What should our response be to trading Charities?

by John Coulthard on November 22, 2011

Was I the last to know that most of the big charities make more money by “trading” than they do from donations.   So if I look at a few :

  • Leonard Cheshire - 92% of income from Charitable Activities 7.5% from donations
  • Action for Children  – 90.8%  of income from Charitable Activities  7.7% from donations
  • BARNARDO’S  -64 % of income from Charitable Activities 17.8% from donations

Many do rely on donations:

  • Help for Heroes  – 14% from Charitable Activities and 79.7% from donations
  • NSPCC – 15% of income from Charitable Activities 76% from donations
  • ALZHEIMER’S SOCIETY – 34.9% of income from Charitable Activities 54.2% from donations

You can find all of this information from the Charity Commission web site.

Should the corporate response be the same for those both groups?  Perhaps businesses should provide more support to those that rely on donations.

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Restaurants… people ask

by John Coulthard on November 21, 2011

I am often  asked for recommendations for restaurants in London.   The best place for a business lunch or a pre or post theatre dinner.  If you need to find and or reserve a table, try www.hardens.com or www.toptable.com. 

These are not the best in London just the ones that I like at the moment

Business Lunch or Dinner:  (Important that it is relatively quite) I would think about:

      • Cinnamon Club – great for breakfast
      • The Thomas Cubitt – Upstairs
      • Boisdale’s  – in the old dining room (can be noisy in main area if there is live Jazz)

Pre or Post Theatre (can be a bit noisy)

      • Busaba Eathai – Various  + Wardour Street and Store Street
      • Wahaca  – Various, Wardour Street is a great location
      • Inimo  Soho– very cool ordering system good place to take teenage offspring

Out East

      • St John’s Bread and Wine  – Shoreditch
      • Franco Manca in Brixton
      • Tayyabs in Shoreditch

Our West

      • Indian Zing in Hammersmith
      • Franco Manca in Chiswick
      • Princess Victoria  -  Shepherds Bush  – great for Sunday Lunch

South of the River

      • Bangalore Express  – Waterloo (try up  ladder … you will know what I mean when you get there)
      • Skylon  – table near the Window
      • Oxo Tower  if you must

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Ten things I learnt at the Supply to Government Conference 21 Nov 2011

by John Coulthard on November 21, 2011

When I listened beyond the rhetoric and read between the lines (thanks to the King’s Fund for teaching me how to do it)  I discovered:

1. Frances Maude blames the Civil Service for all the poor procurement, delivery and funding issues in Government today.

2. The Civil Service blames the suppliers for all the poor procurement, delivery and funding issues in Government today.

3. Civil Servants working in Government ICT blame Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, HP, BT, the “big 4”, and anyone in IT for all the poor procurement, delivery and funding issues in Government today.

4. Anyone working in Government would prefer to mention a US digital company… like Twitter or Facebook long before they mention a British firm like ARM or Huddle.

5. Left on their own Civil Servants will look after themselves first, look no further than MyCSP (My Civil Service Pension), the first Social Enterprise to come out of the Cabinet Office.

6. No one in the Civil Service seems to know what a Social Enterprise is… one senior leader in Civil Service said … “oh yes all the Twitter and Facebook stuff… oh very good”… words fail me!

7. In talking about New Business Models for delivery of public services Civil Servants  can only talk in terms of the old ways.

8. When discussing the leadership of change they refer to civil servants changing their jobs; never losing their jobs… there is a difference.

9. Most Civil Service leaders I met at the conference gave the impression that it is impossible the think about or visualise the future, and they seem to have no knowledge of the Popcorn Institute , IDEO, Imperial College or UCL or anyone that has a track record of doing just that.

10. And finally I learnt never to go to one of these things again.

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Leadership and The Buck

by John Coulthard on November 11, 2011

If you feel that the Buck stops above you then you are not a leader. 

It strikes me that Civil Servants in the UK want all the benefits of having their cake and eating it.  They want to be seen as leaders, with all the trappings that come with such a position.    But when their leadership fails they want to pass the buck and be protected.   Too easily they  use the language of a victim rather than that of a leader, collapsing into self pity and recrimination.

So if you find yourself managing complexity then you are a manager.   If you are managing change then you are a leader.  Professor John Kotter has been explaining this for years.   It was Rudyard Kipling that really nailed this in his poem If.   The shortest essay on leadership I know.

Oh and given that he was born in Bombay, I wonder if the UK Border Agency would have let him into the UK.   

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I was the 2,828,875,727th

October 27, 2011

What number were you?  Find out at the BBC

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How to be a social entrepreneur

October 20, 2011

I love this. Hat tip to Tom Studdes at http://www.forimpact.org/

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MPA report into NPfIT

October 18, 2011

The MPA of the Cabinet Office have published their report into National Programme for IT in England.  Well, I was hoping for something better, I don’t mind the spelling mistakes, I guess they are using some new open source document software.   I don’t mind the errors of fact, I really don’t mind that fact that [...]

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Leadership and business growth

September 27, 2011

I was sitting in the Chapel of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst a couple of  Sundays ago.  It is a place of profound peace.  Standing at the lectern was Major-General Patrick Marriott CBE.  He was talking about the moral aspect to leadership.  He quotes Viscount Alanbrooke and Viscount Slim and the importance of having a [...]

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The email black spot!

September 20, 2011

There is a wonderful feature in Outlook (PC or Mac). You can ignore all emails by conversation or email alias. There are 5 people in my current organisation that my inbox rules routinely place in a special folder… a folder I rarely look at… and my life is better for it. Today, however, marks a [...]

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public services…not in my name

September 14, 2011

Recently I have attended a number of meetings to  discuss public service reform, it has been a theme that has come up over coffee, Sunday lunch and at the pub as well as these more formal gatherings. In most of these discussion we seemed to reiterate all the old themes.. with the odd politicians stoutly [...]

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