It is a safe, dignified and driven place which adds value beyond any reasonable expectations. I’ve been, very occasionally, to other schools like this. The people who work in places like this are rainmakers and saints.

And tonight, young person after young person performed beautifully….two girls did Fairytale in New York; a big, strong, vibrant older girl a quite incredible The Power of Love; a beautiful young man O Holy Night…..and so on.

And where the hell is it all taking them……

I met another young man – mid-20s – earlier on. He got a first last year in business from a Manchester University. A friend of mine taught him and thinks he should be a superstar in the making. He’s been in London for almost a year, fruitlessly searching for a job beyond the menial tasks he performs in bar work and leaflet distribution to keep a thin roof over his head. He searches and searches and searches…..along with countless thousands of others.

He’s tired and ground down with it – but still too proud to accept his bus fare when I tried to insist he take the pathetic £5 reimbursement from me.

This morning I spent an hour catching up on the coffee house-gossip about which part of the public sector in Manchester was dissing another, who was in line and who wasn’t for the latest flight-of-fantasy “enterprise support” roles, training grant streams as budget subvention not delivery obligations……wave upon wave of self-indulgent politicking utterly removed from turning the tide of joblessness and under-employment. Fun to listen to but…..

Tonight when I got home I watched a tv news – a ceaseless and inchoate hubbub of metropolitan, politically correct fetishes around the media, Westminster in-fighting and, to cast it further, a slew of stereotyped Liberal post-colonialism.

We hurtle into the shallowest of Christmases I can ever remember, deeply riven with unaddressed chasms; so little of our fundamentals usefully joined-up, productive community hopelessly buried.

If we can’t provide for our young people – here, now, at home – then it’s all a damn joke.

Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter……

There are two core factors to rebuilding growth – these are the amount of capital invested in UK businesses and the volume of exports.

With the consumer economy largely continuing to flatline – even people with jobs are cautious about spending as they are scared by the prospect of losing them – now more than ever we need to focus on making things and selling them abroad.

In the good times, Government will claim credit for stimulating success in all manner of ways – but it actually isn’t that complicated a mix.

What government is singularly bad at is realising that there is far too much State spending – we need to shift a good deal of the money off the balance sheet of UK Government plc and on to the balance sheet of UK Corporate PLC.

But in the absence of any deep political will about doing anything much radical about this core allocation of GDP – the chancellor today spoke about trimming a couple of percent off Whitehall departmental budgets – we need to be much more radical about investment and export.

It is no good carrying on bashing the existing banks. They have chosen the risk profile they now operate to and it is unlikely to change very much. They bank hard assets and existing trade – they are not very much interested in future growth stories.

But we have to be. The current channels of distributing capital into business and industry are failing. We are commercially woefully under-capitalised – US business is broadly two thirds equity and one third debt. We are the reverse of that – and debt is not easy to come by, either.

We need to see more about national and regional investment institutions away from the tried and failed distribution networks – the banks, the enterprise agencies, local government. The route from money to productive investment needs to be much more direct. The chancellor today spoke about allowing ISAs to target SME public companies – which essentially means AIM. It’s an OK idea – but it is tiny against the overall needs.

There was some more talk of a “business bank” but at the moment this is looking to be more like a credit line than a fresh, new institution.

Other, existing piecemeal initiatives such as Funding for Lending just push more money into the “mushy middle” – pools of money which under-invest, or banks’ balance sheets; safe, big company schemes – more finance as reward than finance for growth.

Secondly, earlier stage investment needs more visible and vigorous tax breaks. The breaks need to go much deeper and the ceilings need to be considerably higher. We need to operate on the basis that only by creating more will we have more overall to spend.

(To be fair, though, the incremental fall over the life of this government of corporation tax from 28p to 21p is easily overlooked: this is now becoming a major incentive in either returning to this country or moving to this country. It is this kind of boldness and faith in momentum that now needs to be placed in the earlier stage/smaller company environment.)

Thirdly, we need to incentivise exports with significant corporate tax breaks – at least 10p in the pound for extra exports from where companies are performing now. We have massively under-leveraged export potential – both for the sake of investment and of incentive.

The chancellor had no easy task today – but tiny-scale fiddling while the UK stagnates is not the most convincing answer to sparking business growth.

Sharp Project – as it is awarded what must now be in excess of £30m, is there, please, a cost-benefit analysis to hand?
The mainstream digital community in Manchester is awash with stories of how the strategic focus on Sharp seems to absorb all sector support but ignores the main existing centres of digital activity, like the Northern Quarter. It is also perceived to be hugely strategically fixated on broadcast, with little mention of digital telephony, marketing and apps, all areas where Manchester genuinely excels.
This hasn’t been helped by the recent publication by the City Council of yet another set of “digital” aspirations with, as far as many of my network can tell, no widespread consultation of businesspeople actually involved in the sector.
Not for one second to denigrate the hard-working individuals themselves within Sharp, a good few of its tenants seem to be smaller, service-type operations of limited scalability (there’s absolutely nothing wrong with individuals pursuing their trade but there is potential harm in a misunderstanding of economic development dynamics). There is also a degree of displacement, whereby existing companies have been attracted in from outside, where they were already trading.
Tendencies such as these raise big question marks about net economic benefits – about bang for the economic development buck.
I remember analysing a “business incubator” in West Yorkshire as long ago as 1984 and discovering widespread “displacement” before it was even a common term in the economic development lexicon.
Besides claims-making around job creation and unique economic benefit, the “hub” term is also much in evidence.
I have written consistently around my own research-informed beliefs that the growth benefits of housing businesses from broadly comparable sectors under a common roof are frequently overstated.
An economic development expert of mine has recently done a good deal of comparative analysis around this topic and would confirm my suspicions that usually not a ton of co-creation goes on beyond the sharing of coffee and sugar.
So, what about the Sharp Project? By any yardstick it is now proving to be really expensive (which, to be fair, is not the same issue as value). If that is money which has to be spent on exactly this kind of infrastructure, or be otherewise lost to the area, then it’s unequivocally a good thing.
If, however, there are choices to be made around where the capital costs and operational costs could otherwise be spent, I’d prefer a little less brand hype of the “digital hub” variety and a bit more evidence-led analysis put explicitly into the public domain at this stage, before more money is allocated.
So please send me a cost-benefit analysis by return and, if favourable, I will distribute it far and wide amongst the mainstream digital and business communities and diffuse the scepticism that is currently somewhat blunting the Sharp message.

This flawed model runs along the lines of: early stage idea and founders, drip a little seed money in and see how they get on; developing project, drip in a bigger bit of cash and see how they get on; emerging company, stuff in a good bit more money and probably some professional management alongside…..and so on…..ever so incremental as she goes.

But she often doesn’t go anywhere in particular. And the friends & family money and the angel money which is the most precious of all is often squandered and creative goodwill yet again goes a-begging for the sake of structured opportunity.

There is an over-reductionist view of business creation, possibly born of protective professional boundaries and over-heated by the frenzied gabble of the professional “enterprise support” brigade, both public sector and academic.

Accountants do figures. Innovation experts claim to spark innovation. Marketeers craft messages. But business doesn’t run along neatly segmented axes of figures, innovation and messages. It follows its own visceral rhythms.

The above is why so very, very few successful businesses are seen dead in the much-vaunted incubators. Or rather, they would be found dead if they expected to grow right through from seed to major scale within wackily-painted but ultimately stifling walls.

So it’s goodbye to stairstepping for me and a much more explicit embrace of superventuring.

By that I mean locating and refining alpha IP, then treating this IP, sufficient investment capital and alpha human capital pari passu as resources which need to be melded together vigorously and in high volume from the very outset. Priority ceases to be on the “founder”, the “investors” or the “intellectual property” – everything is subordinate to excellence of resource and excellence of delivery This is adult business, not business as childish collage.

This is where and why we have founded KKE this week.

The “perfect storm” is being whipped up by cloud computing. Our IP is in our absolute certainty that the outright winners from cloud computing will not be in cloud computing.

That’s all you will hear from us for the moment – apart from the founding mission that we are leaders of the journey from post-enterprise IT to mobilised IS. And in due course you will also be hearing more and more about SEE – the Socially Extensible Enterprise (all three terms are our trademark principles).

We not recruiting. We are mobilising; talking quietly to alpha people, who either will or won’t. For the alpha, though, the impossible is a challenge to circumvent. For the rest, everything is impossible…..just another tiresome stairstep to nowhere in particular.

I’m Going Public identified the commonplace public sector tendencies to empire build without any tangible value creation, to add staff virtually endlessly in the absence of having any clear purpose and to bring in hoards of outside consultants in place of having either the capability or the strategy to achieve anything real.

These quite tragic wastes of money and resources have been underlined again and again this week with insights shared by both existing and former public sector employees, largely from those sections which lay claim to economic growth and support. Their horror stories include:

1. Several instances where people – often senior – known to have failed (and sometimes people who are downright damaging to both institutions and individuals) are reshuffled into related organisations in a gutless evasion of responsibility.

2. Countless instances of “Emperors New Clothes”, where agencies have initiated multiple failed projects yet continue to spew out self-aggrandising marketing claims.

3. Complicity in the all-but permanent use of massively expensive external consultants, often despite having high in-house expenditure on the very same areas. It is well-known that the public sector squanders £billions on IT but the practice of evading in-house responsibility by letting consultants gorge themselves on fees is in fact spread right across many operational areas. The sheer scale of this unchecked gravy train is mind-boggling.

4. And perhaps the most singularly vivid individual case – a senior and respected online agency founder who left a position with a civic agency tasked with promoting creative industry growth a few years ago. He had a profound, guilt-ridden sense that the inability of that organisation to achieve anything useful was bordering on criminal dereliction of duty.

- These ghastly organisations and agencies need to be shunned, pilloried and shut down.

I’M GOING PUBLIC!

I’ve been appointed chief executive. I’ve negotiated my 40 days paid leave (important people in the public sector always “take leave”, I’ve learned. They don’t “have holidays” like ordinary people – and they certainly don’t have next to no time off, like real businesspeople).

I’ve selected my PA. I’m considering whether to have a Special Assistant. Bob over in Civic Alive! has one, so I guess it’s a no-brainer that I need one as well. Can you imagine turning up at a Regional Commissariat meeting on one’s own, without a single Special Assistant?!

Maybe it’d be better to have two. There’s no way that I am having my organisation folded back into someone else’s! Oh no, in this new world of harsh austerity it’s all about who’s biggest survives!

And about always looking at one’s Blackberry in meetings. I’ve now got the latest model!

I’ve got my deputy and she’s got her two assistant deputies. I guess they will be hiring their own PAs as soon as possible.

It’s all going really well and building up quickly. So much so that the nice young man at the recruitment agency suggested they should go on a retainer, as well as their commission. That seems very reasonable as we really have them at our beck and call at the moment and who knows how many people are going to be recruited before we are anywhere near fully staffed up!

He’s had some really useful suggestions. Given the importance of what we are doing, we are obviously going to need in-house heads of Finance and Operations. With deputies; oh yes, and PAs for each. In fact, you can’t possibly run Finance and Operations functions off just a director, a deputy director and PAs. What happens when someone is away on leave? That will create holes. We are going to have to have assistant directors at the very least – plus PAs – until we can build fully rounded-out departments.

And that’s obviously making some additional big holes in our functional capacity. I think I’m OK with sorting IT – everyone in the know around the city seems to be using the permanent contractors from MacroBIG. They really seem to know their way around the latest offerings from IBM!

You can’t beat having your own expertise in-house as well, though, so we’ve recruited the former head of IT from Barnsdale East Council, which was folded into Barnsdale Central Council. He’s a real live wire. Apparently they built a web site as early as 2006 and it now has an email inquiry system for some of the council’s services!

I’ve left the actual team-building to his own discretion. I think he’s planning to bring his former deputy and two assistants over. Obviously they’ll need new PAs – you can’t expect everyone to be travelling distances in the morning.

The recruiters have actually shown great initiative and anticipated how quickly all of this is growing; they’ve brought us a great new Head of HR & Organisational Development. Apparently it was highly opportune for us that Bitpart Carpets in Pitsborough sadly went into liquidation recently and put such an outstanding candidate back on the market.

I’ll leave it to them to sort out a deputy and appropriate assistants. And these new people will no doubt want to be involved in selecting their own PAs.

For the time being I guess that only leaves Marketing at the organisational level. It needn’t be anything too developed at this stage. I’d image an overall head, plus a deputy. And a couple of assistants. Being creative types I’d expect they will want a little above the usual PAs – probably a grade or two up. So we might need a couple of PAs as well to get things going.

And, to be fair, you can’t really expect the IT people to cope with the huge demands of running a website as well as all the infrastructure. That’ll probably be another three or four people. And god knows how this requirement is going to balloon if and when we start wanting to interact with people outside! I was thinking about bringing this either under the overall umbrella of IT, or Marketing, but the recruitment people advise that it would probably be best as a stand alone website division with its own dedicated director. I’ll be guided on this one. You have got to be so on-message these days!

Operationally there are obviously some quite big obstacles that we will have to overcome on our journey to playing a full role in supporting the regrowth of the fabric of the region. We’ve already plugged ourselves deeply into the area’s public-private partnership ecosystems on this and are rapidly getting up to speed.

To be prudent, we have already brought on board a Director of European Relations to make sure that we are aligned with the main flows of European grant support in case the horrendous local level cuts go any deeper. (It’s so important that the public sector weighs-in and rescues the private sector!) She’s brought her own PA over with her so that’s got that side of things up and running nice and smartly, although I expect it will require an extra research assistant or two very shortly.

And just to make sure that we really hit the ground running and know where we are going, we have hired in SocialFABRIC, the big and established consultancy in Public-Private Purpose Positioning & Provisioning. It’s great – they kept us on tenterhooks over resource but they pulled out all the stops and have been able to parachute a 12-strong team straight into us and they have promised me that they can keep up a strong presence here almost indefinitely! We’ve put in a couple of temporary PAs to support them – you can’t let yourself go mad on permanent staff these days.

SocialFABRIC are brilliantly aligned to our regional BIG HUB vision. Apparently their thought leadership has already helped confer their highest level of National Hubmaster status on no fewer than 26 other UK cities and towns already!

Do you know something? As soon we decide on a general idea of what we are meant to be doing (nothing too specific was mentioned at my interview but, hey, you mustn’t stifle creativity!) and – more importantly – what our name and mission statement are, there’s going to be absolutely no stopping us!

And that high (too high in my opinion) proportion of debt in the UK funding equation remains under considerable pressure.

I went to a British Banking Association briefing/Q&A this week and the bankers were rounded on with an explicit fury by business owners. But I think the anger represented more than the restrictions on lending; I am seeing all around the country an increasing frustration about the core conditions under which we continue to seek to do business.

The banking reality is that the lending baseline has moved considerably higher up the risk table since 2008 and will not be moving back down to any great extent any time soon, whatever of various piecemeal government initiatives such as Funding for Lending.

But to some extent this clamour for lending only masks the deeper, fundamental reality: we are not very good capitalists in the UK. We have far too little of our national wealth committed to our productive commercial and industrial base by way of equity.

Our general debt to equity ratio is toppy by about the difference between the U.S. and UK models, that is by about that flimsy third, which is a very flimsy third indeed.

Our national culture and, indeed, our political leadership, has consistently over-valourised financial services against primary production. Our tax system has consistently viewed primary production as an income stream to be exploited, not as bedrock to be nurtured (and thus increasing overall tax take through growth).

The debt on which our economy has rested is fragile. It relies on confidence, constant growth and exponential leverage. With the current collapse and ongoing flatlining in confidence, growth and exponential leverage, it will be extremely hard to re-ignite this fragile vortex with the re-application of debt alone.

This is why bank bashing (although the banks seriously need to get their acts together in a number of respects) is partly a sideshow. This is why the seemingly random but ongoing initiatives around freeing-up lending are only partially connecting with business sentiment.

Yes, a superior lending line does need to be urgently in place for those growing companies which can handle repayment schedules confidently.

But much of the economy is underwater – and will remain so – for issues much more fundamental than the want of a loan.

It’s time to go back to the basic tenets of capitalism and the biggest one of those is having lots of resources committed to long-term growth. Without adherence to that, all the extra debt we hear about is simply further mortgaging an even weaker future to an even more flimsy present.

The argument seems to be that if you put a heap of startups together, there will be a significant level of productive cross-fertilisation.

I have been around the startup scene for quite a few years. Apart from a little esprit de corps around the pressure of overly-long hours and coffee sharing, I have never discovered much deep commercial synergy amongst startups in close proximity.

All that often happens is that there is a supply of subsidised office space – which is not to be sniffed at when it comes to suppressing startup costs.

But there’s currently an epidemic of hubs and clusters. The state sector is providing more and more whackily-painted startup units and there’s a rash of private initiatives that seek membership fees.

It’s the umbrella term “digital” that has largely driven this outbreak of hubmania and clusterfuss in our larger cities.

The problem is that “digital” covers a massively wide spectrum of activity. Digital is an increasingly common and standardised business delivery channel – it is neither a clear-cut business sector, nor an extended family of sub-sectors which creates obvious inter-trading overlaps.

However, digital startups, although operating in distinctly different sectors, may ultimately in quite a few cases be competing in the same labour pool for talent and in the same general corporate IT purchasing pools for their customers.

There is thus no easy commonality in digital that automatically brings the “ecosystems” which the inexperienced but insistent enterprise support sector espouses……there is substantial difference and sometimes some commercial competition.

The misconception is based on the flawed assumption that placing digital startups together will create the extended synergies of a good, old-fashioned industrial supply chain. It doesn’t.

All of this is why we have recently thrown our weight behind VaultPAD (VP), an extended accelerator concept across the travel sector in its broadest sense.

From a virtual worldwide presence spanning Seattle, Manchester and Singapore, there is now a very real and fast-growing anchor in Manchester (with smaller physical presences as well in the other two locations).

There is a central office and, crucially, half-a-dozen high potential projects underway. Some of these are seed projects from the VP in-house team but they are now joined by a couple of others brought in by outside promoters. Across all of the projects involved there are now approaching 20 people. As of next Easter there could easily be 50 (and there are several more exciting projects across various stages of participation discussions).

The key is the core sectoral knowledge which can develop non-compete projects. There is a deep accumulation of travel sector commercial experience, underpinned by access to contemporaneous data APIs. Everyone is being fed rich growth nourishment. No-one is biting at each others’ heels and no-one is quietly starving whilst hubmania and clusterfuss rage all around. The accelerator “umbrella” is pitched at just the right height to bring cohesion and shareable advantage.

We have written and spoken at length this year about our concept of “Wellheads” – integrated knowledge chains which can establish and sustain multifarious but broadly sectoral commercial activity over long periods of time. This economic development philosophy will underpin other major initiatives we currently have planned.

And with VaultPAD we are now extremely confident that we have a Travel Wellhead of immense promise. You might miss VP at the moment as we quietly build away behind the babble and clamour of the hubmania and clusterfuss……but we’re on our way, all right.

One of the calls is for beefing up the LEPs, those 39 largely anonymous bodies which issue occasional, general and aspirational platitudes (everyone wants to be a “digital hub”, everyone plans for “21st century infrastructure” and everyone espouses “new ways of partnership working”.

LEPs aren’t going to work. With very limited exceptions, they haven’t worked in their present format and they won’t work with tinkering. Regional Development Agencies were done away with for very good reasons. Rebuilding them piece-by-piece as LEPs isn’t changing the fundamentals. LEPs (RDAs reborn), if funded, will in all likelihood create an oversupply of commercial premises and duplicate unrealistic priorities both inside and across other LEP regions.

Another plan is to increase and extend the Regional Growth Fund, that very-slow-to-pay-out rewarder of existing major corporate success and prop-upper of stalled local authority pet projects. All manner of previous regional investment schemes struggled for exactly the same reasons – with a handful of notable exceptions, few truly innovative and potentially high impact projects will be selected by civil servants who have little understanding of commercial innovation, a bias towards “big name” corporates, and an instinctive liking for public sector proposals.

So, the same old flows of regional economic support strategies are met with counter flows and so it goes on………like the Wildebeest which start out their migration journey in a straight line, they start to cross and re-cross a river. Confusion mounts, chaos reigns and the only output is vast wastage and exhaustion: herd instincts and hard lessons ignored.

The intention is laudable – the rebalancing and kick-starting of economic growth, particularly activity in the regions.

But these things are not necessarily capable of being delivered cost-efficiently by distinctly regional bodies, outside a tactical investment capability that does not perpetuate the biases of RGF (if such a thing is practically possible) and also with the exception of redressing the excessively SE bias of major infrastructure spend (if such a thing is politically possible). The CBI is currently trying to strike a policy balance between regional possibilities and the structures capable of delivery.

Whatever, as things currently are, the more I see of this Wildebeest Economics, these self-cancelling and largely ineffective cross currents of vastly expensive activity, the more I am personally convinced that we need to step back to a bigger, enabling agenda.

Debate has classically also been unhelpfully polarised between interventionist and non-interventionist approaches. It was Lord Heseltine himself who once famously vowed, “I will intervene before breakfast, I will intervene before lunch, I will intervene before tea and I will intervene before dinner.” (Incidentally, is it just me, or are others feeling just a teeny bit patronised by now as, somewhat creakier, Tarzan girds himself perhaps one last time to sally North and save us poor regionals?)

Two direct problems result in terms of national/regional economic balance when the interventionist/non-interventionist dualism dictates the debate. As mentioned, it can result in a torrent of ineffective interventions. In the non-interventionist camp, it can also result in “non-intervention”, or limited intervention, becoming blanket cover for rank cluelessness. This is particularly a problem in an era of “professionalised” (i.e. inexperienced in the real world) political leadership.

Our central and local government has become obsessed with control of all things. It assumes that state action can achieve all things. It is a curse of modern politics, nationally and locally, that business experience has become woefully rare in a State that relies on capitalist enterprise.

It is in this context that government needs to take this step back from its Wildebeest Economics and see what position is maximally effective for growth. And this stance is neither interventionist, nor non-interventionist – it is facilitative.

This is a case of seeding the right conditions, resisting the urge to set in train yet more micro-management and, inevitably, the ensuing counter positions.

It comes back, as it always will do, to the Big Five:

Access to finance (which spans investment and fiscal measures).

Skills matching (which entails a root and branch re-conception of our national productive culture).

Bureaucracy retrenchment (an unravelling of red tape).

Export focus (a massive upscaling of export capacity and support – beyond unproductive quango channels).

Infrastructure (intelligent, high value projects, balanced across the UK – neither a sole focus on the SE, nor a sop to the Celtic fringes).

This also will require a huge political re-engagement by businesspeople and an insistence that commercial enterprise must be placed first, as the main creator of all else that follows. That the State has subsumed the productive enterprise which underpins everything is our core failing. Ineffectual structures such as the 39 LEPs are an expression of our weakness, not a route to growth.

It is question of making ourselves heard – and of rejecting the Wildebeest herd.