BSA’s CEO position is too important to be a reward for career lifers

BSA is searching for a new CEO. Current CEO Roger Mosby was hired to navigate the bankruptcy. That is almost done, barring a pending sign-off by a higher court. Roger is ready to enjoy retirement.

Below is my letter to BSA’s CEO search committee. I am sharing it publicly due to the national office’s hatred of feedback (part of the cultural rot I mention in the letter).

Do you have ideas for BSA’s next CEO? Send them to bsa.ceo.search@gmail.com.

The letter

Search committee,

The CEO selection committee has a historic and unusually important duty. BSA’s next CEO will have a role unlike any before.

The next CEO must clear the national office of cultural rot and set the strategy for BSA’s next few decades. The new CEO will determine whether BSA is viable for the 21st century.

It is crucial to pick someone who has succeeded at large-organization culture change. To do this, the selection committee must depart from the BSA custom of the CEO being a reward for career loyalists. The selection committee’s candidate pool must include a robust selection of outsiders.

Details

BSA’s next leader must be a dynamic change agent with a track record of success. 

First, this person must be charged with fixing deep cultural problems at the national office. A moribund, bureaucratic, bloated national office has persisted for decades. We have many years of evidence of alarming harms the national office has done to Scouts and volunteers. Below my signature are selected examples. (These challenges generally predate the bankruptcy, so they are not attributable to recent events.) National’s culture is so rotted, the national office is Scouting’s main existential threat.

Second, the next CEO will rebuild the organization from historic membership, financial, and employee losses due to the pandemic and bankruptcy. The next CEO will define the BSA’s next several decades: setting financial strategy, starting a plan to resolve immense debt, creating a healthy culture, restaffing, navigating the demise of the chartered-organization model, improving council performance, and a lot more. These are profound responsibilities.

Here’s the hard part: It is crucial for the committee to go beyond BSA’s tradition of using the CEO position as a reward for career loyalists. My next few paragraphs will be difficult, but there’s just no good way to put this.

I grew up as a preacher’s kid in the United Methodist Church and remain a member. Through this experience, I have a lot of exposure to an employment system that is remarkably similar to BSA’s commissioned-employee system.

I have many friends in BSA’s professional staff, most of whom are commissioned. I value their service immensely. But I am distressed at how, like the United Methodist Church, BSA’s employment system over-values loyalty and obedience to the bureaucracy, undermining employees with valuable talent.

Now don’t get me wrong. Loyalty and obedience have value. No coherent corporation consists of a bunch of cowboys. And for many roles, these are invaluable attributes.

We need to be honest about the limitations of BSA’s employee-advancement system. By over-valuing loyalty and obedience, BSA’s career-advancement system prefers people with strengths different than those needed for a CEO who leads culture change, who has the bravery to trim rot, and who must guide a large organization towards a new, multi-decadal strategy.

It is crucial to diversify and broaden the pool extensively. While a few reasonable candidates may be national or council employees, it is crucial that you also go outside the organization. All candidates with extensive, relevant leadership experience should be on the table.

Rogery Mosby’s appointment is an example of going outside the organization. He had valuable, prior experience navigating a bankruptcy, a set of aptitudes other than what BSA’s advancement system can surface. The same goes for our next CEO, whose required aptitudes are once again different than what BSA’s advancement system surfaces.

I warn of nasty politics. I am sure many career lifers still view BSA’s CEO role as their reward. Going against that for a second time in a row will tip apple carts. That will be resisted.

You must be brave and boldly tip apple carts! Yes, you’ll get blowback. Yes, part of your job will be resisting influence. You’ll experience unsavory behaviors–brown-nosing, hard-nosed politics, and many things in between. I am sorry for this, but this is part of what we need from you to assure a viable future for the BSA.

A final thought: Defenders of the CEO-is-a-reward-to-loyalists system may insist that one must have careerist-level familiarity with BSA to succeed as a national-scope leader. That is false. Former CDO Elizabeth Ramirez-Washka proved that wrong. Despite lacking a Scouting background, she excelled and left as a well-regarded leader (more info).

Please do not hesitate to reach out if you have questions.

Thank you,

Aren Cambre

Selected examples of outcomes associated with the national office’s cultural rot

  • Decades-delayed, bungled elimination of homosexual ban
  • Decades-delayed inclusion of girls
  • Active disinterest in facts and truth, evidenced by continued defense of a tragic, harmful, sweeping ban on coed troops and dens that is exclusively fueled by misinformation and sexist, racist, toxic folklore (more info)
  • Brownface cosplay is endemic in the Order of the Arrow despite decades of concern (more info)
  • While promoting the coed ban, national representatives crack sexist jokes, lie, or gaslight parents and volunteers (more info)
  • Secret, hamfisted Guide to Safe Scouting change that decimated the vibrant camping programs of 75% of Cub Scout packs (more info)
  • Extraordinary secrecy combined with attitude of “we’re right because we wear gold loops” that negates transparency and accountability
  • Overreliance on traditional hierarchy, creating inefficiencies and obstructing information flows between the national office and the customer base (parents and unit-level volunteers)
  • Routinely undermining feedback, open hostility to feedback-givers (more info)
  • Permissive attitude towards rudderless programs that are no longer useful and engage in aggressive scams, like NESA and its “who’s who” yearbook
  • Sapping energy from the movement by fomenting never-ending arguments and misunderstandings among the grassroots due to a gross, bloated corpus of volunteer-facing documentation that is difficult to use, difficult to understand, and rife with vagueness and duplication
  • Perpetual laggard on technology, examples including 1. under-resourcing of investments in customer-facing IT systems, 2. electronic documents hugely over-rely on print-format-centric documents, and 3. full merit-badge books are still only available in print or an electronic form that is obsolete, poor quality, and not free

Comments

7 responses to “BSA’s CEO position is too important to be a reward for career lifers”

  1. Eagle Scout Eagles Fan Avatar
    Eagle Scout Eagles Fan

    If they select the wrong person, this could be the last BSA CEO. Going fashionably woke as they did with the knee-jerk BLM mandated implementation of the Citz/Society merit badge (aka DEI merit badge), membership will erode to unsustainable levels in a few years. Sadly, I’m thinking this CEO selection will become Scouting’s Bud Light and ‘New Coke’ marketing moment, as the organization moves further on from its Mission & Vision and the families of all faiths and colors who embrace those values in common.

    1. Aren Cambre Avatar
      Aren Cambre

      The kinds of people who love the incompetent-CEO model are throwback reactionaries. They love leadership vacuums. They fill vacuums with wedge politics, driving people away.

      Want to violate the values of Scouting in the deepest possible way? Create rules to drive away the most fragile members of society or those who simply disagree with you.

      The Citizenship in Society badge ended up fine. That’s not a problem.

      1. The next political wedge will likely be in the form of the new CEO herself (*) … born of an executive recruiter whose aim is to DEI-fy senior management in America. (* yep, I’m betting the executive recruiter advocates hiring a female minority as next CEO. The Board, inclined by their decades of momentum making bad decisions, will abide by the recruiter’s ‘fashionable’ hiring decision. The selection of the fashionable CEO results with the merging of BSA+GSA, a new brand(ing), loss of BSA control of Philmont to the banks, new Vision and Mission Statements which will betray BSA’s core constituents/purpose … and the demise of the organization in 5-10 years.

        1. Aren Cambre Avatar
          Aren Cambre

          The betrayal of BSA’s purpose and constituents has been been by throwback reactionaries. These people are using BSA as a tool in their endless cultural wars, dragging us into repeated, expensive, ridiculous membership controversies.

          I hope our next CEO has the wisdom, bravery, and grit to help BSA move beyond throwback reactionaryism. BSA must no longer allow itself to be a tool of obstinate contrarians.

  2. Mosby was a good old boy no better than the former process of rewarding loyalty. This time, they rewarded cronyism. He was an HR executive working for companies that acquired other distressed companies. His skills were not what we needed and we have barely survived his reign.

  3. C. Davis Avatar
    C. Davis

    I am curious to know your thoughts on the appt of the new CEO yesterday.

    1. Aren Cambre Avatar
      Aren Cambre

      I am optimistic. His credentials are aligned with where I wanted BSA to go. Importantly, BSA twice in a row broke its habit of squandering the CEO role on a careerist, leadership-adverse bureaucrat. BSA’s career system runs off leaders, so it is not reasonable to expect it to surface people with leadership talent.

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