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Change is the only constant, education isn’t

When I left school in 1979, I knew there was not such thing as a job for life. With un-employment at 25%++, it was obvious.  So every time I meet one of these people who still believe its their human right to stay in the same job and expect my fellow tax payers to keep them, I try and find out as much as I can from these people. How did they get this mindset? How do they deal with every day problems and issues? How do they see the future? What are their real life expectations?  Just as you would if you had the opportunity to spent time with Elvis, Marlyn or Mr Hughes.

I seem to have come up with four groups:

  • Some people are very good at dealing with multiple issues, variable and accepting(no thriving) on change. Change is their fuel, their life blood.
  • Some people don’t like risk, so reducing the variables in their life to those they can deal with, tea or coffee, catch the 5.30 or 5.45 train home.
  • Those who are extremely happy with their status, power and empire. They will do anything to stop anything changing.
  • And then you get those who are just lazy.

The more and more I deal with our educators, those people who are developing our young, I fear we are recruiting the wrong people to teach the next generation of world leaders. These educators are some of the most risk adverse people, cannot accept change and more importantly did not understand what happened in 1979.

We still run courses which educators ‘can’ and want to teach. Just take a quick look at reed.co.uk and look at the jobs available and then go to UCAS and try and spot how many courses would lead to one these jobs. Over 25% of jobs are sales related, yet there are no courses. Then we wonder why UK industry is not selling to other countries.

We are not competitive in our education system and then don’t understand why our young are not successful in a competitive global job market.  Every person in this country is competing with over 6,000,000,000 other people for their job. Even if you want to work in the local corner shop, over 340,000,000 in Europe can just as easily work for that shop. At other levels of industry, software can be developed and used anywhere, manufacturing can be transferred within weeks to any part of the world. Its all competitive, even education (oops! sorry maybe that’s just too radical for 2012).

Someone this week told me we still use an education system developed for the industrial revolution and he was right. We should be able to create an education system which fits everyone, what ever age, what ever mental, physical capability and most importantly their aptitude. This also mean allowing people to finish full time education at 12, allowing 50 year olds to gain new skills, allowing university/college students to develop their own business whilst studying.  We live in a highly competitive portfolio working, global market place.

Education is all about the experience, (see: Morrison’s, Walmart, Google) and not about the quality, content or having the biggest building. It about the industrial relevance, networking opportunities and space utilization.

Lets go back and think about how we are going to lead the world and re-define what education is and how our society interfaces with it throughout their enterprising lives.

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The Fiction of Market Research

Your professors sit there and wonder what they can get you to do as coursework, and yes the best they can come up with a market research assignment, predominantly based on desk research. This keeps you in the library and out of trouble while making it easy to compare this academic years’ marketing students in one easy process.

In the real world…

The majority of market research is done by people who know little or nothing of the product or service. Their job is to research and make nice pretty reports. This research takes months to gain any form or quality. In olden times, 1960’s when marketing was discovered by Theodor Levitt this was fine, but in the post Steve Jobs days, it is not. Data must flow faster than money for it to make money. Otherwise its value is zero. The stock exchanges of the world have long understood this, free data feeds on stock value are delayed by only 15 minutes. Most marketing data is at normally on average one year old. So how valid could then be?

So off you go and ask some random sample of people on the local high street and ask them a series of questions, do you like my product?, how much would you pay?, would you recommend it? and finally their demographics.  You ask me these questions on a Saturday afternoon while I am out shopping and I tell you anything you want to hear to get rid of you, especially if you are offering me and my family an IPAD 3 or a trip to DisneyLand (The LA one and not the cheap one across the channel).

The true and ONLY test to see if someone will buy it is to offer it for sale. Steve Jobs knew it. Never once did he do market research, how would you know if you want to use a tablet which is made of glass and aluminium when the only tablet you have ever used went into your month and you swallowed it. Its just one step too much for the man on the street. So spend the money on the hype and not on the research which will just out of date data.

If you have the product then sell it, if you don’t have the product then allow pre-orders. Marketing has to generate leads which generate sales, whenever you do marketing, research, strategy, planning, analysis, its have a single destination, a sale. If it’s your assignment then the payment is a 1st class honours degree.

Offer it for sale, ask for orders, what modifications would they require to part with their money today. You take the money on a product delivery or return basis, so they never loose out. You take their email and telephone numbers, so they can become in and be part of your focus group, beta test users. You make them part of your user community and send them updates on everything that is happening. They have brought into you and your business and therefore are part of your new family, these are called loyal customers.

If you can’t get 10 people to buy into your concept, parting with real money then its time to go back to the concept drawing board, looking at the business model, customer needs, the products features and benefits and how you will get access to the right group of people who will part with their cash.

Yes, I hear all of you out there saying you need to understand your market, but we need to teach students about action and not information research paralysis. It’s the doing that makes the business and not the research. You don’t see Alan Sugar saying “go and research who will buy cup cakes at Westfields shopping centre”, he just says go out and have a go and come back, someone will get fired. And you know who that will be, it will not be the one doing the sales, it will be the one who spent the last few days researching what to do. In Dragon’s Den, the one with the letter stating they will purchase the product gets funding, the one who saying they have spent £450,000 on research, prototyping and further analysis gets a kick up the back side.

So decide now which one you are going to be?

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Not all businesses are the same, so why should all business support be?

The process of developing a business from the embers of an idea is a mammoth task and the majority of entrepreneurs will take as much help as is available. They call up business link, attend a few HMRC workshops, go to networking events and attend skills development programmes where available.

As newbie to being an entrepreneur you are not sure how long this take and therefore spending money and time on anything has to be seen in the light of moving the business forward.

In the previous years we have seen the simplification of business support and now a major reduction in the support is not making each industry sector look how they can support their own.

There has been a major amount of research done into business clustering and the benefits.

The tech clusters around Universities such as Cambridge, manufacturing in the North West and material engineering in Sheffield. Therefore both the regions and the industry itself needs these clusters to develop, grow and become the defacto region for this type of business. These self-regulating clusters should be the catalyst for regional growth based on local business developing a self help group.

Industry has a long industry of developing such organisations such as the traditional guilds (which still live on in Germany) and Chamber of Commerce, CBI and IOD. However their failure in the past to manage government funded projects is based on individual self-interest and not that of the group, seeing the one profit from helping others in the community.

This is because not all industry is the same! Having network of general business advisors creates a failure point as everyone has to be a generalist and not a specialist. If you are a specialist then providing your services as a consultant is not always done for money. However, if it’s a £50 million project, then who doesn’t want part of this pie.

The important aspect of this support is that those providing the support want to keep these young businesses as members, they know they have to provide the very best to benefit. One mistake and the relationship fails and that business move on without your support, never to be seen again.

So we should be developing our business networks to support start-ups and pay them on the success they have in clustering these businesses, growing them and then ensuring they are exporting. All things that many of our industry sector networks do so well.

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I’m putting you all on the naughty list!

As we come closers to clocking off for this year, I always start to review what has happened and more importantly try and understand how I can do things better next year.

The major concern I see is that the majority of people have not tried to be more enterprising this year. They have tried to do their business as usual, using the same business models, trying to hang on to the same funding models, dead end public sector jobs and even running the same university degrees which lead to zero employment prospects (unistats.direct.gov.uk).

We all have to make changes everyday to continue to develop and it through this development we can ensure we stay with the flow. This should be every person’s manta.  I am always amazed at why we think that doing the same thing for hundreds of years will provide prosperity in this country, whereas there are billions of other people in the world who are constantly looking at how they can develop faster, higher quality, cheaper, more effective methods to do what we have done for hundreds of years. These people are taking advantage of the global economy.

Its only through using innovation, our technology advance, our amazing communication advantage and selling in real time to the global customer we can move the economy forward. Its not through spending money we don’t have on goods we don’t make.

Our resistance to change is shown in the way the UK deals with Europe, the way we run our national infrastructure and how we educate our people. I am a great believer in if its not broken don’t fix it, however sometimes you have to take some hard decisions based on the rest of the planet and not just on the few who can’t be bothered to change (especially when their pension means the young will be paying for it in taxes for the next thirty years).

So lets make 2012, the year that we embrace change and especially entrepreneurial change, making sure that we develop new forms of income, new business models and creating a network of like-minded people who are developing a prosperous future.

So here are some New years resolutions for you for 2012:

  • Make 2012 you most enterprising year!
  • Become a self made Entrepreneur in 2012
  • Employ someone else in your business in 2012
  • Start a new business in 2012
  • Develop multi streams of income in 2012

Talking About Entrepreneurship