Just about a year ago, Never Eat Alone co-author Tahl Raz interviewed Fast Company co-founder and entrepreneur Bill Taylor about his acclaimed book, Practically Radical. In this fascinating Social Capitalist interview, Taylor shared his insights about the best ways to compete, innovate, and succeed - including this story about how the Girl Scouts could teach us all a little bit about organizational change.
If you're in an organization where you feel like you're trapped by the status quo and conventionalism, one solution is to look far outside your company, far outside your field for ideas that are working well on others. Another is to rediscover and remind yourself of the ideas, values, energy, and the urgency that helped create this organization and ask, “How do we reinterpret that original DNA for the era of technology, culture, and markets we're living in today?”
One of my favorite change stories from Practically Radical is about the Girl Scouts of the USA, when a woman named Kathy Cloninger took over as CEO about eight years ago. Now, the Girl Scouts were not in crisis. They were doing fine. They were a ubiquitous, all-American, heartwarming brand. Yet Kathy and her colleagues sensed that something wasn’t quite right. The membership growth was really slow, and it was particularly slow amongst segments of the population, like the Hispanic community and others where population growth was really high.
While the brand was ubiquitous, nobody thought of it as compelling, cool, hip, or anything like that. Cloninger realized that the Girl Scout performance, the programs they were offering, the opportunities to engage with the organization, the uniforms, in short everything, was just not right for this new era of technology, communications, and culture, so they made some really dramatic changes.
Today, for example, you can see all the new Muslim troops they have, or the incredible new relevance Girl Scouts bring amongst Hispanic mothers and daughters. There are also troops called Girl Scouts Beyond Bars, which are Girl Scout troops for mothers who are incarcerated and their daughters, so they can come and do Girl Scout activities.
There was this front page piece in the Boston Globe a few days ago on the new generation of Girl Scout badges, like badges for doing organic gardening, the Inventor Badge, the Money Management Badge, the Social Entrepreneurship Badge; they’re really upgraded and are relevant to the program.
Now, it was really hard to make this deep-seated transformation. It’s a very conservative organization, and a lot of the volunteers who were Girl Scouts themselves 20 or 30 years ago, said, “Hey, this doesn’t seem like our kind of way.” So one method Cloninger and her colleagues used to create the confidence to make all these future changes was to revisit their own past.
They went back and reread the earliest writing, a kind of the mission statement written in 1912 by Juliette from Juliette Gordon Low, who was the Founder of the Girl Scouts. Low was an incredible social activist, a firebrand, and a rebel rouser who started the Girl Scouts in 1912, a time before women in the United States had the right to vote.
They concluded that if Juliette Gordon Low, this incredible feminist and advocate for empowering girls to be just as gifted as boys, came back to life today and saw how cautious, plain vanilla, and kind of “namby pamby” the Girl Scouts had become, she’d have been absolutely mortified.
The problem wasn’t taking risks and doing something bold, the problem was how timid and cautious Girl Scouts had become. So the folks of the organization would actually wear the buttons “WWJD?” – not “what would Jesus do?” but “what would Juliette do?” The question became, “What would this organization look like through the eyes of the founder?,” who until then everybody had admired and paid lip service to but no one really knew or understood. The rediscovery of the organization’s history, interestingly enough, helped wear down a lot of resistance to creating a different future.
If you want to hear (or read) the rest of the interview with Bill, click here for the full transcript and recording.
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