#ventures
Venture Capital has become the fuel behind the innovation that is largely associated with digital technology from Silicon Valley, to Berlin, Tel Aviv, Mumbai and Shanghai.
I recall reading the book “Sprints” by Jake Knapp and the approaches taken in Google Ventures. Looking at start-ups, seed-funding for new ideas and the rounds of investment many of us are in, know and help create new possibilities for work and life tools, platforms and apps that we end up servicing need and creating demand.
Ventures in the past saw grocers and drapers like J Sainsbury and Moss Brothers become high-street brand names. No investment rounds then but the gradual growth of consumer capitalism and shareholdings saw large companies become huge.
But ventures — the word in a noun sense — is a dare, a risk and a business enterprise involving risk but with an expectation of gain.
In an adjective sense, it’s very similar — to brave the dangers, to dare to do something.
Which is what the team People and Transformational HR Ltd. are undertaking. Some dares, some risks, some ventures.
We are launching 2 new PTHR Ventures in 2022/23.
Firstly, we’re committing ourselves further to the cause of autonomous, self-directed and people-powered change in organisational life with the creation and launch of the PTHR Self-Management Venture.
Whilst retaining our core consulting, learning, advisory, content creating PTHR as is, we’ll create a “satellite” venture explicitly helping teach, coach and learn how to create more self-management in the world of work.
We’re about to launch into a learning programme with the Semco Style Institute to cement our existing 15+ years of research and operating in self-managed ways having already learned a lot from WorldBlu’s Freedom at Work model, Menlo Innovation’s Joy Factory, Buurtzorg’s Patient-Centred Care, Widen’s Decentralised Autonomous Operation and Jugaad (or Frugal Innovation) from India.
Secondly, and off the back of our Climate-Positive status with Ecologi and our Certified BCorporation status, we will also launch the PTHR Sustainability Venture. Helping people in organisations create ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) strategies, plans and activities in line with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the business impacts of ecologically positive approaches that go beyond the scorecard numbers and into social, human and natural value lenses.
We recognise that our fellow OD and HR practitioners are often being asked to lead on design, development and deployment of more autonomous ways of working, building trust and empowered approaches to decision making, Agile and self-directed teams, and more aligned approaches to conducting business that is better for the planet, communities and social good.
We’ll conduct research, share content, and help others learn both/or Self-Management and Sustainability approaches. At team level or organisational level.
PTHR already has an Incubation Service. Which helps ideas come to life or be tested on their viability and potential business modelled application. We’ve helped a few people so far do that and have one or two success stories already.
More on that here: https://www.pthr.co.uk/solutions/side-hustle-incubator/
There’s a lot of hype about the side-hustle culture (much of which was put into more accurate context by the superb white paper co-authored by our friend Dr Naeema Pasha from Henley Business School found here.)
Sometimes glamorised and sometimes vilified, this phenomenon is where people run an adjacent venture alongside a day job or other working role. It’s where people try before they commit and leave the job, or balance the two and continue to run a dual track in their work.
We recognise that many of us in job roles might be frustrated entrepreneurial innovators. Having a great idea that the business you work in, simply doesn’t recognise, want or appear to need. So instead of not being able to build this inside your current domain, the side hustle allows you to experiment with something where others might be willing to join you in that venture.
We want to help fuel innovative concepts (especially those of an HR, People, OD, Learning focus) so will partner, guide, coach and enable those ideas to come to life.
These won’t be the only new ventures we kick-off. 2022 will see us deliver:
- Real-Time U — an alternative to Business School learning with an up-to-the-minute, relevant and adaptive curriculum of business teaching, learning and applied emergent theories.
- Inside the Imaginarium — a deep-dive conversational approach with some of the world’s more interesting people to debate, explore and deduce clarity from some of the world’s more complex issues.
- The HR Careers Accelerator — fast-forwarding those new or in administrative roles in HR to get ahead of automation and zoom into Practitioner level capabilities to push the people profession forward.
- And we have more of our Business Reinvention Labs to come and bundled packages — helping box in change, transformation agendas and performance and development need into tidy categories, contextualised for the screen-based ways of learning and applying; in the now dispersed working knowledge economy.
Ventures — within enterprises — works to the Platform Model of business with a core operating system with applications and programmes that run on it. We believe THIS is the organisation design model for us and could power much of the business world into the 2020s with more responsive, people-centric, creative and inclusive ways to develop solutions to the problems of the world.
For more about how we’ve set up our PTHR Platform, see our Operating Stacks:
And as the storyteller Malcolm Gladwell says:
Innovation, at the heart of the knowledge economy, is fundamentally social.
Let’s get socially innovative. Let’s create smart ventures that make a difference. Let’s not talk about the changes we want to see, let’s BE THEM and DO THEM.
