Knowing and Making

I visited a networking group yesterday which brings entrepreneurs and investors together to try and matchmake them. At the end we had a conversation about how to make the group work best. One of the persistent concerns about investment networking events is that each investor just stands there while a hundred entrepreneurs swarm over them, trying to get their money. This is unmanageable for the investor and doesn't serve the entrepreneurs very well either. Most of them get nothing and it is so competitive that those who might get an offer, get screwed down on terms. What's more, the facades that people (particularly entrepreneurs) erect make the search for worthwhile matches difficult. Even though investors will nearly always get to the truth before providing and money, the results of search theory  mean that they will have to spend more time, and will find worse matches, than if the entrepreneurs were honest (although there may be behavioural phenomena that counter this - back ...

The Observer today published its selection of 500 UK rising stars for 2009 . I'm very happy to have been selected in the Business category, along with 70 other businesspeople including Amanda Zuydervelt of Stylebible, Carl Jewitt of Ernst & Young, Jay Bregman of eCourier, Luke Ashworth of Netbasic, Sokratis Papafloratis of Trusted Places, Tom Critchlow of Distilled, Simon Campbell of ViaPost, Richard Alvin of Clearsight, Duncan Cheatle of the Supper Club, Carol Brown of Thomson Bethune, Elizabeth Harrin of Spire Healthcare/A Girl's Guide to Project Management, Edward Mellett of WikiJob and Darren Fell of Crunch. Some interesting people from the other categories are: Art and Design : Alex Fleetwood of Hide and Seek, theatre director Annette Mees, Renato Benedetti of McDowell+Benedetti, sports artist Keith Fearon Drinks : Richard Bigg of Cantaloupe Fashion and Retail : Tamsin Lejeune of the Ethical Fashion Forum Food : Liz Jarman of Sainsbury's Media : Stefan Lewandowski ...

This article is about how people lead people, but starts out with a more fundamental question: Why do people lead people? Indeed why do leaders exist? To answer this we must go further back and ask why there are even any groups of people to be led. The simple answer is that is what works. Specialisation of roles emerged long before Henry Ford and Adam Smith - as soon as hunter-gatherers settled in villages and discovered agriculture, there were some people out in the fields digging, some people making tools or clothes, some raising children and others inventing the wheel. Specialised roles are more efficient because people have different talents and, with practice, can get good at one thing. They can use the tools appropriate to the job and stay in one place to carry it out. And when you have specialised roles, you need a team. Whoever is making the clothes still needs food to eat, and if they are not growing it themselves they must cooperate with someone who is. So groups of cooperati...