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Giving Back and Getting Back: Mom-And-Pop Shops
December 10, 2007
Urban Enterprise Initiative encourages Booz Allen employees to help mom-and-pop stores
By Laurel Maury
Volunteering is usually thought of as something done outside of work. It enriches people's lives, but isn't part of office culture. However, when Booz Allen Hamilton, a highly respected consulting firm, found itself involved with the Clinton Foundation, management discovered that weaving volunteer work into its corporate identity did more than give back to the community; it gave back to the company.
Six years ago, after September 11th, a group of New York consulting firms, Booz Allen among them, banded together to assess the economic damage to downtown Manhattan. At the same time, small businesses in Harlem approached former President Clinton for help surviving both rising rents and the general economic malaise that terrorism brought to the city. Reggie Van Lee, a partner with Booz Allen Hamilton, gave a presentation on the effects of economic damage, which Bill Clinton attended. A few weeks after that, Mr. Clinton approached Van Lee with the idea of using volunteers from downtown consulting firms to help small Harlem businesses. Booz Allen took this suggestion and ran with it.
To Van Lee's surprise, between a quarter and a third of all of Booz Allen's New York employees were interested. "We had about seventy people in the room, about twenty on the phone," all wanting to volunteer. Sixty people from Booz Allen and a number of others from the National Black MBA Association and from New York University's Stern School of Business signed on as volunteers. Thus Urban Enterprise Initiative (UEI), which is now in its fifth year, was born.
Suddenly one of the most respected consulting firms in the world was leading volunteer teams to help small, mom-and-pop, uptown businesses, including Katrina Parris Flowers and the Harlem's Heaven Hat Boutique. Employees volunteered two to six hours a week after work and on weekends, and were so jazzed, Van Lee recalls, "It was like a religious experience."
The most obvious boost was to employee morale. Both Van Lee and Booz Allen partner Karl Kellner describe how, after long hours at the firm, employees are reenergized by their work in Harlem. Kellner feels a swell of happiness whenever he passes Katrina Parris Flowers on the bus, and he's not alone. Employees no longer officially part of the project sometimes troop uptown to volunteer at the cash register at the businesses where they once helped develop strategy and motivate employees. Kellner says, "The ability to do this kind of work is one of the reasons I'm at Booz Allen."
But the work doesn't only make happier employees at Booz Allen, it makes them more skilled. "There are lessons learned in the nonprofit sector that apply directly to the for-profit sector that you wouldn't otherwise learn," says Kellner. For starters, it taught volunteers to abandon consultancy terms and speak in regular language. "You become much better at explaining yourself and your method- ology," says Kellner.
The work was "almost identical, in some ways, to the analysis we do for our commercial clients at Booz Allen," says Kellner. "Except that it was on a much smaller scale." Instead of surveying 10,000 consumers, they'd stand out on street corners, passing out questionnaires, and survey 110. Booz Allen's people had to learn to explain business concepts from scratch to people who'd never even done computerized inventory. "It helps me with my corporate clients, the government clients and the not-for-profits," says Van Lee. Van Lee feels the work he did with Katrina Parris, which started with two people making bouquets, taught him more about how to deal with nonprofit and governmental clients than any other work he's done.
Booz Allen's involvement with UEI helps attract talent, too. Van Lee says students are coming out of business school wanting "to do more than just line the pockets of CEOs." He believes, "They don't want to work for a not-for-profit, because there is no money in that, but they want to give back to society." Booz Allen Hamilton's commitment to service is one of the things that makes the firm stand out to desirable young MBAs. Van Lee has seen students who heard him speak about UEI at Columbia University show up at Booz Allen as new hires and tell him that his speech inspired them.
All-Volunteer Program
Booz Allen Hamilton actually has a long-standing commitment to nonprofit work, though it has usually taken the form of pro bono work for clients such as the New York Foundation for the Arts. The firm sets aside resources and billable hours and treats its pro bono work as if it was for paying clients. However, UEI is unique in that it's all volunteer. Employees cannot bill their time or expense their travel. Therefore Booz Allen's work with UEI can serve as a template for firms unable to afford allowing their employees to work for free, but that nonetheless want to start volunteer programs.
The main ingredient to UEI's success, both as a volunteer project and as a tool for building better employees, is that the project uses Booz Allen's strengths. Instead of manning a soup kitchen, or volunteering at a public school, UEI has its volunteers doing market research and business strategy—what the company's people do best. The second ingredient is that the program is local. People get excited when they see progress in their own backyard.
The third thing is harder to define, but it's something that may just help keep cutting-edge firms vibrant and help make average firms cutting-edge. This is something Van Lee calls "mega-community." In its work with UEI, Booz Allen has had to bring together accountants, lawyers, people who can advise on real estate, entrepreneurs and nonprofits. What this means is that a firm has to be open to working with people outside its usual sphere of influence. When managing a mega-community, it helps to have a charismatic leader of some sort—in the case of UEI, it's Bill Clinton. It's important too that the leader be separate from the commercial firms involved, and be able to inspire people and break gridlock when it arises.
From talking with Reggie Van Lee and Karl Kellner, it's apparent that the benefits of being involved with a mega-community are subtle, but wide-ranging. This outer-directed involvement gets people out of their bubble, away from their security blankets, and forces them to listen to and deal with real problems that real people face. That's knowledge that can invigorate any company.
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