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Scholastic
Clarifying the way forward for a new era of leadership—and learning.
Context
With new leadership, and pandemic-fueled changes to the reading journey at school and home, how should Scholastic rise to meet the moment?
Scholastic’s mission to enrich the lives of children through reading grew more complex through the 2010s and into the early 2020s.
The pandemic worsened reading scores, and pressures on adults supporting the reading journey increased. Libraries became culture war battlegrounds. Books competed with screen time.
Internally, the siloed structure made it difficult to respond to these issues. The leadership team needed a North Star to guide the organization to transform.
The challenge was in finding the threads of corporate identity that could unify a team ranging from the editors of Captain Underpants books to the Book Fair consultants on the ground in schools.
UNLOCK
The future of American literacy is at stake. Our role is to make reading unmissable for generations to come.
By speaking with teachers, educators, librarians, and families, we unearthed the insight that when we miss out on reading, we miss out on getting to know ourselves—and the world—better. And we saw what’s at stake for a world unread—worsening inequity, deepening divides, cultural schism.
IMPACT
These insights unlocked Scholastic’s new rallying cry: Make Reading Unmissable. It then informed a set of guiding behaviors and a model for engaging with customers in a way that brings people together. It has also become the framework to guide an enterprise-wide transformation effort.
Photography courtesy of Scholastic.
