If We All Lead, What Follows?

Surely fashion doesn't a play a part in something as serious as the support of business growth?

Oh yes it does - and, what's more - I believe that some current trends are dragging focus away from core business fundamentals.

I can remember a time (yes, I know, that kind of comment makes me sound 101 years old!) when early stage business guides used to attempt a holism, starting with market analyses, picking up with innovation and going straight on through sequentially to the back-end of bookkeeping and compliance.

There's something different happening these days. There has been a massive profileration of academics involved in business research and a massive increase in the State commitment to early stage business support. And the two feed off each other in their need to seem relevant.

Academics need to generate research ideas to generate funding, to generate growth, to attract students, to further their own careers etc.

In terms of our national economy, manufacturing captial migrates Eastwards, the rump of our industrial base continues to contract, our services sector both struggles and fails to replace our core wealth generative capacities, regional regeneration fights post-industrial bleakness, overall and youth unemployment rises........everyone looks to the entrepreneur as saviour.

There is an inbuilt success narrative which runs like this - we need high growth companies, entrepreneurs are inherently brilliant as they are our saviours, the basics are bound to be right because entrepreneurs are brilliant, but where they might be needing help is in Leadership skills to back up their innate brilliance.......

Academics are neatly both fuelling and matching this demand for great big bundles of Leadership stuff. They are funded by the same State that so valorises the success narratives of entrepreneurship and, driven by the current fashion in much of the human sciences for big, subjective, individualised narratives, they are producing vast amounts of research that prioritises the agency of heroic individuals over the structure of institutions and resources.

It's a heady mix of go-getterism that pushes Leadership right to the front of the stage.

I see throughout the early stage business environments in which I move - various incubators, advisory link-us, websites, magazines, networking groups and forums - that everyone is getting the Leadership bug.

Plenty of folk with zero or tiny numbers of staff are getting themselves drilled in the theory and practice of Leadership.

I can see it now.......hosts of inspirational and interpersonally adept proto-leaders descending from the crossover classrooms of academic and State agency support, only to be brought up short by this kind of exchange with their first putative commercial client:

"Tell me, what are the features and benefits of your offering and why should I buy from you instead of our long-estbalished supplier?"

....."Oh, you don't need to be worried about that kind of old hat - shift over to me.....I'm a fully fledged Leader of No-one!"

Perhaps we need to be more critical about research and support fashions and concentrate more on the fundamentals of fashioning sustainable businesses.

- Malcolm Evans is a founding partner of The Cultueship Practice which researches corporate culture and business ethics and implements productive organisational development strategies.