Reinventing Business-Civic Partnerships

Excerpts from Carol Coletta's remarks to the Cities of Service "Building the Blueprint Meeting" in Philadelphia Dec. 3, 2009.

Not that long ago, there was an obvious reason for business to be involved in community.  In any mid-size city, there were three big local banks, three local department stores, two local newspapers, three locally owned TV stations and a local utility.  They were involved in the community because the community equaled their market.  And frankly, business was a lot easier then.

But with globalization, acquisitions, consolidations and franchising came two things:  Less dependence on any one market, and a 24/7 competitive environment that leaves much less time for CEO and senior management engagement in community affairs.

For those of you longing for a return to the good old days, I have one word of advice:  STOP!  They are not coming back.

Furthermore, government faces demands from citizens for inclusiveness, transparency, and public engagement that can make public-private partnership difficult at best and slower than anyone had hoped.  In addition, government is under a new level of scrutiny from an often histrionic media that creates an environment of skepticism and suspicion.

It is now up to us to reinvent the public-private partnership in terms of these new realities the partners face.

That’s why this conversation is so timely.

As I think about the opportunities ahead of us, a few thoughts and questions come to mind:

• If all this becomes, is another volunteer program – another Points of Light – we will have missed an opportunity that doesn’t come around often.  We are at a moment when dramatic change is at hand.  It’s clear that the way we’ve built our communities over the past 60 years no longer work.  It is costly and inefficient, and it no longer provides upward mobility for Americans.
• Cities are the right scale at which to make change happen. They are big enough to make a difference but small enough to get your arms around.
• Long term goals don’t motivate change.  Think about the 2030 Climate Change goal.  Why does anyone believe a 20- year goal will motivate politicians serving 4-year terms?  Or for that matter, why do we think it will motivate a mother who has to get up, make breakfast, and get the kids off to school?
• We need short-term, measurable outcomes onto which people can project their own wants and needs to motivate change.  They have to see, “What’s in it for me?” And we need to get started yesterday.  We need velocity.
• To get velocity, we won’t be able to depend on a top-down approach.  We need to get vastly  -- vastly -- more people into this work of making change.  If you need a model, think of the Obama campaign.
• We can only get vastly more people involved using an approach you can think of as “chaotic alignment,” supported by a platform that makes it easier for a lot of people to take independent action toward a shared goal.
• And to get the innovation we need, we need partners committed only to an outcome, not to a particular program or institution.  [We’ve seen this in our Talent Dividend Tour this year.  We’ve visited 27 cities to date, working to convince  cross-sector groups of urban leaders that the value of increasing college attainment in their cities just one percentage point is so great that it ought to be the number one item on the city’s economic development agenda.  Our only commitment was to the outcome.  The most promising cities for achieving the Talent Dividend first are those who are most fiercely committed to the outcome rather than to a particular strategy or a particular institution.  They are willing to follow the facts, and let the facts drive strategy.]

Which brings me full circle to the business-civic partnership.

Key to a good partnership is knowing what each partner can bring.  In the case of community change, business brings at least three important things:

1. A real concern about talent and whether a community can develop, attract and retain enough of it – which means business can make communities mindful of the competitive landscape in which they exist.
2. A focus on outcomes achieved by any [legal and moral] means possible.
3. Agnosticism about strategy – which opens the way to much-needed innovation.

The challenge for Cities of Service is to figure out how to use business at its best – its focus on outcomes, its neutrality on who does what, and its ability to innovate -- and to marry volunteers with change that matters.  It’s not that we don’t want to do good deeds. We do, and we will.  But good deeds are not enough.  We need to re-make communities in America if we are going to deliver a better future for our nation.  That, in my opinion, is the sweet spot for the business-civic partnership.