yknot

For me it's not so much what BSA should have done, it's that it even happened in the first place. BSA, like the Catholic Church, staked out a higher moral ground where participants expected everyone to be held to exemplary standards. Other youth organizations, like sports or 4-H, exhorted you to enroll your kids but they didn't bleat about religious values or character or morality. Ironically, that lack of moralizing may have protected them to some degree. The church and BSA did and then failed miserably in recognizing how predators would use that to cloak their actions. We were in the kid and personal character and leadership business and we actively promoted that. It's incomprehensible to me that we were so inept at recognizing and dealing effectively with this no matter what the standards were at the time. That, to me, is the indictment of the BSA. How did such predators thrive in our ranks when everything we are supposed to be about should have kept them out?

Paper airplane competitions

Hula hoops, marbles, and marble shooting games. Can keep them distanced and the marbles controlled with the hula hoops.

That was true 20 or 30 years ago but not now. People are generally just pretty depraved in the prison system. I have family who work in corrections and it is a different world today.

That's heartbreaking. I also did not tell my father certain things for similar reasons but thankfully those things that negatively affected me were not of that nature. I recently found out about a couple friends who were younger than me who were abused by an adult we knew and the guilt that I did not see it and help them is overwhelming. I wish such things had not happened to you or to them.

Even decades ago if I told my father someone had tried to mess with me they would have been picking up body parts in three counties. Yes times were different and there was a higher threshold for some things then than there is now but the basic human instinct to snap a child abuser's spine has not changed. Except today things being the way they are we send lawyers to snap them in half. I was not an adult in that time period when most of these cases were alleged to have occurred but I have a very hard time comprehending how it could have been so widespread yet so ignored at worst or so incompetently handled at best.

In my area, the private schools are open and the public schools are mostly online. Parents have migrated their students to private schools, including parochial, in order to have in person schooling.

OK forget about Pope Francis. The Cardinal in my archdiocese hasn't been hiding under a rock. There is plenty for him to talk about that has nothing to do with the abuse scandals.

You are getting hysterical. No one is proposing Mosby talk about abuse. Mosby needs to motivate the troops. Mosby can also talk about all the aspects of scouting that have nothing to do with abuse in a controlled setting. There is nothing to fear. Nothing to stop him. Much to be gained over this silence.

I think you keep misinterpreting what I am saying. I am not advocating putting Mosby on CNN. But plenty of CEOs are able to still get messages across in a controlled setting. I've been in corporations during crises and you can put your CEO in front of an internal lens -- whether that's a camera or in print -- to communicate messages to the troops. Invariably, these messages will be leaked to mainstream press. No hostile questions. It's really not that hard.

You are responding without reading. The war is not against the victims or the attorneys. The fight is countering the non stop onslaught of negative publicity with proactive positive messages, of which BSA has many. Let's take the Catholic Church. Lawsuits have never shut Pope Francis up.

Embattled organizations that survive crises fight for their lives in the court of public opinion. The fear of making things worse is what is paralyzing the leadership. It's going to paralyze itself into nonexistence. If BSA does not start laying some groundwork to counter all the negative publicity, it won't matter what the bankruptcy judge leaves it with.

I don't think ParkMan advocated "war" , that was me. And my use of the word "war" was not aimed at attorneys or victims but as staking out a battlefield in the realm of public opinion. We have ceded too much ground to negative coverage. The program aspect of scouting is a deep mine of positive stories, yet we do almost nothing in a coordinated or institutional way to promote any of it. That's where the war needs to be waged. If we wait until the bankruptcy is final, we will be too late. We will be swamped by another wave of negative publicity -- because there is no good publicity that is going to come out of that -- that we may never recover from. We've got to rethink the way we present the organization.

Legal and PR teams are almost always in conflict. Good leadership knows how to weigh the advice of both because it has a bigger job than staying out of court. It has to also ensure the long term success of the organization and that generally includes retaining as much public good will and trust as it can, especially in the face of a crisis. You can't always do that by listening to lawyers because sometimes good legal advice is bad business advice. The ongoing damage to BSA's reputation is almost fatal and needs to countered. The abuse scandal has paralyzed the organization in a way that it can't see any path forward, but there are some. To clarify a point, you do not wage war on victims. You also do not wage war on the attorneys, because that is same as waging war on the victims. You wage war in the court of public opinion to protect your reputation. Program aspects are the positive narrative we can control and promote, but we don't. A blue ribbon million dollar PR consultant would be great -- BSA has been in need of one for decades -- but the most effective PR is just based on common sense communications and coordinated information sharing. It is a natural by product of good leadership. Someone mentioned that surrogates would be useful but then correctly noted we don't have any, at least not in the traditional sense. We're too fractured and too radioactive to recruit any. As someone else noted, though, we do have surrogates at the Council and local levels who have been trying on their own to counter the tidal waves of negative news. This is where BSA has failed to provide any real leadership, direction, or resources. None of that is overly expensive, it is again just basic communication and common sense and most of it would fall well outside of any legal concerns. Another way to look at surrogates is to partner with other organizations doing positive things relative to what you do. There are proactive messages that could be sent that would if not repair at least stem some of this damage but almost nothing is being done. The Girl Eagle Scouts event was good but far too anemic and a one off. My last criticism of BSA leadership, and specifically Mosby, is the lack of internal communication to the troops throughout this crisis. He took the helm of an embattled organization, yet it took weeks if not months for the rank and file scouter to hear one word of reassurance or inspiration from the new leader. There is an important internal component to good public relations that starts with an organization's own employees or volunteers. These people, if treated well, are usually sympathetic to your cause and are your first army on the ground. In order for them to act as grass roots surrogates, however, they need to be kept informed and motivated. There's no legal excuse to hide behind here. It's pretty simple for a leader to at least issue motivational statements to his team and only once or twice over this long year has he done so.

Everybody makes mistakes. Pharma companies produce bad medicines. Car companies produce inferior products. But companies with integrity own up to mistakes in an upfront way, communicate about them, and somehow convince the public that they are still better off with access to medicines or vehicles because of the overall good they do in their lives. That's what leaders do. BSA has had no such advocate. I'm not defending anything wrong that was done. But if you believe along with the lawyers that the world is better off without scouting, then yes, accept the silence of our leadership and prepare for the end of scouting.

I worked in PR as a consultant at the highest levels for Fortune 100 top executives for big pharma, big auto, big energy, big tech. This is not how it is played. You don't wait, you get out first. You control the message. You are not passive or silent. Any corporate level executive, any upper management at even a mid level business, would know this. It is inexplicable how passive and mute BSA has been.

Yes, yes and yes. We are getting the pants beaten off of us by more sophisticated operators. We have got to learn how to chart our own course.

War looks like leadership. And that's how you win. You mention Mosby. Perfect. Where is our leader? BSA named its reorg ruminations The Churchill Project. What leadership skill did its namesake wield better than any other WWII leader? Words. He communicated, he inspired, he motivated. Where is Mosby? Where is his appeal to the troops to fight the good fight? It has nothing to do with waging war on victims. It's simply about reminding everyone what is good about scouting and why we need to do our best at the unit level to keep it going. On this he has been virtually silent.

The problem is this is war. Stop fussing about how fair or unfair it is, or how we used to do things, or parsing out the legal angles and simply figure out how to win it. No one at BSA is a war time leader.

I wouldn't do that. Just because something happened 50 years ago doesn't mean it can't be verified even if the perpetrator is dead. I believe in a reasonable look back process because forensic investigation can validate many claims. Also, the vast majority of the claims -- about 85% -- were made by men in their mid forties to early fifties so the reality is that many perpetrators or at least corroborating witnesses are certainly possibly alive.

Most of the people who I know who have been "first" at something are oblivious to being "firsts". Or, if they are aware, they are embarrassed or aggravated by it. For the most part, they've simply been people who were driven enough by passion or ability that they succeeded in overcoming barriers where others before them had failed. Some of these girl Eagle Scouts no doubt have pushy parents or some hubris of their own, but for the most part they seem to be just more great scouts. I don't have any issue with BSA making a big deal of this because it's good PR and will help market the organization at a time when it needs all the good press and recruitment help it can get. I think it has been destructive for BSA to focus so intently on promoting Eagle Scout status but that's a crisis for a future day if and when it emerges from bankruptcy.

Except I'd gladly pay 45 cents for a thin mint or a snickerdoodle. Would like some right now. Not so popcorn.

Visiting the American cemetery at Normandy with my dad who was a WWII vet was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. The rows of headstones, mostly of young people, were sobering. Driving down the coast and looking up at the cliffs they climbed up under fire left me speechless. I look at my teenage sons, and think of my dad. He couldn't wait to enlist, and signed up at 17 the day after he graduated high school. They are capable of the same, but thank God this generation hasn't needed to ask it of them.

I don't know. I think the average suburban kid in a stable home is well protected from physical harm, but psychologically I think society dangles them over cliffs. In many ways, kids are not allowed to be kids any more. Mentally they are pushed into adult situations and adult stress loads. The attraction for this kind of literature and media may be that it presents kids with characters who are able to survive in chaotic, dangerous worlds where adults are no longer in control or can't be trusted. Whatever it is, there is definitely something going on though and it's disturbing.

I was aghast when Hunger Games made it onto our district's 4th grade summer reading list. We're a long way from Lassie.