The Business Of Scouting And A Crisis Of Our Own Making

I’m an Eagle Scout. When I turned 8, and for the next twenty years, Scouting occupied the majority of my time in life.

I was elected and appointed to national Scouting posts for several years as a kid, and served for several more as an adult. When I was 19 years old, I met — then lived with, and traveled the world assisting — one of the great mentors of my life. He was 91 years old, and William “Green Bar Bill” Hillcourt was renowned as one of the founding fathers of the worldwide movement of Scouting. Hillcourt was a hero to millions of Scouts and Scouters. He wrote many of the Scout handbooks and shaped much of the Scouting program for nearly 70 years, though was often out of step with the corporate decision makers of the Boy Scouts of America.

Following Bill’s death, I carried a spark from the torch he tried to pass, and one of my earliest startups was a magazine for Boy Scout leaders, together with a web community we launched in 1994, the dark ages of the internet. We reached tens of thousands of leaders, and for several years it was my honor to write and travel and speak to a grassroots movement of Scouting, and lead an incredible team of staff and volunteers that loved their jobs.

In some ways that early startup experience really set an impossible standard for my future business ventures… we didn’t just satisfy customers. Instead, the words we published and ideas we promoted brought customer letters proclaiming “Bless you for helping me change the lives of kids!”, and went on to paint in vivid detail how we had done so. It was pretty inspirational and heady stuff for all of us in that business, even if we weren’t making any money.

There was a time when I expected my entire life would be spent in the service of Scouting, humbly trying to continue the legacy of Bill Hillcourt, and give back to a movement that had done more to shape and mold the man I became than anything I learned in school, from my parents, or from any other influence.

Scouting inspired the value of cheerful service, honed my leadership, and fostered my ambition to nurture and advance my community. From those lessons, I’ve launched startups, mentored founders, created schools and built several organizations. I’ve succeeded and failed plenty of times, and Scouting was the lab where I first learned how to do both.

The Scouting of my youth was a welcoming place for all kids to learn and grow. But twenty years ago, Scouting in America chose to become a culture warrior, and has increasingly marginalized itself and eroded its brand.

The BSA won a Supreme Court case in 2000, defending its right as a private organization to define its own membership. That case may have been specifically about gay members, but it was really about a broader right of association. The BSA was correct to defend itself in that case, and the final decision of the Court was also correct.

Many may argue that BSA was drawn into the battle. But where BSA failed, and instead placed itself at the tip of the dagger, was in not announcing the very next day that they were granting local chartering partners (the churches, civic clubs, and parent groups) the power to decide who the best leaders would be for their kids.

BSA correctly fought for the right to association, but then denied that right to their most important partners, the parents in neighborhoods and communities across America.

It may be a difficult nuance to understand the difference between the movement of Scouting, which grows in more than 140 countries and still shines brightly with millions of kids in local neighborhoods throughout this country, and the organization of the Boy Scouts of America. The BSA is the national corporation, exclusively granted a charter by the US Congress to administer the only boy scout program in this country. It’s the organization that established this policy.

The movement of Scouting continues to be one of the great opportunities for light and goodness in the world. But in my opinion, and one shared by millions of parents with kids who could benefit from Scouting, the corporation that administers Scouting in America lost its moral compass a long time ago.

The BSA will argue they were only honoring the wishes and concerns of parents. They will argue they didn’t expressly ban gay kids and adults, they simply compelled them to keep that part of their identity secret if they wanted to remain in Scouting. But in reality they refused to allow all local parents, troop leaders and chartering partners to decide for themselves.

In retrospect, the Boy Scouts of America made a bad business decision. It might have been good short-term business, in that it placated a few of their largest chartering partners, like the LDS and Catholic church, who were then using the Boy Scouts as a sectarian tool (even if many smaller churches and other partners were marginalized in dissent). But it was clearly bad business in the long run.

Not long after that Supreme Court case, in a rare, candid moment, the chief scout executive at the time was quoted in the media saying “when [parents] start walking away from us, that’s the signal for us to revisit the issue”. That’s a business decision, driven by numbers, not a moral one.

And for the next thirteen years, the BSA became an increasingly isolated echo chamber of like minded customers, where their business decision ignored the total addressable market.