Range - David Epstein Page 0,60

to be a pilot and her classmates laughed. So she showed up in the church basement to start her six weeks. She ended up staying with Troop 17 for eight years, until they graduated high school.

Afterward, Hesselbein kept picking up Girl Scout roles she neither sought nor intended to keep. She was in her midforties when she left the country for the first time, for an international Girl Scout meeting in Greece. More trips followed—India, Thailand, Kenya. Hesselbein realized she loved volunteering.

She was asked to chair the local United Way campaign at a time when that role was as foreign for women as aviatrix had been. It was a volunteer job, so she figured she had nothing to lose. But when she appointed as her vice chairman the president of the local United Steelworkers of America, suddenly the United Way president decided that wasn’t such a good idea and he had better check with Bethlehem Steel, a major supporter. Hesselbein stood fast, and managed to get both the company and the union behind her. That year, little Johnstown, Pennsylvania, had the highest per capita giving of any United Way campaign in the country. Of course, it was a temp role as far as Hesselbein was concerned, so the following year she handed it off.

In 1970, a trio of Johnstown business leaders who supported the Girl Scouts invited Hesselbein to lunch. They told her that they had chosen a new executive director of the local Girl Scout council. The previous one had left and the council was in serious financial trouble.

“How wonderful, who is it?” she asked.

“You,” they replied.

“I would never take a professional job,” she told them. “I am a volunteer.”

One of the businessmen was on the United Way board, and he said that if Hesselbein did not take the job and straighten out the finances, the Girl Scouts would lose the United Way partnership. She agreed to fill in for six months only, and then to step aside for an experienced professional. At fifty-four, she began what she calls her first professional job. She devoured management books, and a month in realized that the work fit her. She stayed for four years.

But even as her work was going well, the backdrop was dire. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, society changed dramatically. The Girl Scouts did not. Girls were preparing for college and careers in unprecedented numbers, and they needed information on thorny topics like sex and drugs. The organization was in existential crisis. Membership fell off a cliff. The CEO position went vacant for nearly an entire year. In 1976, the search committee invited Hesselbein to New York City for an interview. Previous Girl Scout CEOs had staggering leadership credentials. Captain Dorothy Stratton had been a psychology professor, university dean, founding director of the U.S. Coast Guard Women’s Reserve, and the first personnel director at the International Monetary Fund. The most recent chief executive was Dr. Cecily Cannan Selby, who at sixteen entered Radcliffe College and later used her physical biology PhD from MIT to apply wartime technology to the study of cells. Selby’s national leadership positions spanned industry and education. Hesselbein, meanwhile, had been the head of a local Girl Scout council, one of 335 around the country. She planned to spend her life in Pennsylvania, so she politely turned down the interview.

But John accepted it. He said that she could decline the job but he would drive her there to do it in person. Since she was not interested in the job, she felt at ease when the committee asked her what she would do as hypothetical CEO. Hesselbein described the total transformation of an organization steeped in tradition: activities reworked to stay relevant—heavy on math, science, and technology; the hierarchical leadership structure dismantled in favor of “circular management.” Rather than rungs on a ladder, staff at all levels would be beads on concentric bracelets, with multiple contacts who could advance ideas from local councils toward the national decision makers at the center. Finally, the organization would be inclusive: when girls of all backgrounds looked at Girl Scouts, they would have to find themselves.

Hesselbein arrived in New York City on July 4, 1976, as CEO of a three-million-member organization. Out went the sacrosanct standard handbook in favor of four handbooks, each targeted at a specific age group. She hired artists and told them that a six-year-old indigenous girl near an ice floe in Alaska who flips through a handbook had better see someone who looks