“Oh, what a girl can do!”

With their slogan, “Oh, what a girl can do”, last month, Girl Scouts were knocking on neighborhood doors to sell their cookies. And, for the first time, living in North America, I was impacted by the Girl Scouts cookies campaign.

One morning, I was in my apartment and a girl and her mom knocked on our apartment door to sell cookies. My husband opened the door and was delighted to help the little girl and immediately ordered dozens of cookies. In our minds, the Girl Scouts initiative was one of those activities to raise money and engage kids with their communities, where kids would gather together with their families and prepare homemade cookies.

A couple of weeks later, the cookies arrived and,  to our surprise, the girl scouts cookies were all but homemade. It seemed like a real and serious business — perfect cookies, carefully designed packaging, full of encouraging messages addressed to girls for their future lives. As a Brazilian, I noticed that my first idea about the initiative was completely wrong. This was not a homemade entrepreneurial activity. On the contrary, this was a very organized and solid campaign to create and develop future women leaders in the country. This maybe the naïve perspective of a foreigner, but I was really impressed to see how this campaign has the potential to create future women leaders.

If I think of my own childhood, in the seventies, I was not trained to be a leader. Entrepreneurship was not a word of our vocabulary at that time. The future was not clear — for me nor to my parents. In contrast, reading the five skills shown on the packaging of the girl scouts cookies, I am impressed to see how their goals are aligned with many of the goals of executive women.

In very big letters the package reproduces the five Girl Scouts goals:

1. Goal Setting
2. Decision Making
3. Money Management
4. People Skills
5. Business Ethics

Do these 5 statements sound familiar to our executive lives? They are core elements to guide our careers, aren’t they?

These girls are learning this from a very early age.

They will look for these attributes and qualities when searching for a job. They will choose companies that deliver their dreams. They will be leaders; they will fight for a better world. Good for them, good for the companies and good for the world.

Buying cookies from Girl Scouts will never be the same. I can hardly wait for the next year’s campaign. Oh, what a girl can do!