Frances Hesselbein

Frances Hesselbein agreed in the 1940s to stand in for six weeks with a Johnstown Girl Scout troop that would otherwise have folded, and that favour turned into a career. She rose through the organisation to become its chief executive from 1976 to 1990, by which time it counted roughly 2.25 million girls and a workforce of 780,000, most of them volunteers. Peter Drucker, who watched her closely, said she could run any company in America. She left to head the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, later renamed for her, co-edited 27 books that reached 29 languages, and took the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1998. Work Is Love Made Visible, issued by Wiley in 2018, is a collection she assembled with Marshall Goldsmith and Sarah McArthur rather than a book of her own writing: its contributors circle the question of purpose through character, service, fellowship and the moments that redirected them. She died in December 2022 at 107.