay - which they accepted - and noises were made about me being asked to apologise to the committee - utterly mortifying.

However, I was out last night with some of my old mates from voluntary work. We all met 15 years ago, in our mid-20s and it was the first time we'd all been in the same room for a couple of years. All of them, I was delighted to find, were becoming more frugal than me. Martin (a mathematician) only reads books from libraries while I am never off Amazon. Anna (a mental health nurse) only buys second hand or half-price clothes while I will always go for Paul Smith (if its in a sale). Fiona (a conservationist) lives on nine grand a year and I need at least four times that.

All of these people - mid 30s to early 40s - share on thing as well as their frugality: they are happy people doing what they enjoy and not worrying too much about acquiring stuff. Only one has a car or owns a house. After a delightful dinner (cost £25 for five!) we walked, or trained home. Except me, of course, who drove.

So is frugality the way to go? I think it could be - as long as you don't forget your manners!

Aren't many private business also social businesses?

2010-12-10T08:18:00.002Z

We in the ‘for good’ world often get in a twist about defintions and distinctions. To accommodate this we have developed a typology of organisational types - charities at one end and co-ops at the other with CICs, social firms and 57 other varieties inbetween.

Business doesn’t bother with this nearly as much. But there are as many different types of business, in my experience, as there are types of ‘for-good’ bodies. For a start, there are small, medium and large ones. There are private and public ones. Manufacturing and services. And there are some which are, essentially, values-driven and some which are excessively profit driven.

It is this ‘grey zone’ between exclusively profit focused business and the harder-nosed end of social business that is, I believe, little understood by our sector. It is most often found in the privately owned medium sized business sector, where owners are long-term engaged and also rooted in their own communities. In such companies, there is less short-termism, no remote shareholders and a relationship with staff that means that jobs are preserved where possible. We tend to lump these businesses in with the red-claw private sector, but, in reality, trust is high, employees involved and the business views itself in the round as an employer and a contributor to the local community.

This is a type of capitalism that was once prevalent in the UK but which has been slowly eroded by harder-edged shareholder- capitalism and its endless take-overs. Small and medium-sized firms do, of course, still exist in vast numbers, particularly in our smaller cities and towns, but they are not the force they are in, say Germany, where the 'Mittelstrand', of middle-level of family-owned business with up to 250 employees is still prevalent.

For me, this socially responsible form of capitalism - local, connected, balanced is actually not a million miles from social business. While ownership is still concentrated in a few hands, the modus operandi and social benefit of these ventures - employment, training, economic stimulation - often compares favourably to the charities and social businesses operating in the same space.

Here's a question for social enterprise to think about: Is it is better to run a 20 person business, private profit-making in Merthyr Tydfil...or set up a social enterprise? You would get grants for both, true, but which would need less long-term subsidy? Which would generate and sustain most jobs? Bring most money into the local economy? Train most people? Pay most tax? I think I know the likely answer.

This isn’t to say we shouldn’t set up social businesses in places like this. We should - business might fail to tackle specific problems that a social venture wouldn’t shy from - e.g. employing disabled people - but I think the social enterprise sector should get its head around the fact that not all businesses are the same and in terms of everything except ownership, some businesses probably deliver stronger social returns to capital than certain social enterprises.

Where would you put your money?

Wonking Versus Doing

2010-12-06T22:48:00.005Z

If you haven't read Tony Blair's book, then consider giving it a try. Even if you think you can't stand him, it is compelling reading. For me the most interesting bits are the passages on public services. Quite early on he felt uneasy that his Government didn't have what it took to reform public services. Labour was, in its DNA, always going to find it hard to challenge what had become a massive vested interest.

Now Blair sensed this and looked around for answers. He went to the Thinktanks, academia and experts. He found plenty of political stuff but very little, in his own words, of practical value. I was stunned by this. London is stuffed with the cleverest, most competitive and politically savvy people around. I have always assumed that, although a lot of what is produced by them is useless shit, there was always enough red meat for policy-makers to feast on.

Not so, it seems. I found Blair's comments strangely comforting. Didn't he have Matthew Taylor sitting downstairs? Geoff Mulgan down the corridor? Tony Giddens up the M11 in Cambridge? Although I have now overcome my complexes about Very Clever Metropolitan People, I kind of believed that these guys and women tended to deliver. Turns out they didn't and the poor PM of the time was left riffing through the Number 10 library for ideas. Quite a thought.

Perhaps one reason I took a small satisfaction in Blair's confession was that my own approach has always been a funny mix of dong stuff, writing about it, networking it and improving it. Speaking Up was a bit like that - try things, fail a bit, adapt and so on - or 'iterate' to use the vogue term. I was never one for sitting in a quiet room trying to come up with the answers. My hunch was that this wasn't the way social progress happened. Progress isn't mathematics, it is a much messier business.

Stepping Out is kind of the same. While there are plenty of people bashing out clever-sounding ideas about public sector reform, conjuring frameworks and pathways, you can be sure that most of them haven't set foot in a surgery or ward for a long time - except, possibly, for botox. This isn't the stuff out of which change is made. You end up, as Blair said, with a lot of fairly superficial, political short-term stuff that never really gets to the heart of things. Just expensively conceived crowd-pleasers such as all the crap 'tools' being brought out around the Big Society - itself a biddable idea, stuck in with many of the wrong kind of people working on it.

But this blog is not a simple 'Out there in the Real World' piece. Far from it. What I am trying to say is that we gain most useful knowledge about making change, and even grand-theories, from the mucky business of doing it, then theorizing it, then doing it again. However, somewhere on the road in our intellectual tradition we seem to have lost that fascination with getting stuck in. The thing we remember people like Michael Young for. These days, that is for the Boring Folk (possibly like me!) to do once the Clever Ones have done their work. Bland implementation versus Grand Policy.

"Oh but what about NESTA, Carnegie, RSA, Young, other 'Do-Tanks'?" I hear some of you shout. Well, yes, these lot are more engaged and doing some fascinating work that we can learn from. This is 2010 not 1998, when Blair was feeling adrift. Thank Goodness for them indeed.

But I am pretty confident that in 50 years time, the stuff that is seen as the key to change won't be the outputs of 'Do-Tanks' but other stuff, quite outside this world. Things that have grown, in the first instance, out of experience of people close to the issues and for whom getting the policy right is far from the first concern, when pushed. Change starts with action not policy. In the 2010s, new policy ideas, like new pop tunes are rare. There will never be another Beveridge just like there will never be another Beatles. The big set-pieces have been done. These days, policy can only underpin what's good out there - and give it a wider framework. This is what we seem, along the way, to have forgotten.

My Fantasy Stash of Sardines

2010-12-03T20:26:00.003Z

There can't have been many people in England tonight out running in subzero listening to the Style Council. Not even two maybe! This cold weather has a funny effect on me. It sets off that wiring in me that makes blokes my age turn off lights, eat leftovers and make weird fantasy-plans for an underground pantry stashed full of tins of sardines, beans and water - just in case the worst happens - and we run out of food.

Yes, middle age sort of creeps up on you. Things which were mild tendencies are now becoming more extreme. My frugality now causes me slight embarrassment, as I take the leftover fruit from the awayday or shake every last drop from the nozzle. My desire for my own time and space now manifests itself in fairly adept attempts to avoid anything other than the most desired social gathering. I often monetize the value of what I would exchange to avoid things I cannot stand. Most weddings. Concerts. Clubs. Most lectures. Anything after 10pm.

It also makes me much more choosy about who I spend time with. There was a time when I would tolerate most people socially. Try to get on with them. Now, outside the professional setting, I only bother with people I actually like. Even at work, I strongly err to work with people who share my outlook and are interesting to be around. Never again will I sit in toxic relationships for years, as I did a couple of times while a CEO.

It's the old truism I guess that as time goes on, you realise its finity - and take the appropriate steps. Wisdom perhaps. But the grouchiness, the frugality, the hoarding, the 15 year old banger you won't replace, even if it makes you look poor? The
se are the less attractive and fathomable elements of the early-middle years. My wife find it all slightly ridiculous. But she's 35.
Too young to understand!