I was recently invited to speak at Scott Bader to mark the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the Scott Bader Commonwealth. My title was Combining Entrepreneurship with Stewardship – Lessons for a Long Life.
My lecture took place the day after the by-election won by Andy Burnham. Since then Andy Burnham has set out his vision for the economy in a speech given in Manchester on 29 June.
In his speech Andy Burnham said
‘It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down. Instead it can only be nurtured from the bottom up. It comes from having the power at ground level to make a real difference; from a clear shared vision that everyone can understand and investors can back’.
In my own lecture, I said:
We rarely hear a coherent, systemic vision which describes how, over time, a healthy business sector could thrive within a healthy society, serving its major needs while also making possible the economic growth that any country needs.
Usually we hear a static view of an industry or company, not a dynamic one. People talk about the current state of, say, the pharmaceutical or hospitality industry and argue about how these industries are taxed or regulated.
Wealth creation is a dynamic thing which grows out of the soil of a society – its education system; its culture; its financial institutions; its natural assets; its science, research and development. Its creativity and imagination.
The lecture was delivered with the challenges facing one manufacturing company in particularly in mind. At the same time it represents my own perspective on wealth creation, derived from more than forty years of working in and with businesses. Note my insistence that entrepreneurship matters but so does ownership; that we need new ways – some of which are being pioneered by the Tomorrow’s Enterprise Foundation – to identify talent in young people and channel this into our companies; that the country needs some agreed long term objectives that will not change with every election or ministerial appointment; that regulation should be designed with a focus on the wellbeing of future generations; and that government policy should be holistically designed to encourage the birth, growth, and renewal of healthy UK companies with steward ownership that underpins a long term focus.
Let me know what you think.
Mark.