Jessica Lawrence is the CEO of Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Southern California. Her 2011 SXSW panel titled “Rebel in a Polyester Sash: Rehabbing Corporate Culture” will tell the story of her success in transforming her organization’s corporate culture.
Jessica started out as a development associate at the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio in 2003. She has just graduated college and started out at her new job inspired and full of new ideas. However, she quickly started to notice that she was surrounded by people who were losing enthusiasm by the day. It was easy to see that the corporate culture, charachtarized by outdated rules and hierarchy, was hurting productivity and motivation at her organization. Even then Jessica knew that major changes to the organization’s culture were necessary in order to revive it. But how would she convince an entire organization to shift their priorities and rethink the way they’d been operating from day one?
After dedicating 5 years of her time and passion to the Girl Scouts, Jessica moved her way up to CEO, where she truly got the opportunity to leverage her great ideas about changing Girl Scout’s organizational culture. Since becoming CEO only in 2008, Jessica has completely transformed her organization using using a method known as Results-Only Work Environment (R.O.W.E.).
The model, based on the book “Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It” by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson outlines how R.O.W.E. has worked for large organizations such as Best Buy. The basic idea is that employees can work in whatever manner they want to, whenever they want to, as long as the work gets done. This negates the need for pointless meetings, scheduling conflicts, and traditional rules that waste time and resources. Jessica had great success at implementing this program at The Girl Scouts, so much in fact, that this year Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council was selected by The Non-Profit Times as one of the fifty best non-profits in the nation.
Jessica shared her success with R.O.W.E. as a first-time panelist at SXSW Interactive 2010. In 2011 she will return to lead her own panel, where she will share the full story of how she transformed the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council into a productive, forward-thinking workplace without retaining the organization’s mission and core values. I had the opportunity to interview Jessica during her recent visit to Austin. Check out the interview below and be sure to check out her panel “Rebel in a Polyester Sash: Rehabbing Corporate Culture” at SXSW Interactive in March!