Category:Leader's Digest

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Leader's Digest

Leslie Dillon provides these leadership-related items from a variety of sources outside the library field, including the management literature.

Recent items

Contents 1 In Search of Growth Leaders 2 Our Kindle 3 How to Maintain Your Customer Service Brand Promise 4 Why Dogs Wag Their Tails 5 Yahoo Answers: Another Competitor? 6 The Information Experience 7 The Next Step in Open Innovation 8 OCLC Symposium: Mashed up Library 9 More Competition for Reference? 10 How the Book Publishing Industry Should Reinvent Itself

In Search of Growth Leaders

16 July 2008

“[S]enior managers need to do more to recognize, develop and encourage [their] managers to achieve organic growth.”

What’s organic growth? It’s internally generated growth — different for libraries than for for-profit companies, but library directors want and need to grow their budgets, their collections, their staff’s skills, and their user base, so organic growth is as important for libraries as it is for corporations.

“Growth leaders produce above-average organic growth … and create better value for customers.” They look for opportunities and achieve “breakout results” by using their entrepreneurial skills.

Based on three years of testing and interviews, this article gives us a look at the characteristics of growth leaders and a guide to developing these managers.

• Rich, diverse experience. Varied experience early in their careers gives growth leaders skills that help them launch growth initiatives.

• Belief in their own abilities. “For them, life is a journey of learning.” They thrive on “accepting challenges, taking action and getting … results.”

• Changing the rules. Instead of seeking certainty and relying on data for planning, “growth leaders think like entrepreneurs.” They’re willing to gather data, “but they don’t rely completely on” it.

• Managing risk. Growth leaders embrace new ventures, but they’re not risk seekers. In fact, they seek to minimize risk.

• Preferring people over data. Growth leaders’ successes are “based more often on thoughtful exploration of customers’ needs than on dry market data.” Detailed knowledge about individual customers is preferable to seeing them as data in reports.

• Pragmatic idealists. Growth leaders hold “people ruthlessly accountable for results”, and at the same time engage “their passion to build something great together.” They’re “tough but fair.” Growth leaders are also pragmatic about corporate bureaucracy and know what battles to pick.

In fact, the growth leaders interviewed for this study knew how to work around corporate bureaucracies and skirt restrictive processes as “they executed their initiatives. The[se] managers tended to ask for forgiveness afterward instead of permission before.”

Sean D. Carr, Jeanne M. Liedtka, Robert Rosen and Robert E. Wiltbank, <a href="http://sloanreview.mit.edu/wsj/insight/leadership/2008/07/07/">In Search of
Growth Leaders</a>, MIT Sloan Management Review, Jul. 7, 2008.)

Our Kindle

16 July 2008

The eBook has arrived at last! It’s Amazon’s Kindle and we own one (well, it’s my husband’s, but he lets me use it sometimes.) It isn’t perfect and it is expensive ($400), but it’s well over the threshold of what’s needed to guarantee its success and usher in the era of the eBook.

What’s to like:

• Satisfies the 4 B’s — use in the bathroom, bus, at the beach and in bed.

• Easy on the eyes — easier maybe than some print books.

• Comfortable to hold.

• Easy to adapt to. Before I’d finished my first book, I was reaching out with my right hand to turn the page — as if it were a “real” book!

• Enough power. Lasts many days without recharging.

• Able to accept different formats.

• A sizable collection of both free and for-purchase books. Available best sellers usually cost less than $10. As the Kindle pipeline cranks up, more and more recently published books will be available.

And more:

• Wireless capability. Here’s a scenario –You’re at the beach, and the weather is awful. You contact Amazon (you can even do this from your car!) and discover that the new Alan Furst novel is available. You download it instantly for $9.99. Let it pour!

• Amazon’s energetic development of available books. An eBook reader is no better than the the books available for its use. Having Amazon as the conduit from publisher to reader is a real plus here.

• Experimental new functions. Web browsing, GPS, iPod features, Wikipedia, and dictionary look up are available. Email and messaging are in the works. While these experimental features will need improvements to be truly useful, they should come quickly in today’s collaborative environment. Can Skype be far behind?

What’s not to like:

• Easy to lose your place. The page turning bar on the left can be easily engaged. So if you don’t pick up your Kindle carefully, you’ll suddenly be on page 500. Sliding a rubber band into the slit behind the page turning bar will help you avoid that.

• Difficulty navigating back to your place. Sometimes when new users lose their place, it’s hard to get back to it.

• Font. I didn’t particularly like the seraph font. You can change the size, but hopefully soon you’ll be able to change fonts.

The Kindle won’t replace the paper book any time soon, except perhaps for specialized uses, e.g., students. Key uses will be for travel, for storing and using tools that are available free, e.g., dictionaries of foreign languages, reference works of all types including encyclopedias, and for collections of eBooks downloaded from free services. Most of the classics now available on the Web can be made available in Kindle format.

Here’s a great set of over 100 tips for the Kindle posted by George Needham, a fellow Kindle owner, on It’s All Good.

How to Maintain Your Customer Service Brand Promise

16 July 2008

Outstanding customer service “has become an imperative” according to Anand Subramaniam, VP of Worldwide Marketing at eGain, a major developer of customer support software (used by some early virtual reference systems). Your “customers will not hesitate to defect to competitors if your business does not deliver on its service promise.”

While the article is intended for companies with call centers, Mr. Subramaniam lists several ways to deliver on your customer service brand promise that are particularly relevant to today’s libraries:

• Align customer service operations with brand strategy. “Don’t mix a “Wal-Mart-style” operational approach with a “Nordstrom-type” brand intent…”

• Set service levels based on rigorous strategic and operational criteria. Your “customer relationship intent” should be “a foundation for setting service levels.” Service levels should be based on things like evolving customer expectations.

• Manage expectations through proactive communications. “Setting the right expectations is critical in making the right promise and keeping it.”

• Enhance staff experience for better customer experience. To “increase the probability of delivering on the customer service promise,” route requests to the right people. Include “customers’ ’state of mind’ or emotion to the routing framework.”

• Provide staff with a complete view of customers. “Forcing the customer to be the contextual “glue” is one of the most cited sources of customer frustration…” A “unified customer interaction hub … can help achieve quantum improvements in customer experience and loyalty.”

• Eliminate knowledge and best practice silos. “Service resolution and fulfillment often span multiple people” and work areas.

• Leverage robust workflow management. “Implementing robust workflows to eliminate service … gaps across people and [work areas] will maximize the probability of meeting service levels.”

“[P]roactive expectation setting can sometimes make a big difference in retaining unhappy customers.”

(Anand Subramaniam, Eight Ways to Maintain Your Customer Service Brand Promise, Sales & Marketing Management’s ManageSmarter, Jun. 24, 2008.)

Why Dogs Wag Their Tails

30 June 2008

The authors of Why Dogs Wag Their Tails: Lessons Leaders Can Learn About Work, Joy, and Life, two dog-owning leadership consultants, “have some insightful things to say about how to create good, sound work environments for today’s employees.”

We can all learn some lessons from our dogs about how to deal with people. The books tells stories about real people solving leadership issues and offers “practical business examples, complementary stories of dogs, and specific tools for addressing important issues” with some apparently delightful anecdotes about the “instinctive, canine approach to life.”

Skip Corsini, Why Dogs Wag Their Tails, Sales & Marketing Management’s ManageSmarter, Jun. 2, 2008.)

Yahoo Answers: Another Competitor?

30 June 2008

An article in the June 29 issue of The New York Times Magazine claims that Yahoo Answers, only two years old, is “second in popularity only to Wikipedia as a reference site.” I’m not sure the article’s worth reading, but here’s a brief summary.

Instead of directing information seekers to citations and databases, etc., Yahoo Answers “delivers questioners to other people who simply like questions, matching inquiring minds with know-it-alls.”

The author compares Yahoo Answers with Ask Jeeves’ (Ask.com) retrievals, which were “hard to make heads or tails of.” Before Yahoo Answers, the author just used Google. Now she goes directly to Yahoo.

She attributes Yahoo Answer’s popularity to the fact that people ask questions from the heart — questions she suggests they’d be too inhibited to ask at the public library.

She mentions libraries only twice — NYPL as receiving scholarly questions, and public libraries as inhibiting questions from the heart. I think she could have used the help of a real reference librarian for this article!

When I looked briefly at Yahoo Answers, it seemed to me that lots of queries were opinion questions, but there were definitely many that a reference librarian could answer probably better. Maybe Yahoo Answers will go the way of Google Answers. Remember that? It’s now “retired”, and “no longer accepting questions.”

(Virginia Heffernan, The Oracle Collective, The New York Times Magazine, Jun. 29, 2008.)

The Information Experience

30 June 2008

Michael Stephens conversation with Darien Public Library’s John Blyberg elicited some great food for thought. Here are a few choice nuggets:

• While Library 2.0 features are important, “if a change in library services, technology-based or otherwise, isn’t well grounded in our core values and mission, it just looks funny.”

• Technnology use should be “transparent, intuitive, and a natural extension of the patron experience.”

• Libraries are “charged with a deeper significance” than just distribution of popular materials and provision of internet access. Libraries “exist within the context of the communities we serve,” which is now a global context.

• Information use has become an expression of self — that’s the “information experience”. And libraries are ill-equipped to respond to this.

• The skills needed “for creating an info experience” are different from traditional library school offerings. “The art of making a library successful” isn’t the same as the “mechanics of making a library run.”

• Danny Meyer, restaurateur and author of Setting the Table, believes “that every position he hires can be split 49% by 51%. The 49% represents the skills necessary to do the job — etiquette, procedure, etc. The conspicuous 51% is hospitality and an intrinsic desire to serve other people and make them feel good about themselves. The 51%ers take pride in the fact that they help provide a fulfilling experience to someone.” Libraries need 51%ers to “imagine a different type of library that engages patrons collaboratively.”

• Libraries can package “authoritative knowledge” “in ways that are not so paternalistic and present ourselves as partners in discovery. None of this requires technology, but technology has become the nexus of collaboration.”

(Michael Stephens, On the Information Experience: An ALA TechSource Conversation with John Blyberg, ALA TechSource, Jun. 18, 2008.)

The Next Step in Open Innovation

30 June 2008

Typically “innovation is a proprietary activity conducted largely inside the organization in a series of closely managed steps, but according to an article in The McKinsey Quarterly, that’s begun to change. The next step toward more open innovation is “distributed cocreation, … the model of innovation as a convergence of like-minded parties.”

Research by the authors suggests that while it’s too early “to draw definitive conclusions” about distributed cocreation, it’s time for senior executives to “start seriously examining” its possibilities and identifying its challenges (e.g., ownership of intellectual property).

Benefits of corporations collaborating with their suppliers are obvious, but Wikipedia collaboration is a different ball game. “Wikipedia is created entirely by its users, not by a corporate-development staff.”… It is a living and continually expanding global reference work,” which has expanded 8,000 percent in seven years. Wikipedia’s success suggests that other organizations could cede “more control over decisions about the content of products to networks of participants…”

Three ways to win with distributed cocreation:
1. Capture value from the cocreated product/service.
2. Capture value by providing a complementary product or service (e.g., Red Hat sells services to Linux users).
3. “[B]enefit indirectly from the cocreation process—for example, through an enhanced brand or strategic position.”

Cocreation hurdles:
• Attracting and motivating cocreators.
• Structuring problems so contributors can participate effectively.
• Governance that will facilitate cocreation.
• Quality control.

Lessons from successful communities:
• Useful frameworks for successful cocreation will likely emerge in the next few years.
• “User-generated media sites are growing … by 100 percent a year, traditional sites by perhaps 20 to 30 percent.”
• Research indicates that “most cocreators recognize that the brand—not they—will own the resulting intellectual property.”
• Research also suggests that incentives will be needed to encourage participation.
• Trust and affinity are important in online communities.

Getting started:
• Look for areas in your organization where cocreation may have already begun.
• Experiment by using existing systems/resources.
• Be flexible.

Organizations “should experiment with this new approach to learn both how to use it successfully and more about its long-term significance. Pioneers may have ideas about opportunities to capture value from distributed cocreation, but fresh ones will appear. To benefit from them, [organizations] should be flexible about all aspects of these experiments.”

(Jacques Bughin, Michael Chui, and Brad Johnson, The Next Step in Open Innovation, The McKinsey Quarterly, June 2008.)

OCLC Symposium: Mashed up Library

30 June 2008

<p>I couldn’t go to ALA Annual, so I’m missing a lot, including what sounds like the must-attend symposium from OCLC (my former employer). In case you missed it too, I’ve compiled a summary from excellent posts by some folks who were there.

Moderator Andrew Pace defined mash ups as “a full fledged computing platform and on the verge of replacing the personal computer as the dominant tool.”

The keynote speaker was MIT Media Lab’s Michael Schrage, who advises organizations on the economics of innovation, is the author of two books, and a columnist for Fortune and CIO. He said “libraries need to think about innovation, interoperability, and competition. We need to: learn from our lead users; identify who we collaborate with to create value; invite users into our conversations about our biggest internal disagreements; and build “libratories” to develop talent and inspire R&D that can be formalized into a product.”

Follow-up panelists Susan Gibbons, Associate Dean, Public Services & Collection Development, University of Rochester (NY) River Campus Libraries, David Lee King, Digital Branch & Services Manager, Topeka & Shawnee County (KS) Public Library, and Mary Beth Sancomb-Moran, Librarian, University of Minnesota, Rochester, discussed mash ups at their libraries.

Here are some of the key points:

Michael Schrage:
Major theme: Managing the challenge of an institution – how to be innovative within an institution.

Innovation:
• Innovaton is the conversion of novelty into value. E.g.,Twitter, began as a novelty, now has value for use with the library and in online classes.
• Innovation is a means to an end.
• Innovation forces the organization to address what it really does.
• Self-delusion is the biggest obstacle to innovation.
• Innovation isn’t what innovators offer; it’s what customers, clients & users adopt. E.g., only 10% of cell phone users use more than 50% of their features; those features aren’t innovative, they’re wasteful.
• Start your innovation process by asking your users,“What’s the most innovative thing you think we do?”

Competition:
• Like innovation – it’s a means to an end.
• Competition is about perceived value from choice.
• Movie theaters, used book stores and newspapers don’t know how to compete; reluctant to creatively compete.

Mashups:
• We’re focusing on the wrong aspects of mash ups.
• Interoperability is the platform but it is not the data sets.
• Which vendors, people, etc., should libraries be interoperable with?
• The most important product of a network is the networker.

Libraries:
• What are the most important products of the library? Libraries as physical spaces that house books and artifacts? No competition. Libraries as information providers? Highly competitive space.
• Libraries are creatures of subsidy rather than market forces. Commit to competition or commit to subsidy.
• What institutional innovations and adaptations best boost your chances of getting there? (And who owns the keys?)
• Encourage patrons to produce content (reviews, tags, comments, etc.) so that the more the library is used, the better it gets.

Schrage’s Four Takeaways:
• Learning from our ‘lead users’ (Who are they? How do we know?)
• With whom do we want to collaborate to create value? Why?
• Nurturing our best internal arguments/disagreements. What is our defining disagreement? Publicize it! (Transparency is good)
• Establishing “Liberatories” that attract talent and inspire hypotheses. (Liberatories = library + laboratory)

Great quotes:
• “The content of the audience is more important than the content of the talk.”
• “The most important product of the network is the networker.”
• Success comes not from taking the path of least resistance, but the path of maximum advantage.
• “A scholar is a library’s way of creating another library.” (Daniel Dennet)

Panelists:
• Meebo (Instant messaging from anywhere): People on the public access computers use the Meebo widget to ask questions. Placed the widget at the “no results found” page.
• Patron-generated content: Patrons can add sticky notes to various library spaces — MySpace page, Flickr account, YouTube channel. Original content by patrons.
• Take the library message outside the library. (Bookmobile, go online). Be where the people are; make sure you’re there when people ask questions. Set up shops in coffee shops, the mall, the State Fair. )(Be out of the building a lot more.)
• Use 2.0 technology. Be there at hubs, mobile areas.
• Become a consultant to small businesses.

(Andrew/W’s photostream, Jun. 27, 2008; misc.joy, Jun. 27, 2008; A Passion for ‘Puters, Jun. 27, 2008; It’s All Good, Jun 27-28, 2008.)

More Competition for Reference?

26 June 2008

We’ve grown accustomed to declining numbers of reference questions over the years, and to the many new types of questions we get now, but there are some interesting new developments on the horizon that we need to keep our eyes on. Microsoft’s SearchTogether and ChaCha are two cases in point.

According to Greg Notess, SearchTogether is “a fascinating exploration of ways to enable collaborative searching … [that] lets users work together on a search process, share the work, and explore results simultaneously.” The SearchTogether beta lets users divvy up the searching, designate a group to share results with, and add comments and ratings. Groups “can work together in real time or sequentially at different times.”

Microsoft’s description of write-up of SearchTogether SearchTogether sounds a lot like what information professionals “handle daily in reference and instructional transactions.” But (fortunately or unfortunately for us reference librarians) SearchTogether isn’t yet ready for prime time, and it’s too dependent on Microsoft software. SearchTogether users must use Internet Explorer 7, install the plug-in, have a Windows Live Messenger account, and list collaborators in their Contacts.

But it also has lots of great collaborative features, including “three types of searches, group search histories, page-level rating and commenting, automatically generated shared summaries, peek-and-follow browsing, and integrated chat.”

Others are working on similar products (Yoople!, Delver, and Wikia Search). And Google’s director of product management said recently that “the nature of information discovery is changing … from a solitary activity to a social one.” These products and others to come may provide a glimpse of what’s in store.

…

ChaCha, a search engine that uses humans to answer queries, is moving into the mobile space. Scott A. Jones (cofounder of ChaCha, and also of GraceNote), believes that for mobile searching to succeed, answers must be very specific. Google and others have been struggling to do this, and they’re having problems. So “having human mediation is key,” especially when the mediator is a subject expert. Right now people on the go call or text their friends when they need fast specific information. Thus far, at least 40,000 guides from all walks of life have come through the ChaCha system. Candidates need to pass a test to qualify. Questions are routed to experts if no answer is already in the database. Mahalo, another human-powered search engine, focuses on the more common questions, and Jones sees a potential partnership there. Google Mobile is great at answering simple questions like sports and weather, but Google prefers algorithms over people, so Jones doesn’t see them as a competitor. Jones is looking at using highly targeted ads as a revenue source for ChaCha.

…

So what should reference librarians make of new developments like these? We don’t need to panic, but we should pay attention to them, and be thinking of “what if” sorts of ideas. Can and should we use these types of products to help us provide reference services in libraries? Should library reference services get “out there” where the action is? If so, how? There are databases of answers to library reference questions. Maybe libraries and cooperatives should collaborate with these innovators. Libraries and OCLC have partnered successfully with Google, so precedents have been set.

(Greg Notess, SearchTogether: A Tech Preview of Social Search Potential, Information Today NewsBreaks, Jun. 23, 2008; Chris Dannan, Can ChaCha’s Humans Compete with Google’s Algorithms?, FastCompany.com, June 2008.)

How the Book Publishing Industry Should Reinvent Itself

26 June 2008

Paul Krugman’s op/ed piece in The New York Times predicts that digital book readers will soon become the common, perhaps even preferred, method of reading books. The problem is finding the right business model.

According to David Balter, writing on the Harvard Business blog, Conversation Starter, “traditional book publishing is still primarily an old media business in a new media world.”

2007 book sales were just 0.9% above those for 2006. “Publishers … are finding it increasingly difficult to figure out just what’s going to work and what isn’t.” Foot traffic is down in book stores and authors can now have their books published and distributed via the Web.

Publishers need to get in touch with today’s economy, in which consumers are “the ultimate distribution channel.”

Balter suggests that publishers look at authors the way “savvy early-stage investors view emerging businesses,” investing in the ones that look like they’ll be successful. Here’s a scenario:

• Authors package their books and distribute free copies on their own.
• Publishers decide what books to pick up, pay for licensing and distribution rights, and “distribute a product that has developed an initial marketplace of buyers.”
• Publishers tweak the completed product as agreed-upon with the author, “print more and distribute them through the strength of their partners.”

“Here, everyone wins. Authors have to prove their ability to deliver a good book and build an audience before a publisher fully invested. Publishers greatly reduce the up front production costs and the risk of betting on authors that can’t produce, and increase the odds that what they spend on will provide results.”

Balter has done just that with his new book, The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II. We’ll see if it works!

(David Balter, How the Book Publishing Industry Should Reinvent Itself, Conversation Starter from Harvard Business Blogs, Jun 13, 2008; Paul Krugman, Bits, Bands, and Books, The New York Times, June 6, 2008.)

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