HiPERconversations: Sylvia Acevedo, CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA

In our latest HiPERleadership Podcast Episode, I spoke with Girl Scouts of the USA CEO, Sylvia Acevedo, about Out-of-the-Box Thinking. Throughout her career, Sylvia has been a game-change leader; her leadership navigating through the COVID-19 crisis has been no different. 

The mission of HiPER Solutions is to identify and unlock the maximum potential of HiPER Leaders and their organizations.

If there is one thing to take away from the conversation with Sylvia, it’s knowing who in your organization rides the wave, and who makes the wave. The difference between a manager and a leader is that managers ride the wave, leaders make the wave. Both types of people are crucial to an organization. As Sylvia puts it: 

When you're a manager, you pretty much know your resources, you know your market, you know the competition, and then, within those constraints, you meet or exceed your goals and that is incredible management. That's excellent. 

But in times like today, in the face of a pandemic, a leader still captures success, still captures victory, even though all of those things are unknown. You don't know your resources, you have an uncertain environment, you have a high-risk environment. And yet, you're still able to achieve your goals. 

A great example of Sylvia making the wave was during her tenure as Director of Latin America at Fortune 1000 software company Autodesk. In the early 1990’s, Autodesk put Sylvia in charge of a Mission Impossible: turn the Latin American market from profit loser to a profit leader. The big issue she faced? Piracy was an accepted business practice; virtually no company actually paid for their software licenses. If a software company threatened to sue a business for pirated software, it was not uncommon for the investigator / attorney to “mysteriously” disappear. 

After two years at Autodesk, Sylvia’s work led the LATAM market to represent 50% of net income for the entire company. How’d she do it? Out-of-the-Box thinking. The solution was not about getting a business to pay for your software, but to shift the focus surrounding how customers, even non-paying customers, feel about your company. 

In Sylvia’s words, “the companies using pirated versions of our software were being poked with a stick to get to them to pay, I found it was much better to put out a carrot” and let them come to her. Instead of doing the hard selling of the software, she did two things: 

• First, Sylvia made it a point that the pirated software was outdated, there may be several different versions used within a single company, and none had the correct manuals. Without the appropriate manuals, the software will not perform well and the outputs end up costing more money over time than just paying for the software. 
• Second, Sylvia provided compelling incentives to the clients and prospective clients to buy the manuals, and then gave public recognition by giving out awards for various accomplishments users and customers achieved with software. Under her leadership, Autodesk held the first-ever software developer conference in Brazil. Sylvia changed the dialogue from adversarial to collegial collaboration. She helped them legitimize and build credibility amongst their peers. 

Fast forward to the year 2020.

After four years into her tenure as CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA, Sylvia has had tremendous success in making the organization more relevant than ever to millions of Girl Scouts across America; there are now 100 new badges in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). 

In March 2020, along with the entire world, Girl Scouts of the USA was faced with the COVID-19 crisis, and it happened right at the peak of Girl Scout Cookie season, the primary economic driver for the Nonprofit Councils ability to deliver on the Girl Scout mission. The Girl Scout Cookie program is one of the core program pillars for Girl Scouts’ development of girl leadership skills in business and entrepreneurship. 

How has she made sure that the COVID-19 crisis has had minimal impact on the Girl Scouts of the USA mission of delivering the program? Go Digital! 

In just nine days, Sylvia and her team were able to pivot the Girl Scout Cookie Program to sell cookies online in a way that continued to benefit the regional Councils. How’d she do it? Out-of-the-Box Thinking. Let’s summarize the steps she took to pull off yet another mission impossible. 

1. Set the “Super Bowl” win. Communicate, communicate, communicate the objective. In this case, it was making the 2020 Girl Scout Cookie season a success no matter what, even in the face of a global pandemic.
2. Never lose sight of the mission. For Girl Scouts of the USA, the mission is to provide compelling programming that builds girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.
3. Determine a way to achieve the mission. In this case, it was decided that in the interest of safety for everyone, all cookie sales had to move online and that required coordination with regional Councils. As millions of boxes of cookies were sitting in the homes of Girl Scouts, the only way the Girl Scout Cookie Program would be a success this year would be to use the existing inventory housed with Girl Scouts across the country.
4. Inspire the world. Girl Scouts and Girl Scout Cookies served as a beacon of hope for the first responders, truck drivers, and countless others affected by the crisis.

Make the wave. In every corner of the globe, people are facing constraints as a result of COVID-19. Sylvia and her team have led Girl Scouts of the USA in a way that was defiant in the face of adversity. The vision and commitment to a purpose and mission has inspired the entire organization and millions of Girl Scouts across America. 

Extraordinary situations require extraordinary leaders, and Sylvia Acevedo is no exception.

-David

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David M. Morris David Morris is the Founder and Chairman of HiPER Solutions. David founded the company because through his 20+ years in Executive Search and Executive Advisory, he recognized an unmet need for senior leaders to use data to uncover, unlock, and optimize the people they are counting on to make their biggest projects a success.

In response to this need, HiPER Solutions has developed the first of it’s kind data-driven system for a C-suite Executive to ensure that their largest cross-functional projects operate with efficiency and precision. This system has been leveraged by CEOs and Senior Executives of the Global 2000 and large government organizations, including Uber, E*TRADE, Western Digital, DirectTV, CalPERS, and Young Presidents Organization (YPO), among many others.

As Chairman, David is responsible for the overall direction and strategy of the company, and for evangelizing the HiPER Movement across the world. David earned his Bachelor of Science from The Wharton School of The University of Pennsylvania.

Sylvia Acevedo A lifelong Girl Scout, Sylvia Acevedo was appointed CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA in May 2017, coming full circle from her youth as a Girl Scout in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Through Girl Scouts, Sylvia discovered her passion for space, science, and math. Her interest in STEM subjects would lead her to a career as a rocket scientist, engineer, technology executive, and award-winning STEM entrepreneur.

Sylvia has championed girls in STEM, the outdoors, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Girl Scouts now earn badges in cybersecurity, robotics, design thinking, coding, eco awareness, high-adventure outdoor activities, and, of course, space science.

Sylvia has been an engineer and executive at Apple, Dell, Autodesk, and IBM. She began her career as a rocket scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she created algorithms and analyzed data from Voyager 2’s spacecraft flyby of Jupiter and two of its moons, Io and Europa.

A strong civic and education leader, Sylvia understands the role education plays in creating opportunities for children and developing the workforce of the future. She was one of the first Hispanic students, male or female, to earn a graduate engineering degree from Stanford University—an MS in industrial engineering—and she holds a bachelor of science degree with honors in industrial engineering from New Mexico State University.

Sylvia has been recognized widely for her accomplishments in business and education, and for her work to bring more girls into the STEM pipeline. In 2018 she was named one of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business,” as well as “Cybersecurity Person of the Year” by Cybersecurity Ventures. Forbes named her as one of America’s Top 50 Women in Tech, and in 2019 InStyle magazine placed her at number seven on its list of “The Badass 50: Women Who Are Changing the World.”

Sylvia is the author of Path to the Stars: My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist, a memoir for middle school students that inspires readers to live the lives of their dreams.