Blog about Libraries

By now, everyone knows of the toy recall.

The two quick thinking people who began the whole thing were honored last night at the Monroe County Public Library.

From the perspective of one who works at the place were this nationwide recall started, I am relieved at the happy ending. Public awareness about lead has been heightened in our community and the library is being seen in the best of all possible lights. I am also a little bit proud of the way the library handled this situation. They put aside worries about image and damage control and chose instead to plunge headfirst into crisis intervention. The health of the kids came first and that remained the number one priority from the first indications of a problem. Of course, that's the way it should be.
Well done, MCPL.

Even though I work in a library, I'm not a librarian. Which is neither here nor there, but I thought I'd throw that out there. I'm working on a controversial, hard-hitting and thought-provoking article, "Who Wants Teens in the Library Anyway?" But before I get to that, I thought I'd take advantage of the BlogAboutLibraries internet media empire to promote a worthy library-related project.

Cable access/internets superstar B of Rox.com fame is looking to raise funds for a library in New Orleans; Boozocracy!

I'm personally pulling to keep Bart sober in 2007.

What do your library signs say? Michael Stephens has been posting pics of library signage from his travels and now Michael Sauers has started a new Flickr group for librarians to post the good the bad and the ugly. At this point, there is more bad and ugly than anything at the Flickr site, but I hope that changes soon.

In many cases, my guess is that bad signs are created by people who have the best intentions to prevent disruptions or to provide a public message about acceptable behavior in their library. The benefit of the doubt goes to librarians, who for the most part are interested in maintaining facilities that are friendly and peaceful to the broadest slice of their community. The failure is often in the delivery- signs with the giant red circle and slash, signs that look like they were written out in a fury of emotion, or signs that are just plain grouchy. For some of these, it looks to me like the person who created them would have been better off taking a day to think hard about what they were trying to accomplish and how they could do it without sounding like they were freaked out. Unless of course the point was to actually sound like they were freaked out...

Anyway, there are probably lots of great examples out there. I hope people will start sharing the good ones they see for all of us to learn from. Thanks to Michael and Michael for their work.

I have been thinking lately about what it takes to manage innovation. For the most part, I have always been considered an innovative person, but this is due mainly to the fact that my supervisors gave me a lot of leeway to experiment, to try things out and to explore new ideas. There may have been a good idea here or there, but for the most part my ideas have usually been impractical, naive, or just downright cooky.

But they let me work on just about anything I wanted. What they understood is that managing innovation is quite different from managing operations. The former requires a high comfort level with uncertainty whereas the latter is all about closing loose ends and developing highly predictable futures. Every once in a while something good came out of my head, and for those things (and not the abject, humiliatingly awful failures) I got a little glory now and then.

Eric Schnell posted this article back in April in which he created an interesting table that describes the difference between managing sustaining and disruptive technologies. There are similar iterations of this table elsewhere and many contain the same basic theme; that operations and innovations are two separate environments. I would do Eric a gross injustice if I tried to summarize the entire article (I suggest you read it instead), but my takeaway was this- in order to support innovation, managers and administrators have to be comfortable with a little bit of chaos. In order to do so, we have to understand that we are managing two distinct and opposite processes- the closing of loopholes and the creation of possibilities.

Roger Bean and Russell Bradford have written on the business of managing innovation. They discuss a similar litany of opposites:

"Management is nothing if not the art of manipulating contradictions into a coherent and efficient system to provide something someone wants. Here are a few of the contradictions confronting managers every day:

• Hierarchy versus anarchy


• Control versus flexibility


• External versus internal


• Serendipity versus goal clarity


• Individuality versus collectivity

How these contradictions are resolved, also determines the climate for innovation. Experienced managers know that Solomon like decisions are never really an either-or proposition. Instead, sound decisions are nearly always a balancing act that places the specific situation somewhere between the two polar extremes."
Managing Innovation Managers Innovative Leader, V 11, No. 5, May 2002 by Roger Bean and Russell Radford

Another consideration is the role managers play in creating innovation. Should the manager be the person who comes up with new ideas? Sometimes the relationship between the manager and staff can thoroughly screw up the process of bringing innovations to maturation. For instance, how many staff would rather brainstorm with coworkers than their boss? How many staff are comfortable critiquing the boss' ideas? Quite possibly this isn't a problem for many people, but it can't be overlooked by a manager. It may be more important for managers to support innovation by just not saying "no" themselves. Sure, lots of ideas may be wrongheaded, but if I want to nuture innovative thinking in my library, I have to be prepared to work with what I've got. Bad ideas have a tendency to reveal themselves as such and good ideas will float to the top. After all, in my career none of my crackpot innovations has ever made it to production, thanks to the deliberate, thoughtful input of coworkers and good bosses.

Do you work within the "Culture of No"? If you are a leader, do you foster a "Culture of Maybe?" Continuing to wonder why it was that all libraries in the country have not started IM reference led me to start looking at organizational cultures. I came across some interesting stuff that I am certain applies to many libraries.

Every innovator in libraries has probably dealt with "NO", or "Death by a thousand cuts". There is a subtle difference between the two, the former being (obviously) an absolute refutation of one's ideas, whereas the latter reaction is to peck away an idea for so long that the innovator just throws up their hands and goes away.

Michael Roberto wrote Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer: Managing for Conflict and Consensus. He describes the Cultures of No and Maybe in this quote from an interview:

"Indecision can cripple an organization, and it comes in several different forms. Lou Gerstner coined the phrase "culture of no" to describe the situation he inherited at IBM in the early 1990s. In this type of culture of indecision, dissenters essentially have veto power in the decision-making process, particularly if those individuals have power and status. The organization does not employ dissenting voices as a means of encouraging divergent thinking, but rather it enables those who disagree with a proposal to stifle dialogue and close off interesting avenues of inquiry. Such a culture does not force dissenters to defend their views with data and logic, or to explain how their objections are consistent with the organization-wide goals as opposed to the parochial interests of a particular division or subunit. A culture of no enables those with the most power or the loudest voice to impose their will."

This came from an interview with Martha Legace, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge for Business Leaders Website.

Roberto is referring to leaders, but this culture can exist at all levels of the organization. Coworkers can resist new ideas in a variety of ways, and in cases where these are highly experienced, respected and well connected staff members, their powers to scuttle innovation can be expansive. Unfortunately, the process of shepherding new ideas and change through the coworker maze is where a lot of great ideas in libraries go to die. This type of culture is also what makes smart, energetic and enthusiastic folks seek new opportunities, and before they know it the director is left with people for whom a state of inertia translates into job security.


In another take on organizational culture, I ran across the Five Rules of Creativity, created by the Weiden and Kennedy ad agency. They are:

1. Act Stupid. "Our philosophy is to come in ignorant every day. The idea of retaining ignorance is sort of counterintuitive, but it subverts a lot of [problems] that come from absolute mastery. If you think you know the answer better than somebody else does, you become closed to being fresh." states Jelly Helm, creative director.


2. Shut up. "The first thing we do when we meet with clients is listen. We try to figure out what their problems are. Then we come back with questions, not solutions. We write these out and put them on the wall. And then we circle the ones that we think are interesting. More often than not, the questions hold the answer."


3. Always say yes. "What I've learned from improvisation is to let go of outcome and just say 'yes' to what ever the situation is. If you say an idea is bad, you're creating conflict--you're breaking an improv rule. You want an energy flow that moves you forward, as opposed to a creative stasis."


4. Chase Talent. "Find people who make you better. It's best to be the least talented person in the room. It's reciprocal. It challenges you to keep up."


5. Be Fearless. "Do anything, say anything. In the worlds of our president, Dan Wieden, 'You're not useful to me until you've made three momentous mistakes.' He knows that if you try not to make mistakes, you miss out on the value of learning from them."


Thanks to Jennifer Davis who had the smarts to connect these two things together in this post

I think these are some pretty good rules to live by. I thought about taping them on the wall of my office, but then it occured to me that everyone at MPOW would want to tell me that rule #1 is not something I need to be reminded to do. Oh well, stupid is as stupid does, I guess.

Here is a quote from an AP News article on Email/Chat:

"... when immediacy is a factor as it often is most young people much prefer the telephone or instant messaging for everything from casual to heart-to-heart conversations, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

"And there is a very strong sense that the migration away from e-mail continues," says Lee Rainie, the director at Pew.

For many young people, it's about choosing the best communication tool for the situation."

Credit: Martha Irvine, AP National Writer

Here is my concern; why in the world doesn't every library with an internet connection offer IM Reference? This includes my own library where I have introduced the concept to my staff on a couple occasions, but where we have still not taken steps to get it going. My sense is that some of them just are not ready to make this leap. Maybe it's my fault for not pushing my people harder, hoping instead that one day someone will come to me with the same idea I had two years ago. However, if that doesn't happen soon, I can't see how we can continue to afford not doing it.
It won't be long before IM is the "phone" and Email is a delivery tool (and it probably is already that way for a lot of our own patrons). Whether we like it or not we don't get to choose how we communicate with our clientele- it's their choice. Or maybe it would be better say that we do get to choose, but that they may not use the tools we hope they will. So, it's up to us- do we want to be relevant or not?

Me? I chat all the time. And I'm not a millenial by any stretch.

Thanks to Michael Golrick for pointing this article out and commenting on it.

Jill at Library Marketing - Thinking Outside the Book is spot on with this point about creating users out of non-users:

"Differentiate yourself: It's likely that one reason your non-users haven't made the leap to users is that they probably don't understand why your library's services are different or more useful than other sources of information they regularly use. When you reach out to these community members through e-mail or print mailings, events, etc., be sure to let them know what it is you can do for them that no one else can."

I wrote an earlier post about differentiation. Worked kinda hard on it...wanted to bring it up again. Okay, so I'm shamelessy citing myself. Again.

Man, I have become addicted to wikis. I have several projects going on at work and I spend a lot of time meeting with people, discussing ideas and proposals and incorporating responses and reactions into the work. The problem is that there is never a notetaker at these meetings, and despite my best efforts, it has always been difficult to keep the progress in order. Mainly, my own laziness gets in the way, as notes scribbled onto a legal pad sit in piles on my desk. After a while, the stuff gets all mixed up and I have a very difficult time keeping track of things. And of course, it has always been difficult to share the results with others easily.

Emailing summaries of meetings helped, but then there was nowhere convenient to store the info. That's where the wiki comes in. After I meet with someone, or put together the basic parts of a project, I will email a summary to the people involved. Then, I'll build a couple of wiki pages around parts of the project. The email summaries are just pasted into the pages and become a running summary of where the project stands. Usually, the wiki is divided into a couple of sections, like "meeting summaries", discussions, drafts, etc.

The boost in my own efficiency has been pretty astounding. But the even better part has been that wikis allow me to push ideas out to others in ways that weren't possible before. For instance, I was drafting a customer service statement for the library and soon found out that we needed to do some educating to get people to even understand what the concept was about, much less what the purpose of it would be. So, I did a little research, built a few wiki pages around the concept then started emailing the url to people I needed to work with. Additionally, I started building tagging items in del.icio.us around the topics, which I included on the wiki pages.

The end product was a a set of wiki pages containing meeting summaries, discussions, tags and a draft of the statement we had come up with. The statement ended up getting drafted in 1.5 hours by four public service managers, quite possibly a record in the annals of library science. I give credit to the use of our wiki for helping us get this project done in such short order.