This Business of Citizenship

In a recent Harvard Business Review, one of the bibles of American entrepreneurship, Rosabeth Kanter mulled about taking business to a different level.  “Companies that are breaking the mould are moving beyond corporate social responsibility to social innovation. These companies are the vanguard of the new paradigm. They view community needs as opportunities to develop ideas and demonstrate business technologies, to find and serve new markets, and to solve longstanding business problems.”That’s quite a statement. While numerous corporations continue to promote their corporate social responsibilities (CSR), Kanter is talking about a new breed of entrepreneur branching out into an entirely new dimension.Talk to Shawn Adamsson for just two minutes and you’ll catch the picture pretty quickly. He and his firm, rtraction, have brought together the concepts of business and citizenship that in many ways blows the doors off the old corporate model of CSR. Key to it all has been the company’s belief that each employee brings not only their particular technical skills into the business but diverse citizen commitments as well. The key, as the firm sees it, is to bring both together for a better product and a better community.Rtraction is a small web development firm that gave away $100,000 of services to non-profits in the last year. For an emerging company attempting to establish itself in a competitive market, that’s not pocket change but a statement of belief in how it wants to play a future role in community development. It captured wide attention in the past week by offering $20,000 of services in a cooperative bid to lure CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi and his popular show “Q” to London over other cities – a bid that ultimately succeeded.“Our work for the non-profit sector isn’t some kind of policy we follow,” Adamsson says. “We just kind of live it out.” It’s not hard to see. Entering rtraction’s office you get the immediate sense that it isn’t a regular business establishment. There is no receptionist, merely a cowbell hanging on the wall. Ring it and inevitably a young and open professional will come greeting and offering words of welcome. A quick look around the corner and you spot a large open office space with various desks spread around – a clear indicator of a collaborative work environment as opposed to employees parked away in their own cubicles. There’s nothing top-down about it.“We’re slowly growing from a web development firm into a digital agency,” Adamsson observes. Growth seems to be a big element of the business design. Adamsson and his two partners, David Billson and Josh Dow, opted early on to take whatever spare time was available to dedicate to non-profits. The list of agencies supported in this fashion is lengthy, ranging from the London Poetry Slam to 1,000 Acts of Kindness and Reforest London. The firm chooses those it supports carefully, selecting those it feels can add future benefit to the community.Missing in our conversation was any discussion of the bottom line – that most sacred of all business pursuits. When I introduced the subject Adamsson confesses that although it’s obviously important, the company’s inspiration comes from its community involvement. “Of course there are spin-off benefits for us,” he states, “but we believe our staff have causes they believe in and we want to help them make a difference.”Interesting. Most businesses select charities of their choice and often pass instruction down from the top to get behind such efforts. The rtraction firm sees it as a coordinated team effort where employees can bring their own favoured causes to the mix.For someone like me, who served in government but has chosen to concentrate on citizenship and its renaissance in Canada, rtraction creates an exciting appeal. While governments most often tolerate the input of citizens, here is a firm that actually welcomes it, building such inclusion into its business model. By seeing community organizations as important service providers and key players as opposed to just recipients of charity, they become important backers of innovation. More than that, they view such charitable groups as housing citizen volunteers that add to the community’s quality of life and service.It’s the new economy, not the old one – an economy that actually values service providers as people builders, part of the economic generation of tomorrow, without whose efforts any business could find little success. In refusing to classify their clients as mere consumers, or their employees as only cogs in some grand corporate design, rtraction is becoming the living embodiment of what Mike Clasper, president of Business Development for Proctor and Gamble, predicted would be the successful firms of tomorrow: “People are going to want, and be able, to find out about the citizenship of a brand, whether it is doing the right things socially, economically and environmentally.”If that is indeed true, then rtraction is about to find a niche situated somewhere between private and corporate citizenship – a more public place where employees are collaborators for the sake of their community and business becomes the innovative workplace for the public good. Given the way things are headed, it might eventually become the business model that can rescue capitalism from itself.