Extracting Good from Good Works

Ed Butler, Managing Director of Corporates for Crisis (CforC), calls his London consultancy a “boots and suits” operation. Not only are he and his fellow directors–Sahar Hashemi and Hugo Slim–willing to don heavy-duty footwear and head to some of the world’s toughest regions, but so are the teams of experts they assemble to implement projects on behalf of multinational clients. Says Slim: “Most other consultants don’t go into the field.”

CforC is the brainchild of Christopher James, a former special-forces officer and diplomat who founded Hakluyt, a business-intelligence firm. After the December 2004 Asian tsunami, some big companies contacted James, wanting to know if the millions of dollars they had donated to relief efforts had been put to good use and if they had gotten any recognition for their help.

The answers weren’t positive. That’s when James decided that there had to be a better way for global businesses to help the developing countries they operate in–many of which have been hard hit by disasters, natural and man-made–while at the same time receiving accountability.

So James, who is chairman, launched CforC in October 2007 to assist multinationals in emerging, postcrisis countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, by getting them directly involved in local humanitarian, developmental or environmental projects. Multinationals, CforC reckons, have a huge capacity for doing good in these regions, and the goodwill their efforts engender can make it easier for them to do business, thus bolstering their bottom line. “This is what we call a license to operate,” Hashemi explains. “Once you gain the trust of a community, you’re safer there.” Butler, a former army brigadier who commanded British forces in southern Afghanistan, calls it “soft security.”

CforC’s team-based leadership structure draws on the operations and planning skills of a military commander (Butler), the business acumen of an entrepreneur (Hashemi, who co-founded a successful espresso-bar chain called Coffee Republic) and the humanitarian know-how of someone involved in nongovernmental organizations (NGOS)–that’s Slim, an academic who worked for a number of agencies, including the U.N. and Save the Children U.K.

The team concept also extends to the field. CforC, which is building a core staff of 20, can tap into a network of experts it has assembled, who number 30 so far and range from ex-officers and diplomats to former business executives and NGO operatives. For each project, it convenes small teams of staff and associates, mixing and matching skill sets to meet the client’s needs. For example, Slim says, a team may have “a human-rights person, an environmentalist and a private-equity expert–now that’s pretty wacky.”

That kind of diversity, however, means CforC teams “look at the world in a new way and can create something new,” Slim says. For instance, he adds, “it allows us to think seamlessly about our clients’ social and core business interests, recommending community and commercial opportunities simultaneously.” Each team is given a mission, resources and a deadline. “Then we let them go and do it,” Butler says. Telecom giant Vodafone, which recently bought Ghana Telecom, is using CforC to help it find useful projects in Ghana to get involved in. CforC’s team includes an African anthropologist, an academic expert on aid flow in Ghana and a former NGO executive. Says Vodafone chairman John Bond enthusiastically: “CforC works in some extremely difficult parts of the world, and they know what’s needed. They’re an enormously talented team.” There may be a comfort factor too in that CforC is a business for which profit isn’t a dirty word. Yet it is close enough to the NGO world to understand the kinds of projects that are most critic-proof.

Its resourcefulness seems to be paying off. As CforC enters its second year, Butler says, its business plan is on track, despite the economic slowdown. Memo to team members: Better keep your boots handy.