Enterprise Facilitation® UK Open Day

We are pleased to announce our first ever Enterprise Facilitation® UK Open Day. This will provide a chance to visit the community of Rossendale in Lancashire, where the Sirolli Institute have worked with a social enterprise called PEER (People Encouraging Enterprise in Rossendale) to develop an Enterprise Facilitation® project - the first in Europe.
The project has been running for 5 years now and has achieved some remarkable results, both in terms of supporting individual entrepreneurs, but also in helping to transform the enterprise culture of the community.
The open day will provide the chance to meet with and learn from the people in the community who have helped to make this project a success. You can find out more at UK Open Day
There will be a charge to attend the open day with surpluses being used to help support the work of PEER.

No it wasn’t the set of a Disney movie...the indians were real!

You may recall the postings about the visit to the Sitting Bull College and to the Standing Rock Indian reservation few months ago. In North Dakota we met an outstanding leader and educator named (Big) Dave Archambould. Dave is also the Chairman of the American Indian Business Leaders association, a non per profit organization that aim to prepare American Indian students for leadership positions in business and in life.

The association encourages college and high school students to gather once a year to listen, learn and exchange ideas. The trick is that it is the students who pick the venue for their meetings and who have to raise the funds to attend the gatherings. You can imagine then why we met across the street from Disneyworld in California!

Fun aside, we did some work, and in particular we explored the Trinity of Management® as it applies to start up businesses. Many Indian Colleges have both entrepreneurial classes and micro lending for future entrepreneurs. As you can imagine to accesss the funding prospective entrepreneurs have to enrol in business classes that focus on business plan preparation with an emphasis on literacy and numeracy skills. The results are not good and few entrepreneurs finish the courses and avail themselves of available finances. Those who do often struggle in the business once removed from the comfort of the classroom environment. A better way needs to be found and the Trinity of Management® could offer a more natural way for American Indians to go into business. After all they understand very well that in a harsh environment you don’t survive alone. I told them that in business the problems can come at you from every direction and that it is therefore important to keep an eye on the entire horizon. It takes three people to keep a clear focus on 360% of horizon…one person will never be able to do it alone!

Will they remember when they will start their businesses? Who knows, but I am pretty sure that they will link my face to a very happy time in their lives, with all thos

Spring in Napa Valley, California. Green everywhere, including the MBA class!

The New College of California has recently launched a “socially responsible and ecologically sustainable MBA program” that aims to fuse “social justice, ecological considerations, and community involvement and alternative forms of management ownership”. John Stanton, the director of the Green MBA program, and Jane Lorand who is faculty at the School, extended an invitation to meet both students and alumni in Santa Rosa. Martha and I made the drive from Sacramento on a spectacular spring day last week.

We decided to go there the “wrong” way and we braved the Silverado Trail, a narrow, ancient, winding road thru the hills that gave us the opportunity of take in the California spring.

John and the students met us initially in town. The first lecture I gave in their classroom, an old railway yard! The evening meeting was in a beautiful student house, in open country, surrounded by fields and trees.

Students and alumni, some 50 of them, had “Ripples” on their study course and the day was therefore more of a “getting to know each other” than a one way lecture. They knew what we were all about and that gave me the possibility of listening to their hopes and to answer their questions. It seemed to me that what is pioneered at the NCC will become the norm throughout the academic world. It is not possible nowadays to do an MBA without understanding the social and environmental implications of commercial decisions. It is equally impossible to conceive of environmental decisions that cannot be financed or even of a personal lifestyle that cannot be sustained for economic reasons.

The Green MBA students are neither hippies nor “wall street” types; they are a new brand of individual for which there is neither name nor stereotype. May they prosper and multiply!

Dr. Ernesto Sirolli

Sirolli in the Press!