Trusted Trustees in Technical Test

So we had our first meeting of the IT4CH charity where our brilliant technology ladies joined us. And they immediately made a huge difference. Its obvious that male trustees are utterly useless, and I include myself in that. We had brilliant ideas, we had great initiatives, we had spiffing discussions and we are going to move this forward. Hard. So brilliant stuff. One more trustee will join us soon, but in the interim, we should have fun.

But if there are anybody else who wants to help us? Volunteers, advisors, all welcome to join in and help. We are now starting to initiate projects relating to technology assisting sick children.

Mind you, we can also do with some trustees for the Home Start Hillingdon Charity. We are very happy, we have now confirmed funding from the council. Before people jump on this being a tax payer funded boondoggle, that is not true, the taxpayer money is used to fund a tiny team who train and manage up to 100 volunteers who actually deliver the benefits. Now if that is not community engagement, what is? I am very impressed with the girls in the charity and would appreciate having more trustees to help assist us to make this into something very good.

What else? Well, popped down to Swansea to lecture the MBA students, working with another university to potentially help them with an internship project, started this year’s mentorship with Manchester Business School, working with Essex on curriculum re-design and strategic positioning and finally i am sucking at Farsi, lol.

Welsh Education–some thoughts

As you know, I am closely associated with Swansea University Business School for many years now, am on their advisory board and am a visiting professor there. As a matter of fact I will be going over there again in November to deliver a lecture to the post graduate MBA students. Most probably I will talk about what do you do in your first 100 days of a job. But I digress.

Let me get the initial thoughts out of the way. I think Welsh education is in serious crisis. What it does, what its designed to do and what it feeds back to society, I am not sure that it is working well. Wales to me seem to reduced to some advertisements on BA flights, far too many photographs of puking mewling unconscious drunk young people on the streets of Swansea and Cardiff, heavy unemployment, and generally bad figures all around. But do not take my word for it, see what the Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews has to say on this matter. I quote:

"I will be blunt and I will be candid. In the first six months I have been in this post, I have begun to wonder whether the Higher Education sector in Wales actually wants the Assembly Government to have a higher education strategy, or whether it even believes that there is such a thing as a Welsh higher education sector ..."

"Indeed, I am not clear - eleven years after the National Assembly was created, and thirteen years after our historic referendum vote - that the higher education sector in Wales welcomes devolution or democratic accountability at all. Since our education agenda in Wales is based on the principle of democratisation, that is problematic."

"We have had more higher education institutions per head in Wales than any other part of the UK but have failed to break free from the bottom end of the UK growth and prosperity table. Our HE institutions are small compared with those just over the border. For all the achievements of higher education institutions, they have had only a very limited transformative impact on our economy, and on our global presence and reputation · We are not having a high enough impact in terms of the quality and quantity of our research · For too many in Wales, higher education remains a distant, and irrelevant activity, clouded in mystery.

"If we are to make the changes needed; we also have to be willing to question what may not be needed. We do not want governing bodies that act simply as a bunch of cheer-leaders for university management.

"I was interested to learn recently that some members of university governing bodies have been appointed on the basis of a phone call. Who you know not what you know. It appears that HE governance in post devolution Wales has become the last resting place of the crachach".

For me, a university governing body or advisory board is like the board of directors. They are the trustees for society to ensure that the university sector develops and delivers. If the universities and schools havent delivered, what does that say about the great and good of Wales? (the crachach)?

Did you know that 52% of the funding goes to administration and support services in the Higher Education Sector based upon a PwC Report? Chemistry and Modern languages departments are closing down. Also guess what? Most of the research being done in the universities is public sector research funded by the public sector. I am simply gobsmacked. Where is the value add? Where are the people who create jobs and scientific discoveries and innovation and and and? Where is the research to support that? Where are the students who are taught to be entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists?

I try to do what I can. In my lectures, I bang on about the students going and setting up their own units. Investing their own monies. Teach them about sales. How to generate more revenue. Bang on in these pages about it. And so on and so forth, but if we have to do more, we need people to realise that there is a crisis. I dont think people have realised it at all. And because they havent realised it, the funding is going to start getting cut. At end of the day, this entire convoy of public sector oriented very inefficient and ineffective education is being paid for by the taxpayer. And they are starting to revolt. By that time, we will have ended up with a group of highly useless drunk people who are lying around the streets of Cardiff and Swansea. Like now.

Worries and troubles galore

I am racking my brains on how to raise more money for Home Start. Sustainable money, not something that we are taking off the public purse. I will be approaching the firm to see if some kind of regular funding can be arranged, but something more sustainable has to be established. I have also volunteered to be the photographer for various events where we can raise some dosh. Perhaps a calendar? lol, that should be interesting, but if we are not able to raise some serious thousands of pounds by end of the year, we will be in trouble.

On the other hand, as I had mentioned before. HSBC donated 1000 pieces of kit to the IT4CH charity. That put us in a tizzy. Usually we get smaller quantities of kit so we can turn it around in time and dispatch to various hospitals, but this is really nice of them. We can give some good surprises to quite a lot of hospitals around the country. But we have found some space and its now well settled down.

Incidentally, I finally managed to find the link to the competition submission that I had done for the Whittington Hospital. Here’s the link to the competition website. I like the idea, it links photography with philanthropy. Maybe I can do something like this for Home Start.

Other news, doing a fair bit of mentoring with some students and also trying to get some alumni work going with an old alma mater. God, its painful, like pushing jelly uphill. But we shall overcome and all that nice guff. I also went to Swansea Business School for an advisory board meeting. I will write more about some points which popped up there about the future of business education, but will blog it on my dailysalty site, not here, don't want to bore you guys.

I am also thinking about resigning from WCIT. I am not really sure that I am adding any value there, all the events take place during day time in the city and I just cannot get there.

Charitable activities update

Gosh, I haven't updated this blog for a long time. Well, have been on holiday, no? :)

1. IT4CH trustee meeting

Had an interesting time when I chaired the trustee meeting. Met with a volunteer who is offering to call up IT companies in London to get hold of their old kit and perhaps give donations. I find it humbling to see and meet with these volunteers. They, for no other reason, but to help out others who are more unfortunate than others, spend their own money and time. Wonderful, and this is what I love about humans, despite their propensity to hack off other’s heads and do mayhem, they also love to help others. Attaboy! I am also going to start writing one photo essay on each volunteer or donation per month, hope to get more content generated for the website. Have you visited it yet? More photos coming up soon. Also attended and spoke at some banking and IT dinners. The good part of this is that they pay the charity a honorarium when I do this. Killing two birds with one stone, eh?

2. Swansea teaching

Will be making my annual pilgrimage to Swansea to talk to the young ones about how to succeed (lol), how to manage their money, and what kind of financial management should they learn. Also about career choices and stuff. Will let you know more when that happens, its sometime in October.

3. SIFE Annual launch

Had a nice time with the business advisory group meeting with the SIFE UK launch, met with several students who were all passionate about helping others with doing business projects. One young lady from Durham wanted more help, so might pop up there one day to see what I can help with. My own group relating to LSE here is spinning up, they are hiring more people at the freshers fair for the LSE SIFE group. Will be meeting them next week. So I am quite happy and looking forward to doing much with this project.

4. MBS mentoring

Have signed up to do mentoring with my old alma mater in Manchester. So have submitted few selections for the students. Found it curious that many students were selecting every bloody industry for career choices under the sun. That’s not good, one has to be focussed. You cant say that you want to be in banking and in pharmaceuticals. It shows signs of a confused mind.

5. For some reason, the 100books initiative has gone a bit cold which is a bit of a shame. I was really looking forward to working with that one. Oh! well, no worries, next time :)

I am also inundated with requests to fund people’s bike rides, climbs, marathons, and and and. While I do try to help, its not fun to turn down many. Keeping my powder dry and money for the ones which I am looking at..Another reason why I didnt give any money to

Anyway, more later :)

Small firms in Wales looking for mentors

Ok, so right off the bat, I have to admit to having a sneaky admiration for the Welsh. Of all the home nations, they do not have as strong an identity as the Scots or such a history like the Northern Irish, nor are they as rich as the English. However, by Jove, they are just wonderful in their warmth, their togetherness, their desire to be one with the land, their love of the language and so on and so forth. This is highly visible when you see things like football and rugby games, but those are the very visible signs. It is at the informal levels that you can see evidence that a strong, yet understated, current of nation building is happening. Mix in the rumours that King Arthur was in Wales, dragons can still be found in some of the valleys, mention the bravery of the miners and the ancient history of tin mining in Wales, the ruined castles, and all go forward to make a plucky little admirable country.

With this background in mind, I agreed a few years ago to teach at Swansea University School of Economics and Business. Once or twice every year, I toddle over to Swansea, spending eight hours on the train, to meet with the students and faculty at the business school, talking about a variety of topics ranging from banking, financial institutions, stochastic calculus, regulatory regimes, career opportunities in Banking, etc. In addition, I am also part of the advisory board of the business school. Something that we in the board are heavily pushing is to try and fix two things within Wales. (1) The low productivity of the Welsh economy and (2) the diabolically low rate of job creation and ‘Small and Medium Scale Enterprise’ (SME) creation.

Consequently, the business school has been heavily engaged in pushing entrepreneurship and economics as a discipline, in conjunction with a variety of local Welsh authorities, sprinkled with a liberal dosage of EU funding. It is a steep climb. One way of checking the health of the local economy is to walk up and down the high street. Over the past three years, the Swansea high street has been-to put it politely- pockmarked with a whole series of boarded up shops, charity shops, pound shops, kebab shops and the like. The number of buildings with weeds growing out of their walls and roofs is astounding. I have never seen anything like this before. In other words, the demand is simply not there or even if it is there, the demand is being fulfilled from somewhere else rather than from Swansea high street. One does not need to say that an economy exhibiting a high street like this has challenges.

Today I was shocked to hear that in Swansea, 42% of the jobs belong to the public sector. Tesco is the largest employer with a majority of jobs relating to the bottom of the food chain and the next one is Admiral (the insurance firm), where the jobs relate mainly to call centres. Now, there is nothing wrong with this, but one cannot really have high productive growth, good value generation and good high paying white collar jobs simply based upon call centre, checkout and public sector jobs. It is like a bloody inverted pyramid with most of the jobs frankly being administrative /unproductive from the public sector or from very large firms. In the event that one large firm decides to up and leave, it shocks the locality horribly, which doesn’t recover at all, as we have seen over the past few decades losing one large manufacturing firm after another.

One needs the manufacturing jobs, the high value added service jobs and other similar jobs. Research has pointed out that a good heavy duty sprinkling of small and medium scale enterprises provides the bedrock of prosperity, jobs, good social relations, high productivity growth, demand and in turn offers the funding for good public services. In this case, we are upside down, as we are overloaded with a public sector which is being funded via debt or grants and in the coming decades, both avenues of funding will either become very expensive or rare.

So what do we do? What the business school is therefore doing in conjunction with various Welsh governmental bodies is try to encourage the formation and proper functioning of SMEs in Wales. At this moment, the programme is primarily oriented towards Swansea and Bangor environs, but will extend to all of Wales in the fullness of time.

The programme is based upon a pilot programme run in North West England where SME owner/managers were given up to £10,000 equivalent of training, coaching, education and mentoring. This resulted (as measured by an independent evaluation) in an equivalent return of minimum £15k value to each firm’s owner, average turnover increase of £200k, profit increases and 1/5^th of the pilot study members went on to set up new ventures. Soft benefits included increased job creation, better leadership, improved staff development and a better motivated workforce. These are good results and now it is being rolled out to Wales with an aim to train 1000 SME owners in 2010 – 2012.

I have set up and run several small enterprises and one of the biggest problems a small enterprise owner has is that there is nobody to talk to, nobody to bounce ideas off, nobody to tell or teach about technical skills, no ability to grow from a single man team to a multi man team, no ability to stand back and evaluate oneself and the strategy of the firm. The programme hits these points. The owner / managers devote 2 days a month for 10 months in a variety of targeted intervention programmes relating to leadership, team management, economics, financial, strategy, business problem solving, etc.

Part of the programme includes a 1-2-1 coaching session with a professional coach over the 10 months. They also have a volunteer mentor from business, with whom they end up spending about an hour a month or so. The mentor (they are debating whether to call them as grey wolves or wise owls) provides an independent voice to the SME owner/manager and just provides that little bit of help and independent advice that they so desperately need. The first meeting is face to face, but the subsequent meetings are over email/phone or over a beer. The first sessions have just started in January 2010 and the programme is looking for suitably qualified bankers, consultants, relationship managers and business people who have experience of SME’s (either directly owning, working for or lending/advising them).

If there is anybody in and around Wales who can assist, or who has any links with Wales or who travels to Wales on business or perhaps just somebody who might be interested in making a direct difference in getting Wales up the prosperity curve, please drop me a note. I am very happy to link you up with the programme manager. Don’t be shy or sell yourself short, many times these SME owners just need somebody to talk to and have a bit of a common sense debate and discussion over business matters. They are not looking for heavy duty Lord Digby Jones, but Joe Blogs who is in business. This is obviously good for us, but more importantly, it’s good for our country and good for Wales.

Looking forward to hearing from you.