Don Carlos Lee Gibson Jr.’s New Book Reframes Private Club Leadership as Stewardship

Private clubs like to talk about tradition. Don Carlos Lee Gibson Jr. wants them to talk about something harder to fake: whether the person running the place sees themselves as an owner or a steward.

Don Carlos Lee Gibson Jr. spent more than fifteen years in golf and hospitality leadership, including stints as General Manager and Head Golf Professional at the Golf Club of South Carolina at Crickentree and as Senior Director of Operations with National Golf Management Group, roles that put him inside the daily operations of private clubs rather than observing them from a conference stage. That experience is the foundation of his new book, The Stewardship Standard, which argues that private clubs fail not when their operations are sloppy but when their leaders start acting like owners rather than caretakers.

Private Clubs Aren’t Businesses, They’re Institutions

The distinction matters more than it sounds. A business measures success in quarterly terms: revenue, retention, and margin. An institution measures success across decades, sometimes across the people who built it and the people who will inherit it after everyone currently on staff has moved on. Gibson’s book treats private clubs as belonging firmly in the second category, and structures its entire argument around what changes when leadership stops optimizing for this year’s numbers and starts asking whether the club will be stronger for the next generation of members.

“Stewardship begins with a fundamental realization: what we lead does not belong to us. We are temporary custodians of something larger than ourselves, institutions shaped by previous generations and destined to serve future ones,” said Don Carlos Lee Gibson Jr., author of The Stewardship Standard.

That single idea, custodianship instead of ownership, runs through all eight chapters and sixty-three modules of the book, which moves in sequence from the philosophy behind stewardship in its opening chapters, through chapters on culture and on stewarding people and excellence, to a chapter titled The Stewardship of Legacy and a closing chapter titled The Steward’s Calling.

The Steward’s Three Questions

Gibson does not leave the philosophy abstract. The book proposes a specific test any club leader can apply to a real decision: are we honoring what previous generations built, are we serving the current membership faithfully, and are we preparing the club for those who will follow? Those three questions, addressed in sequence, form what the book calls the foundation of stewardship leadership, meant to function less like a mission statement and more like a check a leader runs before deciding on staffing, a renovation, or a membership policy.

The test also draws a hard line against a specific failure mode. A leader optimizing purely for this year’s dues revenue or renewal rate can pass every operational metric a board tracks while still failing all three questions, because none of those metrics ask whether the decision honors the past or protects the future. Gibson’s framework is built to capture that gap and to give boards a way to evaluate a general manager’s decisions on terms other than the annual budget.

Why Ownership Thinking Fails Private Clubs

The book’s sharpest claim is that private clubs are especially vulnerable to ownership thinking because they run on relationships that outlast any single leader’s tenure. A member who joined decades ago, whose children grew up on the grounds and whose grandchildren are now doing the same, is not participating in a transaction that resets each renewal cycle. Treating that relationship the way a retailer treats a repeat customer, as a renewal to be won each year, misreads what actually holds the institution together, and what erodes when a leader manages for the short term instead of stewarding for the long term.

That is the argument The Stewardship Standard is built to make to an industry Gibson believes has borrowed too much of its management language from conventional business without asking whether it fits a place built to outlast any single leadership tenure. The book is available on Amazon and Kindle.

Private clubs will keep hiring general managers who know how to run tight operations. Gibson’s case is that operational competence was never the scarce resource. The scarce resource is a leader willing to treat the position as temporary and the institution as permanent, and to make every decision, from a hiring choice to a renovation budget, answer to the three questions rather than to the calendar year. That is the standard the book asks private club leadership to meet.

Photo Courtesy of Don Carlos Lee Gibson Jr.