CandidCapital

The Cambridge Enterprise Conference is 10 years old. Its brief history provides some insight into how entrepreneurship has changed since the mid-1990s. The CEC is all the better for having returned to its roots. But beware events that make ‘networking’ mandatory: all you will get out them is a pocketful of business cards you throw away.

Origins of the Enterprise Conference

I normally resist personal reminiscence as being no more than the chick lit of the blogosphere. But…this was the week of the 8th Cambridge Enterprise Conference and I can’t resist a short trot through the melting snows of yesteryear.

Back in the spring of 1997, I attended a meeting that (eventually) took my career in a radically different direction from its then likely path. I worked in London, but in the Cambridge office of the bank for which I then worked, I met two of the established figures of the Phenomenon associated with that city: Christopher Saunders and Walter Herriot. They had a proposal for a short conference on entrepreneurship and were looking for underwriting sponsorship – enough money to commit to expenses such as room hire and accommodation for speakers ahead of knowing whether enough tickets would be sold to cover the costs.

The proposal was appealing in its own right as associating the bank with entrepreneurship in a leafy town famous for the subject wasn’t a bad start. And big corporations are like government agencies: if you don’t spend your budget, you lose it and get less next year (bureaucracies exist for their own perpetuation). Since I was just shy of year-end, underwriting the enterprise conference was an easy decision.

Starting a New Tradition

That meeting alone provided pearls of insight into Britain’s relative economic standing. Christopher, a very English angel-investor choirmaster with considerable experience of the other side of the pond (Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Co), is a subtle interpreter of the difference between America and Britain. He thought that the Enterprise Conference could become an annual event: ‘if we were Americans, we’d say “this tradition will begin next Tuesday.”’ He was right (enough) and the phrase has stuck in my mind ever since.

Walter recommended Microcosmographia Academia, Francis Cornford’s Edwardian satire on university politics that has become the prototype for all self-serving political systems (tautology, perhaps; the title means ‘study of a tiny academic world’). It is essential reading anyone in an organisation, even an anarcho-syndicalist collective.

The first Cambridge Enterprise Conference took place on a Saturday in mid-September 1997 in the Fisher Room at St John’s College. It was a modest one-day affair, with homespun billboards from aspirant companies and – I think – a complete absence the now-ubiquitous Powerpoint, so that papers were delivered the old-fashioned way and the art of rhetoric lingered on in the early-autumn sunshine. So far as I recall, I delivered a paper on the limitations of ‘Rhenish capitalism’ and the misconceptions legion in Will Hutton’s then-recent The State We're In, but since this was a decade ago these details, too, shall pass.

Conferences Then and Now

None of this might matter, except that from the modest acorn of the first Cambridge Enterprise Conference several oaks then grew. CEC 2 was held in the spring of 1999 and an 18(ish) month pattern then became the default setting. At CEC 2 in New Hall, I met the nucleus of the team that was to produce the series of Funding Technology reports. At CEC 3 in 2000, Guy Kawasaki introduced us to counterintuitive tech marketing (most memorably, don't worry, ship crappy).

During the 2001 CEC, 9/11 erupted onto our screens and our consciousness. And the venue changed from college to college as the original intimacy of perhaps 50 people morphed remorselessly into the unwieldiness of a celeb having dinner with 300 of her most intimate friends during the heights of dot.comedy. This year saw the welcome return of a speaker from CEC 2: Amar Bhide, whose work has already been discussed once or twice on these pages. A summary of his presentation can be found here.

Over the years, as many of us do, CEC put on weight by stretching over two days or more, then went on a diet, so that this year it reverted almost to its original format, only lasting one day – though both Powerpoint and the Press were conspicuous throughout.

I much prefer this reversion to a short, intense format, with less padding, fewer ‘messages from our sponsors’ (all of whom claim alchemist’s powers), no rubber-chicken dinner lubricated with Australian antifreeze and no redundant slots on the timetable for compulsory ‘networking’. Don’t tell me you've never been to such events or your nose will extend suddenly and pierce the monitor. Oh, and more on ‘networking’ later.

What Did the Conference Ever Do for Me?

At a personal level, I’ve felt since that first meeting with Christopher and Walter a little like one of the guests on a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. You might recall, for instance, the close-in shot of the London Symphony Orchestra conductor Andre Previn (‘Mr Preview,’ as Eric insisted on calling him) saying, ‘I appeared on a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special and my life has never been the same since.’ And as the camera panned out, he rang a bell and viewers realised that he had been metamorphosed into a bus conductor.

Except that in my case the journey rather went the other way. Working with the people I met through the Enterprise Conferences convinced me more and more that I needed to hop off the bus of corporate life and start busking on the entrepreneurial alleys. It can be cold and insecure, and you work anti-social hours, but it has to be better than collecting fares for a behemoth with ‘use it or lose’ budgeting policies.

‘Notworking’

Going back to CEC 2, I said I met there the team that went to produce the Funding Technology reports. The story bears brief repetition as it points a moral. Over the lunch break at that conference, I was talking to a someone I’d never met before, who turned out to be a serial entrepreneur called Chris Martin. He asked me what I did. I explained that I ran the innovation unit for a major bank, and as a throwaway line, I added that I’d love to undertake a study tour of the US as I was sure they did things better there.

Chris looked at me a little oddly, asked for my business card and a few months later contacted me with a short proposal for review before he submitted it to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, who very soon funded the first research trip to the US, which led to Lesson from America and then subsequent reports on Israel, Germany and now the UK.

The moral for me is about networking. What went on at that modest refectory lunch in New Hall was indeed networking, but it was not the morbid and egregious activity inserted into all too many content-lite conference programmes. If you see an entry on the timetable along the lines of ‘6.30pm: Drinks and Networking’, BEWARE.

The implications are numerous and all are toxic: do the organisers think that we shouldn’t have a drink unless we are networking? That we cannot network unless we drink? That unless the agenda tells you to network you won’t do it? That we don’t network informally, as and when? Mandatory networking is as suspect as a political slogan - A Better Tomorrow or Strength through Joy or Fighting for Peace. And such earnest events are often organised by quangos.

That sort of ‘networking’ ends up not working and is as dreary and wasteful as having 20 minutes of compulsory spontaneity. The business cards you have forced upon you at such East German-style happy hours you throw away as unread as the growing number of useless supplements (gardening, motoring, holidays, DIY, saving, spending, dancing, weaving, hopping, skipping, jumping) that come with the Saturday broadsheets. And if such cards came in plastic wrappers, you wouldn’t even open them.

So networking can make an enormous difference to your life; it certainly did to mine. But networking is not an agenda item; it's an attitude of mind and occasional lucky breaks.

9 September 07

PS I have just (3 October 07) been to a 'policy day' organised by local government and the lunch was a .... 'notworking event'. Sigh.

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