Prosperity in Every Postcode
Build Economic Development Organisations That Turn Devolution into Growth
Every place has potential. Not every place knows how to unlock it. Devolution is the biggest opportunity local and regional economic development in Britain has had in a generation. It is also on a clock. This book is about what the people doing the work can get right - and how to build the capability, culture and leadership that deliver.
Do you want to be great at economic development?
Power, money and responsibility are moving to mayors, combined authorities and councils - the opportunity places have been asking for. The places that thrive will be the ones that build the capability to use it well: sound evidence, strong relationships, well-designed programmes, disciplined delivery and continuous learning. All of it is buildable, and this book shows how.
This book is not a strategy document and it is not a toolkit. There are no holy grails of local and regional economic development: no formula, no transplantable model, no single lever that works everywhere. What there is, instead, is a set of disciplines and capabilities that make institutions great at delivery. Prosperity in Every Postcode is an operating philosophy for the people responsible for the results.
Ambition itself is not the problem. Ambition is the point. Undeliverable ambition is the betrayal of it.From Chapter 2: The Habits That Keep Places Poor
Score your own institution in ten minutes
The book opens with a self-assessment built on its five questions: five capabilities, four levels each, from absent to great. It is not a test you can fail and nobody outside the room needs to see it. What it gives you is a baseline and a shape - and your lowest capability is where the next twelve months of work sits.
- What’s the cause - and are you sure you know?Chapters 3 and 4
- What’s possible?Chapters 5 and 6
- What will you build - and what will you stop doing?Chapter 7
- If delivery isn’t working - why?Chapter 8
- How will you know it worked - and that it benefited who you said it would?Chapters 9 and 13
Built to be used, not admired
Most books in this field close each chapter with a summary. This one closes each chapter with work, and tells you honestly what the work costs.
Every task ends in something you own
Each one names the output, who owns it, roughly how long it takes and the first step. A task that ends in a finding produces guilt. A task that ends in an artefact produces a work programme.
Three things first, then the rest
The conclusion prioritises on your behalf: three things in order, then what to do in the first ninety days, the first year, and years two to five. About twenty things over five years, not a hundred and twenty over a weekend.
One of each, shown in full
A pipeline register. A theory of change with the assumption most likely to break marked. An annual account of economic stewardship, including the section headed ‘what we got wrong this year’.
The journey: five destinations
Thirteen chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Five parts, one argument.
The Reckoning
The lessons of forty years of policy, honestly told - so the next decade can be different.
The Truth
Understand how your economy actually got here and what is really causing its condition. Everything downstream of a wrong diagnosis is waste.
Discovery
The part most books in this field do not have: generating solutions with ideas and foresight, backing the right businesses, and fusing ambition with credibility.
The Work
Delivery: building the impactful and stopping the rest, asking why when delivery stalls, and the learning organisation that can prove its case to government.
The Leadership
Partnership that matches the complexity of the economy, the organisation and people that decide whether any of it takes, leadership that takes everyone with you - and the standard the whole endeavour is judged by.
Who this book is for
Economic development practitioners, from officer to director. Combined authority and council leaders, mayors and their teams. Civil servants designing the settlements. Anyone whose work will help devolution deliver on its economic ambition.
It pairs with The Local and Regional Economic Development Handbook: the Handbook is the reference for the whole field; this book is the judgement, disciplines and leadership that make the machinery work. Explore the Handbook here.
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