Although she might have added the horror of "trade" in the background from which the present Government is very heavily drawn, Chi Onwurah writes:
The Labour party launched a taskforce this weekend to learn the lessons from our comprehensive defeat. It is certainly needed, but already one of the strongest themes to emerge is that we lost the confidence of business.
Before the election business leaders large and small lined up to endorse the Tories while immediately after the vote Alan Sugar fired Labour because we were too “anti-business”.
Leadership hopefuls have echoed this, with Yvette Cooper distancing herself from Ed Miliband’s policies, Andy Burnham saying “We got it wrong on business” and Liz Kendall demanding “I want Labour not just to ‘understand’ business but be the champion of people who take a risk”.
I joined the party when I was 16 and it was my Labour values that encouraged me to become an engineer, to build – literally rather than metaphorically – a better world.
I spent 17 years working as an electrical engineer in businesses large, medium and small across four continents, while completing an MBA.
When I left the private sector in 2004 it was to work for the competition regulator Ofcom, helping communications markets function properly.
Labour is often accused of having no experience of business, but I am hard pressed to find a Tory with a broader business base than my own, and I am certainly not the only Labour MP to have a business background.
Yet our party seems to vacillate between holding business in a loving and uncritical gaze over canapés and hectoring it, as if we were on a different moral plane.
As all the current leadership candidates appear to agree we veered too far towards the latter under Miliband, a Tony Blair-style prawn cocktail offensive appears to be the only possibility.
But it would be a mistake to stop holding business to account in a misguided attempt to show we “understand” it.
That’s because, firstly, business is far too important to our economic and social fabric to be outside our debate.
And secondly because such a tactic would be doomed to failure in the long term.
If there is one thing business people are familiar with it is a sales pitch, indeed many pride themselves on their own sales skills.
A good pitch reflects back the concerns and ambitions of the potential customer. But it is also honest about the challenges involved and the changes needed.
If we tell business only what we think it wants to hear, then instead of demonstrating that we “understand” business people, we will be showing them how little we have to offer.
But commercial best practice was always entirely compatible with my Labour values.
I did not hold my nose as I made my way to the office or the factory in the UK, the US, France or Nigeria, for example. No, I was excited to be designing and building products and services that people wanted to buy and use.
One of the set texts on my MBA course, and indeed the management bestseller when I started work in the 1980s, was Tom Peters’ and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence.
This book looked for the characteristics that set truly great companies apart, and the most fundamental quality they identified was valuing people as partners and as “the primary source of productivity gains”.
A second prerequisite was “shared values”: of respect, quality, responsible behaviour and community. Not only because it is the right thing to do but because it motivates employees and customers to return the compliment.
Responsible capitalism anyone? There was nothing inherently anti-business about Miliband’s policies.
As Britain languishes behind France and Germany in worker productivity, who would seriously argue that Labour was not right to encourage business to value and invest more in its employees? What value does a zero-hours contract place on a worker?
But it is true to say that not all Labour members share the confidence of our convictions.
And in talking to business, confidence and experience are a big part of credibility; business men and women can have a visceral reaction against platitudes and bullshit – it brings to mind too many inept sales pitches.
It is also true that some Labour members do have negative views of business.
When I stood for election it was suggested that my mainly private-sector experience might be seen as a disadvantage.
There are some who think it more worthy to give a helping hand to those in need than to build the businesses that create the jobs people need.
And we often criticised the bad examples more than we championed the good: the global company that gives each employee two weeks of training and development every year; the local business that offers work experience not to the favoured children of friends but to the most disadvantaged in the community; the manufacturing company that sends its top engineers into local primary schools to inspire the next generation.
Because today fewer Labour MPs and their advisers have business backgrounds, the party is less familiar with good business practices.
As Labour’s taskforce begins its work, I would urge the party to harness it to help build a more productive relationship with business – neither over-critical nor starry-eyed, but working together in the interests of the country as a whole.
The Labour party launched a taskforce this weekend to learn the lessons from our comprehensive defeat. It is certainly needed, but already one of the strongest themes to emerge is that we lost the confidence of business.
Before the election business leaders large and small lined up to endorse the Tories while immediately after the vote Alan Sugar fired Labour because we were too “anti-business”.
Leadership hopefuls have echoed this, with Yvette Cooper distancing herself from Ed Miliband’s policies, Andy Burnham saying “We got it wrong on business” and Liz Kendall demanding “I want Labour not just to ‘understand’ business but be the champion of people who take a risk”.
I joined the party when I was 16 and it was my Labour values that encouraged me to become an engineer, to build – literally rather than metaphorically – a better world.
I spent 17 years working as an electrical engineer in businesses large, medium and small across four continents, while completing an MBA.
When I left the private sector in 2004 it was to work for the competition regulator Ofcom, helping communications markets function properly.
Labour is often accused of having no experience of business, but I am hard pressed to find a Tory with a broader business base than my own, and I am certainly not the only Labour MP to have a business background.
Yet our party seems to vacillate between holding business in a loving and uncritical gaze over canapés and hectoring it, as if we were on a different moral plane.
As all the current leadership candidates appear to agree we veered too far towards the latter under Miliband, a Tony Blair-style prawn cocktail offensive appears to be the only possibility.
But it would be a mistake to stop holding business to account in a misguided attempt to show we “understand” it.
That’s because, firstly, business is far too important to our economic and social fabric to be outside our debate.
And secondly because such a tactic would be doomed to failure in the long term.
If there is one thing business people are familiar with it is a sales pitch, indeed many pride themselves on their own sales skills.
A good pitch reflects back the concerns and ambitions of the potential customer. But it is also honest about the challenges involved and the changes needed.
If we tell business only what we think it wants to hear, then instead of demonstrating that we “understand” business people, we will be showing them how little we have to offer.
But commercial best practice was always entirely compatible with my Labour values.
I did not hold my nose as I made my way to the office or the factory in the UK, the US, France or Nigeria, for example. No, I was excited to be designing and building products and services that people wanted to buy and use.
One of the set texts on my MBA course, and indeed the management bestseller when I started work in the 1980s, was Tom Peters’ and Robert Waterman’s In Search of Excellence.
This book looked for the characteristics that set truly great companies apart, and the most fundamental quality they identified was valuing people as partners and as “the primary source of productivity gains”.
A second prerequisite was “shared values”: of respect, quality, responsible behaviour and community. Not only because it is the right thing to do but because it motivates employees and customers to return the compliment.
Responsible capitalism anyone? There was nothing inherently anti-business about Miliband’s policies.
As Britain languishes behind France and Germany in worker productivity, who would seriously argue that Labour was not right to encourage business to value and invest more in its employees? What value does a zero-hours contract place on a worker?
But it is true to say that not all Labour members share the confidence of our convictions.
And in talking to business, confidence and experience are a big part of credibility; business men and women can have a visceral reaction against platitudes and bullshit – it brings to mind too many inept sales pitches.
It is also true that some Labour members do have negative views of business.
When I stood for election it was suggested that my mainly private-sector experience might be seen as a disadvantage.
There are some who think it more worthy to give a helping hand to those in need than to build the businesses that create the jobs people need.
And we often criticised the bad examples more than we championed the good: the global company that gives each employee two weeks of training and development every year; the local business that offers work experience not to the favoured children of friends but to the most disadvantaged in the community; the manufacturing company that sends its top engineers into local primary schools to inspire the next generation.
Because today fewer Labour MPs and their advisers have business backgrounds, the party is less familiar with good business practices.
As Labour’s taskforce begins its work, I would urge the party to harness it to help build a more productive relationship with business – neither over-critical nor starry-eyed, but working together in the interests of the country as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment