I continue to ponder enterprise and entrepreneurism and have recently settled down into three broad themes.  To me, and it really is only my opinion, the challenges of business are creative, operational and service level.  With that in mind I feel syllabus can be more easily defined and delivered.

Beginning with creativity, not every business will be that creative, in fact this is perhaps where we can begin to separate out ‘business person’ from entrepreneur.  Although each business faces challenges that need overcoming, and a creative mind can assist here, not every
business has this central to its purpose or to its founder’s key strengths.  For example many businesses simply reproduce another business model but in a different location or with a slight twist.  These businesses are low on creativity but nevertheless successful.   We need to explore whether or not we want a specific educational and training element of our delivery focused on this requirement.  I personally feel we do, but also that we need to separate it and then reintroduce it to be sure that it has
been adopted.  When it is buried within a business plan lesson it is perhaps lost forever.

The operational perspective is the one I seem to be most often asked about, though the conversation normally begins with the request to deliver enterprise to the students or cohort.   Without some sort of operational efficiency no business is going to survive.  This is the core business studies stuff, available from introductory level right through to post-graduate.  It is the bread and butter of business schools, and let’s stop knocking them while we are the subject, and allows any business to flourish. An understanding of systems, of HR or marketing all allows a business to prosper.  It has become trendy of late to criticise business schools but in truth we are often missing the point there.  The purpose of business schools is to produce efficient effective managers.  The sort you want running your business.  If you run your business you want, or at least need, to be that too!

The last of our trio is customer service.  My goodness this seems to be lacking these days in all walks of life.  You see
when you set up a business it is there to serve your customers, not you.  You and ‘it’ need to ensure you are providing what the customers want in the way they want it and at a price they want.  This does not mean running around and trying to please everyone, what is does mean is looking after those you have set out to please.  Cancelations should not happen, lateness should not happen, service outage should not happen.  We need to work with people to develop the mind-set of service.  If you left your last job because the customers annoyed you and now you want to set up your own business think  again!

 I have always been interested in the interconnectedness of things, of cause and effect, of actions and of consequences.  Playing this over in  my mind I started wondering if actually problems are simpler to resolve than we realise.  
 
The way I see it a lack of connection or a lack of awareness of  what might connect brings about most problems.  Don’t overthink this though- I’m not  saying we need to map out all connections.  What I am suggesting is that if we  think of a few simple principles and then work with them our lack of awareness of connections won’t matter so much.  
 
If we step outside our own little fog of expectations and instead look at the world as an on-going process neither for us or against us we may be  able to do some interesting things.   I think we have got hung up  on our selfish right to do stuff regardless of impact.     Take a simple case in  point – the drive home.  Really we  are all just trying to get home; we are not in a race, not police officers, just  people all trying to get somewhere.   So what do we do, do we just get along?  Often we stress ourselves about who is  ‘right’ or who has the ‘right’.  Rather than just pulling out slightly to  avoid the bonnet of a misplaced car we feel the need to blare our horn and  swear.    Where  is the interconnection here you may ask?   I can guarantee your stress has not reduced. Someone’s error has made you cross, or rather you have allowed someone’s  error to make you cross, and in addition you have now angered another person. Both of you have gone off  in a slightly worse mood even though nothing actually happened.  
 
This ripples through the rest of the day, now you may be a little more snappy at work, a little more curt with your partner and so on and so forth.  None of these needed have happened as the ‘benefit’ of imposing your right outweighs its ‘cost’.  Try another example.  On the way home from a bar you are all having a sing-song,   a harmless bit of fun you tell yourself. 
But in so doing you have woken a few people sleeping, scared the odd  individual making their way home and put pressure on the bar’s licence renewal –  is that really worth it?  Could you not have waited until there was no one around? 



At work we can do a similar thing, it’s not my job we can say, not my responsibility, I leave at 5.  We can push our rights to the fore regardless of the impact they have on others.  This is not a manifesto for obedience and puritanical values mind.  I am not advocating mindless compliance.  What I want to suggest  is that we think a little about the action we are doing and if our only
justification is that it is ‘our right’ then we may want to stop and think. 



Your need to leave at 5pm is based on a combination of your right and desire to get home (I guess), but that individual you serve that pushes your  time five minutes over may  actually have a far better day not having missed the close of business – let’s face it there are hundreds of genuine reasons for lateness.   Now the stress of lateness has been replaced by gratitude and a more positive mood, it has cost you nothing  and that’s a powerful thing to have done, to have changed someone’s life for the  better……