Search results

This paper gives an account of the development and pioneering management practices of a community‐owned and managed agency, Walterton and Elgin Community Homes (WECH), locating these in the context of continuing concerns and emerging aspirations over the role of social housing, with developing UK national policy and a proposed statutory “Right to Transfer” for tenants.

This report provides a narrative of the recent development of social housing policy development and the evolving practice of WECH. This is the essential historical and social policy background to a recent study into the health and well‐being benefits of empowerment through community ownership of social housing. This first paper refers to and discusses the wider implications of the data collected during the well‐being research and literature review, indicating that the population of the WECH estates experience a sense of belonging, and of being involved, which contrasts markedly with statistics for comparable populations in comparable areas of deprivation. Further analysis of the key findings of the original study will be published in Part two.

The benefits of more community‐owned services include the more efficient and holistic management of properties. Community‐based, resident‐controlled housing associations offer a secure foundation for building in additional services as part of the continued drive to devolve public services to the local level, including hosting of a substantial range of community services, for example the reintegration of the Police into the community. The principle of community ownership of council estates is also valuable in its own right for informing the direction of housing management and policy and where to target effort. The experience and practice of WECH supports the proposition that community ownership of social housing may be an exceptionally effective means for improving and sustaining wellbeing in poor neighbourhoods.

This paper argues that Government policy should actively support mass mutualisation as a means for improving wellbeing on council/social housing estates and for empowering poorer communities to take greater responsibility for their welfare. Regardless of the extent of mutualisation, many of the practices involved are transferable to non‐mutual social landlords, and may be seen as markers of good practice for agencies intending to taken on social housing via transfer.

There is continued interest in the transfer of social housing stock to new provider agencies. WECH has been the only large‐scale statutory transfer until now of council housing in England and Wales to a mutual, community‐owned housing association. WECH's experience is especially relevant for evidencing the significant advantages governments could obtain through encouraging many more transfers of council estates to community housing associations.

This paper provides a summary of evidence on a local sense of well‐being gathered from the population of a mutual resident‐controlled housing association, compared at various levels with national and other comparator data. It reproduces statistics and many statements from Walterton and Elgin Community Homes (WECH) residents, to shed light on questions over the potential for community‐owned social landlords to promote social capital and well‐being and transform communities and neighbourhoods in line with current UK government thinking on happiness, empowerment, and the Big Society agenda.

The paper is the second part of an overview of the potential for social housing to empower people and improve well‐being, from the perspective of a full community‐owned social housing landlord. Professor Peter Ambrose of Brighton University led the study of the WECH population, assisted by LSE Social Policy post‐graduate students who carried out the interviews of WECH residents. Dr Satsangi of the University of Stirling led the work comparing the data collected on WECH residents with other populations and datasets. The paper includes a summary of these findings, with further reflections on the implications for national housing policy.

Notwithstanding the high deprivation indices for the area as a whole, residents of WECH expressed high levels of satisfaction with the neighbourhood, and greater levels of community engagement than people living in areas with comparable levels of deprivation. The findings support the hypothesis that an empowering and participatory management style – especially where based upon full community ownership and resident control – effectively enhances community engagement, activates citizenship and significantly improves individual and collective well‐being.

Happiness and well‐being, it now appears, are not so much a function of incomes and costs, as a product of control and influence. Overall, and at the very least, the results should give confidence to national and local governments to drive forward their policies to mutualise social housing, where local communities wish to take over their homes.

The 1992 WECH transfer of 921 homes from the local authority remains the only large‐scale statutory (as distinct from voluntary) transfer of council housing in England and Wales to a resident‐controlled community‐based housing association. Therefore, WECH's experience is especially relevant for informing the Coalition Government's implementation of the statutory Right to Transfer for council tenants.

By learning how to overcome implementation challenges, the Agile methodology can enable organizations to cope with the 21st Century marketplace and deliver what customers expect and demand: easy, quick, convenient, personalized responsiveness at scale.”

The 10 major implementation challenges are addressed.

Agile offers a methodology that can improve the chances of building a new product or service that people will actually buy, use and like.

A key Agile principle – doing work in small iterative cycles with customer feedback at the end of each cycle – is a transformative idea.

The author has recently made on-site visits to leading corporations that have adopted Agile. The “Agile” managers he met recognize that the future of their firm depends on inspiring those doing the work to accelerate innovation and add genuine value to customer, that enhancing that capacity depends on giving autonomy to self-organizing teams within broad parameters of control.

While some large organizations are preoccupied with mastering operational Agility as a way to upgrade existing products and services, they and the wider management community need to realize that the main financial benefits from Agile management will flow from the next frontier: achieving Strategic Agility, a market-making approach to innovation.

The author proposes that firms adopt Agile management as a way to promote market-creating innovations through a process of imagining and delivering something that unexpectedly delights whole new groups of customers, once they realize the possibilities.

The potential of the Agile approach to innovation is that it can revitalize mature companies by discovering new customer experiences and create products and services that fulfill unmet needs.

This article shows how Agile management and strategic management concepts like “Jobs to be done” theory and “Blue Ocean” strategy can merge to promote market-creating innovation.

Given that industry borders are dissolving and competition is more dynamic than ever, the need for Strategic Agility – speedy, customer focused innovation that aims to make markets–is becoming increasingly obvious. This confluence of Agile and strategic management is a new and exciting approach to innovation.

With Agile’s success in accelerating software products and services that customers valued and with the increasing importance of software in general business strategy, business leaders are increasingly turning to Agile for every aspect of their operations.

There are more than 70 different Agile practices. The author advises traditional managers on how to make sense of such a bewildering assortment of ideas.

His research found thatrganizations that have embraced Agile practice three core principles–The Law of the Small Team; The Law of the Customer; The Law of the Network.

The first and almost universal characteristic of Agile organizations is that practitioners share a mindset that work should be done in small autonomous cross-functional teams working in short cycles on relatively small tasks that deliver value to customers and getting continuous feedback from the ultimate customers or end users.

As a network, the organization becomes a growing, learning, adapting organism that is in constant flux to exploit new opportunities and add new value for customers. The future of Agile is ultimately about implementing the third principle: the whole organization operating as an interactive network. In the rapidly evolving “Connected Economy” the power of the network is increasing geometrically.

While the principles of Agile management are simple, the implementation of the actual “Laws of Agile” is daunting to managers trained in the traditions and culture of hierarchical management. This article offers a context for the three laws.

Implementing Agile requires fostering a mindset that is fundamentally different from traditional preoccupations with profit maximization and hierarchical authority.

Agile is about generating instant, intimate, frictionless, low-risk, incremental value at scale. That’s the new performance requirement.

A growing number of companies, including those that have embraced the Agile mindset, believe the true purpose of a firm is to create customers and establish a sustainable relationship with them.

For leaders and managers this article offers radical insights. In an Agile organization, talent discovers strategic opportunities. Talent drives strategy. When the whole organization truly embraces Agile, instead of a steady state machine, the organization becomes an organic living network of high-performance teams. 10;

This conceptual paper concerns management fashions and fads. It focuses on the way that concepts, techniques and ideas become popular in the marketplace and the role of knowledge entrepreneurs and disseminators in this process. Utilising memetics – the study of memes – the paper demonstrates how some concepts, techniques and ideas prosper in the marketplace, not because of their economic reproductive capacity, but instead because of their interpersonal reproductive capacity. Knowledge entrepreneurs and disseminators (gurus and consultants) might in this light be cast as “evil Svengalis”, bringing forth contagious concepts that serve nobody except themselves. In other words, managers are somehow preyed upon, duped and tricked by gurus and consultants unleashing the latest designer mind management virus. A closer look at the institutional context into which concepts, techniques and ideas are forwarded, as well as the selection process for them, suggests however a more complex relationship exists between managers and consultants. Indeed, in this relationship, managers are likely to play an important part in the consumption of fashions and fads.