A Bold Management Strategy: Keeping Quiet

Several weeks ago, I arrived at a meeting in Washington at the same time as Kathy Cloninger, chief executive officer of Girl Scouts of the USA. I hadn’t seen her for a while, so I reached out to give her a hug and a big hello.

“Nice to see you,” she said in a hushed tone. I strained to pick up her words. Obviously something was wrong.

Cloninger had mysteriously lost her voice a few months before. For some reason, which her doctors still haven’t pinned down, one of her two vocal cords had become paralyzed. For a while, she couldn’t talk above a whisper. A recent injection of medication had helped her to raise the volume slightly, but even such modest relief, she told me, would be only temporary.

My first reaction was to tell Cloninger how sorry I was that this had happened. But it wasn’t long before my mind veered from sympathy to curiosity. What was it like, I asked, to run an organization with 10,000 employees and more than 3 million members—and suddenly have such a hard time being heard?