As business people we tend to think of business growth in terms of the next quarter, the next year, the next five years and the "long term" of the next ten years. This thinking is too stunted for somewhere like Thanet and a new paradigm needs to be considered. Rather than the usual short medium and long term periods we are used to dealing with we must content with scales that in some cases can be measured in generations.

As business people the year to year accounting period is not going to go away. It should be considered the smallest accountable unit. The year becomes the immediate term period while the next five should be considered the short term.

The medium term, and the one with the most exciting possibilities, is the fifteen to twenty year span. In that time scale our actions, as innovators, are seeded in new lives that grow to the early stages of maternity and the first tentative steps as contributing adults. If we squander that chance to invest we will not reap the rewards.

The tragedy is that, because anyone may invest in the future (at this range), often we are all content for anybody else to be required to do it. As a result nobody is doing it and everybody is missing out. It is not too late for us to start to invest even a little

Proper care and education of our children is the cornerstone of our future in Thanet. There is only so long we can take remedial action such as extra police work, tough new laws, curfews and fancy titled job centre schemes of dubious long term value. By putting things in place now we can be sure that in the next twenty to fifty years both ourselves and our children will have something of value in Thanet.

How can we do this? Surely schools, nurseries and the like are complex institutions wherein ancient mysteries are carried out and vast sums of money are eat up doing so? You are not alone in thinking such thought but you are not alone in being wrong.

Education does not start in school. Education is completed in school. It starts in every facet of our lives and our interactions with others.

The net effect of these interactions is a change in attitude and outlook. Not for children, not for teachers but for parents, future parents and those that help and support parents. The children of Thanet might not ever directly feel that change but we will feel it in fifteen or more years from now when that same attitude come back to us filtered and blended and asks for a job. By then it is too late.

Any amount of retraining can only bring new skills but some of the underlying features of a lifetime of experiences can never be rewritten. As employers we can never change the attitude of one gender to the other within our workforce. We can, however, set positive changes of corporate attitude that will over a two figure number of years come back to us not as policies but as ingrained attitudes.

No one can turn Thanet around in just few years (mericles and deities aside) but we can begin the proses of setting a new course. A course change that is best appreciated from the standpoint of history. One day our actions will part of the history of Thanet.

Let's make that a history worth reading.