Boy Scouts/ScoutsBSA, Bobwhite Blather, Page 23

December 2, 2013

The moving target of social media

Back when most of us were teenagers, what we now know as “social media” consisted of long hours tying up the family telephone chatting with our friends, or perhaps time spent cruising the boulevards or at the town soda shop. Times have changed and so has the technology, and our teenagers communicate by all manner of instant electronic means.

Early commercial online chat services such as Prodigy and Compuserve eventually gave way to the king of instant messaging, America Online. It seemed like anyone who was online had an AOL account, and when Internet connectivity became widespread, so did AOL Instant Messenger. Continue reading “The moving target of social media”

September 30, 2013

Committee chair timeline: October

October’s here. Across the great deciduous forests of the north, the leaves are changing and crisp camping weather is here. Sunsets are earlier too, leaving less time to set up camp in daylight and more things for committee chairs to think about as the month progresses.

The big one that comes around this time of the year for most units is charter renewal. Continue reading “Committee chair timeline: October”

September 16, 2013

Micromanaging: a bad idea

We’ve all been there, I’m sure. We’ve worked for, or with, someone who quite figuratively can’t see the forest for the trees. Someone who fusses over every small detail of a project, process or workplace and who directs even the most minute function, whether it’s something he or she knows about or not.

Micromanaging, as it’s come to be known, is the bane of corporate existence. Articles and entire books have been written about the phenomenon and what to do about it. It has even spawned a wildly popular comic strip,Â Dilbert, in which a typical engineer is tormented daily by his boss with inane orders, processes and obstacles to getting any work done.

Unfortunately, Scouting isn’t exempt from the micromanagers. Continue reading “Micromanaging: a bad idea”

August 26, 2013

Committee chair timeline: September

Now that school has started, many troops that scale back in the summer are in full swing again or are about to, and a new year of camping and activities is underway.

Since starting this series of articles a few months ago, I’ve been highlighting the things that the committee chair should remember to do during each month. For a reminder as we get the fall season underway, here are those things that you should be doing each month: Continue reading “Committee chair timeline: September”

August 19, 2013

Is your Scouting knowledge obsolete?

We tend to think of Scouting as a perpetual program – something that’s always been there and always will, without much changing. The ideals, the oath and law, the principle of the boys running the troop are all things that seem to be carved in stone.

So how can our Scouting knowledge become obsolete in a program with so much that remains constant?

While the principles we live by don’t change, and haven’t changed in a hundred years, the way the program implements them have changed over the years, and sometimes quite dramatically. Continue reading “Is your Scouting knowledge obsolete?”