What will it take to be competitive in 2020

The DTI and the Regional Development Agencies are (rightly) concerned about the perceived inability of UK businesses to extract the same productivity out of IT as our transatlantic cousins and keep citing the paper which demonstrates that productivity comes from treating the troops robustly according to the McKinsey principles.

Me, I think part of the problem is the lack a tradition of analytic thought in the English Culture. Only here is the phrase too clever by half taken as an insult.

However common-sense would suggest that being competitive in 2020 would mean being fluent in how to use IT to structure, restructure and present information and knowledge to achieve some kind of competitive advantage no matter what route to building your business you take.

You would imagine that getting this right would be fundamental to the UK's continuing success and that the government should be developing a strategy to deal with it.

Well they are - sort of. The Treasury and the Ministry for the Prevention of Learning have recently commissioned a report chaired by a Mr Leitch (who's incidentally head of Zurich Insurance).

The key recommendation is that since the education system is churning out 20% of people who can't read and write then we should make industry sort it out by encouraging them to do level 2 NVQs (i.e. O levels) which we will fund.

We'll 50% fund "apprenticeships" which in practice means doing some vocational courses which lead to an NVQ level 3 (A level standard)

Anything else - which would include how to use IT to effectively grow your business won't be publicly funded apart from a bit of entry level leadership which might be extended down to companies employing 10.

Since the growth of the economy is in knowledge based service industries one would have thought that focusing on making them more effective would be what world class would be about. The impact of channelling most of the adult education budget to remedial reading and writing instead of things like marketing diplomas ( I declare an interest here - I sit on the CIM's Professional Body Board) and courses on practical skills like qualifications for plumbers and electricians doesn't seem to me to be the way to go.

I'd like to ask you what skills you think your businesses need to stay competitive and where do you think you might get them from.

I'm currently doing some work with a couple of Business Schools so if we get some constructive replies here we might well try and recycle them into something useful

All the Best

Alan

Is disobedience a core competency?

I've always been interested in what makes some people able to take the decision to "walk on water" and just get on with trying to make something happen while most are looking for a set of rules to follow. I set up the Free Spirits Club in Ecademy to discuss these issues.

In a discussion on Ecademy, one author took the view that we are hardwired to seek conformity and rules - the simpler the set the better. It's true that if you study the way the brain works you tend to come to the conclusion that it's a machine to take 2 and 2 and produce 5. It's driven to produce patterns from insufficient data and these become persistent, rigid and infective. Much religious dogma seems to fall into this category.

However there does seem to be an opposite tendency for individuals to recognise that they are trapped and to strike out on their own. Sometimes blindly, sometimes calculatedly, sometimes in a conscious attempt to achieve a balance of self expression but not at the expense of the group. Level 7 - the yellow zone in spiral dynamics. Dudley Lynch's book Mother of all minds is an account of his own journey.

What interests me is what can be done to facilitate and sustain the independence from group-think that's needed to make real progress. Or is this just a meta set of rules because the only truly independent thinkers get sectioned?

This seems like a discussion worth having over Easter as it touches on many of the recurring themes we get in here. How do we build a sustainable business (which usually doesn't involve following someone else's simple formula), How do we stay true to ourselves, How do we steer our course between gross materialism on the one hand and utter wishful thinking on the other.

My own view is that we need to learn how to be disobedient for the common good.

I realised when I was 10 that if you played the game according to the rules you were going to lose. It's a casino, the deck is stacked against you. Big industry and government regulation are always making life harder for the independent. But somehow we all survive in growing numbers. It's a key competency to understand which things you can ignore and which things you can't.

A successful operation needs just enough structure - one thing Jonathan and I agreed on completely. What we're told to do is generally over-engineered and will result in slow death - euro-necrosis

So - how do we keep the vital spark alive?

Over to you guys. If you want to see the full discussion follow the track back link

Alan

Are we all hybrids now

This was written in response to a question that came up in my howtodobusiness club on ecademy. It was posed by Mark Wiggins who was asking the old technical salesman question in a different guise - can you combine analytic and hunter-killer skills in the same person.

This was my reply

If you are running a small company you need to be able to do everything - you need to be a visionary, a salesman, a team leader an analyst - you have to be able to do the numbers. In my work I use a tool called the brainmap which analyses how individuals think. (It was devised by Dudley Lynch, author of Strategy of the Dolphin who is one of my favourite business authors.

So much so that I distribute his products in the UK.



This Profile is typical of many small business owners who's profile is somewhat visionary but close enough to the centre to cover all the bases.

For companies operating in the networked economy, the ability to combine systems and people skills, and to integrate left brain and right brain activity is a key competency. It's necessary to deal with the complexity but this approach is probably only effective in the hunter gatherer space (ie under 10 employees) and where dealing with technology is part of the businesses stock in trade or where its necessary to develop a completely integrated business model for proof of concept purposes.

To go past this requires the kind of division of labour approach that Mike articulates. If you want to make some serious money out of a business ( and we know from the stats that only a small number of people actually do) then you need a team to drive the business up to the next threshold - 50 people and several million turnover in round figures - at which point you can cash out.

People who do that tend to take the "Big Picture" approach and outsource anything tedious.

People below the magic 10 barrier probably love integrating and aren't prepared to let go of that. So the business gets stuck. The moral is - if you're a creator get it into existence as a working model and flog it at that point. You won't want to do the growing to 50 stage as you're probably more interested in the what and the systems than you are in the people.

We could discuss all this in terms of Dudley Lynch's models or Mike Southon's or even Wealth Dynamics - they all have something to say on the subject.

However the reply is based on my own experience - I spent years stuck at that hunter gatherer stage because really I enjoyed the challenge of modelling the next business model too much

Very interested to hear other people's views and experiences