Chief Executive Blogs

Craig Dearden-Philips

March 31st 2008

Ian - Culverhouse

It may be April but its the start of the new financial year, always a busy time for a CEO. Speaking Up will grow by a third this year as a result of winning our first large bid (£3.2m over 3 years) with DCSF. This is, by any measure good going. Yet it also means we have to bed in a lot of new staff and new projects incredibly quickly. A tough task for my management team - and one I know they'll get done well!

But all this growth has made me think....is expansion the only way to maximise our impact? My conclusion is that being successful in the future will not just be about getting bigger. It will also be about how we influence others to help people find and use their voice. The ‘others' I’m talking about include Government, other third sector bodies and the companies that provide care and support to disabled people. Our own reach is always going to be limited to 10,000 thousand people at the most and even that is within the next 5 years Yet when we set up this organisation we wanted to create a different society, not just a better life for the few.

We need to get better at sharing our knowledge, reaching out to other organisations in our field and influencing policy and practice. The good news is that doesn't necessarily require us to be the biggest. But it does need us to be the best at both producing and sharing new ideas and practices - the new bid will allow us to pilot a number of ways to share our ideas and influence others, we are putting together toolkits to extend our reach over the 3 years of the bid which will go some way to making an impact, but we will need to do much more.

In summary, I think we need to grow our influence as well as our organisation. Now that we are getting big enough to be noticed, I wonder if this is now our most pressing challenge?

July 16th 2008

Individualised Budgets

Whatever you think of Tesco, they run their business around the things that matter to their customers: Full shelves, clear aisles, good value, helpful staff.

The whole thing, from top to bottom, is built around these four basic customer-pleasing ideas. But how many charities and social enterprises can claim to be run around customers or users? Can yours?A quiet revolution is underway. `Personal Budgets’ are the brainchild of Simon Duffy, a social entrepreneur. His idea was to take the money from commissioners and put it straight into the pockets of disabled people. Because they know best what is right for them.

Simon’s ideas have swept across Government like a brushfire in recent years. And once Gordon Brown is out of the way I am pretty sure we’ll see personal budgets in education, healthcare and welfare services too.

What is wonderful about personal budgets is that the market is doing what years of exhortation about `listening to users’ never achieved. Going forward, providers will increasingly have to listen – or go bust.

And instead of looking upwards to commissioners, providers will have to turn their loving gaze to the disabled customer and come up with our own versions of `clear aisles, full shelves, good value and helpful staff.