Leader's Digest February 2008

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Leader's Digest February 2008

by Leslie Dillon

February 11, 2008

Entrepreneurship in the social sector

The social sector is big business. In the U.S. alone, 1.5 million nonprofits and similar organizations have revenues of $700 billion and control assets of $2 trillion. This would seem a sufficient “arsenal to tackle problems in crucial areas such as education, poverty, and health care.” But in fact it isn’t; their efforts haven’t solved targeted issues.

Four Harvard professors, authors of a recent casebook called Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector, believe that new models and new ways of thinking based on social entrepreneurship will enable “organizations to create more value with their limited resources and tap additional resources not directly under their control.”

Social entrepreneurship is defined here as “innovative, social value-creating activity that can occur within or across the :nonprofit, government, or business sectors... [F]undamental to this definition is that the drive for social entrepreneurship is primarily to create social value, rather than personal or shareholder wealth.”

These experts advocate a network approach, which requires that leaders focus on mobilizing resources inside and outside the organization to create social value. “Social entrepreneurs who have innovated using network approaches are in many ways ahead of the curve, even relative to leaders in other fields.”

“Social entrepreneurs stay relentlessly focused on their missions and seek to continually innovate…” To build successful networks, they must be willing to relinquish control and “share recognition with their partners to advance the mission, not their organizations.” Incremental changes in existing activities won’t meet the challenge. Essential to success is a fundamental transformation in the way the organization does business.

The HBS Working Knowledge article mentioning this book notes, by the way, that MBA interest in social entrepreneurship has increased dramatically in recent years, and is expected to continue. (I wonder how many current and aspiring library directors have or are working toward MBAs?)

(Sean Silverthorne, "Putting entrepreneurship in the social sector", HBS Working Knowledge, Feb. 4, 2008.)

The existential necessity of midlife change

As life expectancy increases, many people will need to make major changes in middle age, often starting a second career. The middle years can offer “unprecedented opportunity for inner growth,” but first we need to get beyond these two myths:

  • Myth 1. Midlife marks the onset of decline. While problems certainly arise in middle age, the fact is that most middle-aged executives “have gained a freedom that only self-knowledge can impart, and they relish unprecedented opportunities for personal growth.”
  • Myth 2. Midlife as magical transformation. Midlife transitions “must be rooted in realism.” Contrary to popular self-help books, magical transformations don’t happen. “To make successful transitions, executives must stay open to the possibilities their experience qualifies them for but remain realistic about what they can achieve.”

When people are in danger of losing their job or just simply lose heart, hanging on for dear life isn’t the right strategy. The authors of this article urge readers to “start thinking about alternatives that suit their abilities and personalities when they still have two or three productive decades ahead of them. In this way, they can discover the possibilities that will allow them to work much longer…”

(Carlo Strenger and Arie Ruttenberg, “The existential necessity of midlife change”, Harvard Business Review, February 2008.)

Why someone may hate your ideas

This is from a Medium is the message post by Eric Schnell at Ohio State University’s Prior Health Sciences Library, who got it from the Casual Fridays blog.

This sure makes it clear why some of my most brilliant ideas haven’t been accepted!

  1. You took a leap, but didn’t build a bridge. Our minds wander down paths and make leaps from one idea to the next very quickly. Your idea makes perfect sense to you because of the path you followed internally. If you don’t take everyone else down that path, it probably won’t make sense to them.
  2. Your idea had no tether. Your idea may be exciting, but if it isn’t tied to the purpose, budget and/or deadline...it’s floating away like a helium balloon without a string.
  3. You told a song. Some ideas just can’t be spoken. They have to be experienced differently. Don’t expect people to see or hear what is in your head. Make it real to them.
  4. You have no relational equity. Maybe you’re new and need to “earn your stripes.” Do you have a track record for presenting poor ideas? This is a big and difficult hurdle to cross. Find someone with relational equity and get them to champion your idea.
  5. You tossed an egg instead of a bird. You tossed it out there too early. Given time, it would have flown. Unless you have a very forgiving environment, a premature idea won’t survive. Be more patient.
  6. Too many thorns around the rose. Maybe it was a good idea, but when criticism arose, you got defensive. Maybe you didn’t show any flexibility when suggestions were offered. Be willing to give in to peripheral changes...
  7. You assumed you knew it all. This is a huge mistake that happens way too often. Don’t be presumptuous. Maybe your idea has been tried before. Maybe there’s more information that would help you come up with better ideas. Perhaps your idea won’t work, but be willing to let it bring new ideas out of others. You don’t have to create all the ideas, just recognize the good ones.
(Casual Fridays, via The medium is the message, Jan. 25, 2008.)

Transformation of the digital world

John Blossom’s summary of the Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) recent Information Industry Summit provides some useful insights for library leaders. Here are a few excerpts from his notes:

  • Transformative technologies. More content is “available from more people and organizations for more audiences than ever before and the ability to monetize content in more contexts than ever before is truly unprecedented.” While this is great for publishers and other organizations that are a part of this transformation, it’s a serious challenge to those “who are locked into older cost structures and...are slow to adapt to new opportunities…”
  • User-generated content. The “more user-generated content there is, the less [people] read a paper and go to the movies.” “User-generated videos are creating their own cultural icons quickly, inexpensively and with a different kind of focus.”
  • Social media. Another “chapter of disintermediation” may be unfolding for publishers. A survey of SIIA publishers revealed that they are beginning to embrace social media with “much of the same confusion, fear and skills gap that existed when they first faced the Web.” While traditional publishers may remain relevant, many of the gains are moving toward publishers who have most aggressively deployed social media technologies that put content where audiences want it.
  • Search as an editorial tool. Panelists from Thomson Corporation, Financial Times Search, HighBeam and Connotate discussed new forms of high-value content aggregation. These companies are focusing on applications that can fit into people’s workflows. Users “need content in their workflow,” and they need “to be able to embed that information in any page.” Metadata is key to all this. “Keyword search is so yesterday.” “You don’t have metadata, you won’t get there.”
  • Google. David Eun, Google’s VP Content Partnerships, said “value now comes from ubiquity, not scarcity.” The old business model was false scarcity, but now companies that succeed embrace ubiquity. The “Internet has grown faster than any previous medium.” It took 45 years for TV to reach a billion dollars in revenue; it took the Internet 3 years. There’s an exabyte of new content every year, enough content to fill 150,000 Library of Congresses. At Google they focus first on the user, not technology. Innovation at Google is from the bottom-up; “not one product comes from a senior executive... We always say don’t present me with a problem, present me with a problem with a possible answer.”
  • Technology’s impact. We overestimate technology’s impact on consumer behavior in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term.
(John Blossom, ContentBlogger, Jan. 31, 2008.)

ChaCha: human-powered search engine

ChaCha, a new search service, is using human beings to answer queries sent via cell phone. You text your question to 242242 and a ChaCha guide will send you the answer in an average of three minutes, though some answers can take ten minutes or longer. Right now ChaCha is free, but they plan to start charging $5.00-$10.00 in the spring. Eventually ChaCha hopes to earn revenue from advertising and eliminate fees.

Reviewers found that ChaCha works as advertised, except it falters if more than one step is required for an answer. There are about 5,000 freelance guides, most of whom are college students, retirees, or stay-at-home parents.

“ChaCha is a definite convenience if you don’t have access to a computer. And it’s fun to see--for free--how quickly guides will be able to answer random questions. But it’s hard to think of scenarios where such a service would be worth paying for...”

(“Review: Human-powered search engine ChaCha lets users ask broad range of questions”, from Associated Press, in Technology Review, Jan. 16, 2008.)

February 18, 2008

The gamer: Your best candidate!

Gamers are just the people you should want to hire. They have five key character traits that make them “better able than their nongamer counterparts to thrive in the twenty-first-century workplace.”

  1. They are bottom-line oriented. “Gamers like to be evaluated, even compared with one another…”
  2. They understand the power of diversity. “The key to achievement [in online games] is teamwork, and the strongest teams are a rich mix of diverse talents and abilities.”
  3. They thrive on change. Gamers create change and even seek it out.
  4. They see learning as fun. “The reward is converting new knowledge into action and recognizing that current successes are resources for solving future problems.”
  5. They marinate on the “edge.” Gamers want to “seek and explore the edges in order to discover some new insight or useful information…”

“Together, these five attributes make for employees who are flexible, resourceful, improvisational, eager for a quest, believers in meritocracy, and foes of bureaucracy.”

(John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas, "The gamer disposition," Conversation Starter, Feb. 14, 2008.)

Recessions call for more creativity, not less

“Conventional wisdom holds that boom times call for new ideas, and recessions call for execution. That ‘wisdom’ is wrong. In fact, even more creativity is needed when times get rough.”

The focus of this article is on the for-profit sector, but it has some useful ideas for library leaders, who may be facing budget reductions if the economy continues to wind down.

So...how do you jumpstart creativity?

  1. Start now. Don’t wait 'til your budget’s been cut and you’re “under enormous pressure to act immediately. No one thinks as clearly when he is already in crisis.”
  2. Involve your team effectively. Use multiple, structured brainstorming sessions. Unstructured sessions don’t work.
  3. Use narrowly focused questions. E.g., “How much does it cost us to handle a perfectly standard item versus ones that require specialized handling? What does that imply about our efficiency…?” Or, “What activities seem to give us the most trouble and frustration, and what would have to change for us to be able to simply eliminate them?”
(Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne, "Recessions call for more creativity, not less, Conversation Starter, Jan. 31, 2008. Read more about it in a summary of key ideas or read the full article “Breakthrough thinking from inside the box,” Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2007.)

When should you keep your ideas to yourself?

Sometimes managers just can’t help themselves! Here’s a scenario for you: An entry-level employee approaches you with an idea, and rather than saying “great idea!” you suggest adding to it.

Marshall Goldsmith, executive coach and author of the Ask the coach blog, sees this as “trying to add ‘too much value’.” The problem is that while the quality of an idea may increase 5% with the boss’s suggestions, the employee’s “commitment to its execution may go down 50%.” You own the idea now, not the employee.

The “effectiveness of execution is a function of the quality of the idea multiplied by the executor’s commitment to make it work. Smart people … can get so wrapped up trying to improving quality a little that they may damage commitment a lot.”

Here’s how to avoid adding “too much value”:

  1. Before speaking to your direct reports:
    • Ask yourself if your “added value” will “make this person more--or less--committed to doing a great job.”
    • If your answer is “less committed,” ask yourself if the value added by your comment will exceed this person’s loss of commitment.
    • If your answer is “no”--don’t comment.
  2. Before speaking in team meetings:
    • Ask yourself if your comment will increase team effectiveness--or if you’re trying to prove you’re cleverer than your peers.
    • If the answer is that you’re trying to show how clever you are--don’t comment.
  3. Before “adding value” with family members (especially teenagers):
    • Ask yourself if they really care about your “sermon” or if you’ll just annoy them.
    • If your sermon is going to go unheeded--don’t deliver it.

“’Adding too much value’ is a classic challenge for smart, successful people.” Leaders “need to make a transition from technical expert to developer of people... Achievement [is] about me. Leadership is about them.”

(Marshall Goldsmith, "When should you keep your ideas to yourself?", Ask the coach, Jan. 21, 2008.)

The Semantic Web goes mainstream

My favorite technology journal, MIT’s Technology Review, has a brief blurb on a new Web application that helps people track personal data. It’s so brief, in fact, that I’m quoting pretty much the whole thing here, with my emphasis added:

Twine,...from San Francisco startup Radar Networks, helps people keep track of personal data, including e-mails, documents, photos, videos and visited Web pages. But its artificial-intelligence algorithms also help categorize that data, sometimes finding surprising connections in disparate content. It is one of the first commercial applications to take advantage of standards developed by the World Wide Web Consortium for the Semantic Web, an envisioned network that will automatically classify and sort information.

Product: Twine
Cost: Free
Source: www.twine.com Company: Radar Networks

(The Semantic Web goes mainstream, Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2008.)

The evolution of web search

Google’s director of research, Peter Norvig, discusses changes in Web search over the last 10 years and the future of Web search.

What’s changed?

Scale. There’s a “thousand times more information,” which now includes not just Web pages, but also video, pictures, blogs, and other media and formats.

Immediacy. When Norvig started at Google in 2001, they were reindexing once a month; they thought of it as a “library catalogue.” Now they see it “more as up-to-the-minute media.”

What does the future hold?

Natural language searching? Google’s focus is more on “the mapping of words onto the concepts that users are looking for.”

Personalization. That’s hard to do for the entire Web, but they’re starting with easier things, like news articles.

Integration. In two to five years, Norvig sees more integration at Google--“various kinds of content,” such as speech recognition, all kinds of phone interfaces, and also integration of Google’s “various properties.” Norvig says Google “used to put the onus on the user and ask them if they wanted Web search or image search or video search. Now we’re trying to solve that for them and serve up the results in a way that makes sense.”

(Kate Greene, "Q&A: Peter Norvig: Google’s director of research talks about the evolution of web search", Technology Review, Jan/Feb. 2008.)

Update: E-paper in living color

Advances in the labs at E-Ink, whose tech­nology is used in both the Sony Reader and ­Amazon’s Kindle, “are pushing electronic-paper tech­nology into color and video.”

The company has recently been able to produce “a prototype color display” with red, green and blue colors.

E-Ink is working with partners to develop flexible transistors for use in color displays; eventually, such displays could even roll up. Commercialization is still a few years off, but “you can imagine a USA Today weather chart where clouds are actually moving,” says Russ Wilcox, CEO of E-Ink.”
(David Talbot, "E-paper, in living color", Technology Review, Jan/Feb 2008.)

February 23, 2008

Harvard Management Update

The February 2008 issue of Harvard Management Update was especially interesting this month. I've summarized four of the articles for you.

Helping new managers succeed

As the manager of a new manager, how can you help him or her succeed in that challenging new role? This brief article offers a few excellent pointers:

  • Balance multiple demands from multiple constituencies. One of the greatest challenges new managers face is reconciling different (sometimes competing) constituencies’ expectations. Explain to your new managers that they need to manage other constituencies as carefully as they manage their direct reports.
  • Use influence and persuasion to gain others’ support. New managers need to learn that there are many sources of power outside formal authority structures, and you need to help them identify people “whose cooperation is essential.” New managers can’t afford to disdain office politics.
  • Delegate wisely. New managers need coaching in when to delegate. Ask them questions like: Is this a decision you need to make alone? Will you make the decision with advice from team members? Watch for delegation mistakes and, when you see them, follow up with your new manager.
  • Create “an environment of psychological safety.” Don’t overreact to “inevitable missteps.” Coach the new manager instead. Talk about the judgment calls needed in their new role. Also, watch for new managers who aren’t asking for help and seek them out.
(Lauren Keller Johnson, “Helping new managers succeed,” Harvard Management Update, Feb. 1, 2008.)

Staying with no

Most managers are torn between “our wish to stay with no and our desire to accommodate the person asking us for something.” Here are a few suggestions to help you stay with no “in a way that both conveys your resolve and preserves your relationships.”

  • Use a neutral no. Saying no and sticking with it requires defusing emotion on both sides. “You want a referee’s manner.” But don’t be afraid to speak directly about the difficulty of your decision and the friction it creates.
  • Be consistent. Prepare a consistent, cogent argument and stick with it. However, in special cases, “you may want to tell your counterpart what you could say yes to.”
  • Explain the real reason you’re saying no. Excuses and lightweight reasons won’t convince your colleagues and may actually increase frustration on both sides.
  • Don’t give false hope. That’ll just encourage your colleagues to keep pushing.
  • Avoid a battlefront attitude. Not everyone tries to soften a “no.” If you feel like your no is a triumph of will, “good outcomes—-and good judgment—-are in jeopardy.”
  • Know your triggers. Clarify your vulnerabilities in advance. That’ll help you “resist your counterpart’s tactics.”
  • Practice! Rehearse in a protected setting, and choose “someone who will play the part of your worst nightmare…”
(Holly Weeks, “Staying with no,” Harvard Management Update, Feb. 1, 2008.)

Cultivating a healthy appetite for risk

Employee innovation is key to new strategies and better processes, yet research shows that organizations don’t encourage an appetite for risk. This article discusses how organizations can become more risk friendly:

  • Increase the potential gains of taking risks. Employees must feel that gains from speaking up significantly outweigh the costs. Encourage staff to challenge your ideas. Publicly acknowledge employee innovation.
  • Reduce individuals’ accountability for risky projects. E.g., create a project review board to make involvement in experimental initiatives less daunting.
  • Productively manage failure. A positive, nonpunitive process for dealing with failure is essential. “Make it clear that intelligent, excusable failure won’t be punished.” Help staff learn from failures; e.g., have reviews that examine what went right and wrong.

“By celebrating hard-won failure and framing it as a learning opportunity, you allow it to be a source of pride rather than shame. At the same time, you give the employee who spearheaded the effort license to take further risks in the pursuit of value-adding innovations.”

(Anne Field, “Cultivating a healthy appetite for risk”, Harvard Management Update, Feb. 1, 2008.)

Using your strengths to become stronger

Top performers excel not by overcoming their weaknesses but by focusing on their strengths--those work activities that make them feel “productive, energized, and engaged.”

To generate the most business value from your strengths:–

  1. Use the SIGN test to identify your strengths:
    • Success. Do you feel successful and effective as you perform the activity?
    • Instincts. Are you effortlessly drawn to the activity?
    • Growth. When you perform the activity, do you feel your mind is advancing?
    • Needs. Does the activity leave you fulfilled?
  2. Use the FREE approach to put your strengths at the center of your work:
    • Focus. How--and how often--do you use this strength in your job?
    • Release. How can you use this strength more?
    • Educate. What skills and techniques would help you leverage this strength?
    • Expand. How might you share your best practices with others?

To help your employees leverage their strengths –

  1. Listen to them and trust their judgment.
  2. Adjust their jobs when possible.
  3. Help make undesirable tasks less burdensome.
(Read more about this in Lauren Keller Johnson’s article, “Using your strengths to become stronger,” Harvard Management Update, Feb. 1, 2008, or see Marcus Buckingham’s book Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance, Free Press, 2007.)

Quality is a relative term!

How do we know how our patrons will view a planned new service, and what can we learn from the for-profit sector?

The first lesson is: “Quality is a relative term... You can only assess quality by looking at an idea through the eyes of a potential customer.”

Take, for example, CVS MinuteClinics, which provide diagnostic services and treat simple, everyday maladies. MinuteClinics fill a specific, previously unmet need. (I love ours!) They’re “quicker, simpler, and cheaper” than going to a primary care physician. And the quality of their services is better. They can’t compete when a complicated condition needs treatment, but that’s not what they’re for.

The trouble starts when organizations think “their view of quality is the same as the market’s view of quality.;; As Peter Drucker said, ‘The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it sells him’.”

So be very wary if your organization “is planning to launch something without thinking about how the target customer measures quality.” Remember: “Quality is a relative term!”

(Scott Anthony, "Is CVS Caremark out-innovating Apple?", Innovation Insights, Feb. 12, 2008.)

Metadata marketing: risks and opportunities

A post on Conversation starter from Harvard Business talks about the importance of metadata as a result of the explosion in user-generated content.

User-generated digital content (e.g., photos taken on your cell phone) and passively-generated data (e.g., your Skype profile) leave footprints (or data trails) of your behaviors. “In an increasingly connected future, the data trails from all these sources will create a massive universe of metadata.”

New devices will provide lenses through which this data can be viewed and analyzed. For example, in New York City taxis with GPS systems already enable traffic patterns to be studied and revised. Soon marketers will be able “to read the emotions of large numbers of people in a geographical area, [and] know not only where to put [the] next electronic billboard, but also what it should display...”

All of this available data has serious implications for people’s behavior, and it raises major questions about whom to trust.

“Individuals and companies will need to find and walk a new line between serving customers and exploiting them, either way with pinpoint accuracy. In the brave new world of aggregated data, companies will need to monitor themselves as well.”

(Jan Chipchase, "Metadata marketing: risks and opportunities", Conversation starter, Feb. 8, 2008.)

Your turn: Talk about it

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