Leader's Digest January 2008

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Leader's Digest January 2008

by Leslie Dillon

January 17, 2008

Manage like an entrepreneur

Harvard Management Update frequently features a classic article from the recent past in a current issue. The December 2007 issue carried an article from January 2005 on entrepreneurship that’s as current now as it was 3 years ago. I think the article’s particularly relevant to today’s library managers, who are being asked--even required--to assume a more business-like posture.

“In a...climate where disruptive technologies overturn all the rules...executives who fail to lead like entrepreneurs place their [organizations] in deep peril.” What defines an entrepreneur? They “pursue opportunities beyond the tangible resources currently controlled by their organizations....And they’re driven to identify new opportunities, not protect what their companies already have.”

While many business executives find this management approach difficult to master, Harvard Business School professor Bill Stahlman believes that “a handful of practices and principles can help leaders begin thinking--and acting--like entrepreneurs.”

  1. Start at the top. Entrepreneurial management needs to start at the top and “permeate the company’s culture and all its systems.”
  2. Run war games. Entrepreneurial managers are characterized by a healthy paranoia. They constantly ask, “Why did we miss that opportunity?” In this age of disruptive technologies, leaders are aware that threats can come from anywhere. Successful organizations “run into trouble by trying to protect what they have rather than developing an opportunity orientation.” Microsoft, for example, “has missed important opportunities, such as those grabbed by Google, because it’s been in defense mode. It wants to protect its monopoly and its strong market position.”
  3. Resist the sunk-costs trap. “Replacing an older business model with a new one takes the courage and will to destroy protective cocoons built around trusted structures and practices.”
  4. Don’t worry about cannibalization. Barnes & Noble’s “less-than-stellar entry into online sales” wasn’t “nearly as successful as Amazon.com because they spent their time worrying that the new online business would sabotage in-store book sales. They didn’t take the time needed to realize that this was a different business that required different sorts of leaders.”

For it to succeed, the entire organization needs to embrace enterpreneurial management. How to spread the entrepreneurial spirit? “Get managers together...to share best practices and lessons learned, and drive home the importance of constantly looking for ways to improve.”

(Lauren Keller Johnson, “Debriefing William Sahlman: Manage Like an Entrepreneur,” Harvard Management Update, Jan. 2005.

What every leader needs to know about followers

While countless studies examine leaders, there’s almost nothing written about followers. What little there is doesn’t distinguish between “those who tag along mindlessly...from those who are deeply devoted and consciously, actively involved.”

This article identifies five types of followers--followers being those who “are low in the hierarchy and have less power, authority, and influence than their superiors:”

  • Isolates. Completely detached, scarcely aware of what’s going on around them; don’t know or care about their leaders; passively support the status quo with their inaction.
  • Bystanders. Free riders, somewhat detached, observe but do not participate; deliberately stand aside and disengage from their leaders and from their organizations.
  • Participants. Engaged enough to invest some of their own time and money to make an impact. Participants who support their managers are highly coveted. They are the fuel that drives the engine.
  • Activists. Eager, energetic, highly engaged; heavily invested in people and process; feel strongly one way or another about their leaders and organizations; work hard either to support their leaders or to undermine--even unseat--them.
  • Diehards. So engaged they’re willing to go down with the ship--or throw the captain overboard; exhibit an all-consuming dedication to someone or something. Diehard followers are rare and can be either a strong asset or a dangerous liability.

How can you tell a good follower from a bad one? “Followers who do something are nearly always preferred to followers who do nothing.”

Good followers actively support good (effective) leaders and oppose bad (ineffective, immoral) leaders. “Good followers invest time and energy in making informed judgments about who their leaders are and what they espouse. Then they take the appropriate action.”

Bad followers do nothing to contribute to the organization, or they oppose a good leader or support a bad leader.

Followers aren’t all alike, and they shouldn’t be treated as if they are. “And while they may lack authority, at least in comparison with their superiors, followers do not lack power and influence.”

(Barbara Kellerman, “What Every Leader Needs to Know About Followers,” Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2007.)

You need both passion and compassion to lead

Leadership consultant, executive coach, and author John Baldoni blogs for Conversation starter at Harvard Business. His recent post stresses the importance of both passion and compassion in the discussion of leadership.

Passion is what gets you up in the morning and keeps you going. “Compassion is what you extend to others; it is the manifestation of caring and concern.”

While compassion takes a back seat to passion in leadership discussions--it’s nice to have, but not essential--in reality, if you want to use passion to rally your staff “to achieve something sustainable, you must do so with compassion--by recognizing and demonstrating your belief that what people do matters.”

Baldoni offers some suggestions for developing and leveraging these critical leadership traits.

To stroke passion:

  • Set high goals. People who love what they do love to push themselves. “By setting stretch objectives, you push motivated people to do their best.”
  • Stoke the fires. Give your staff frequent feedback. “When folks get off track, show them the way back…”
  • Measure results. Show your staff “how what they do matters in terms of gains against goals. And whatever the measurement, broadcast it.”

To nurture compassion:

  • Coach frequently. “Management is a process of enabling others to succeed, specifically putting them into positions where they can succeed.”
  • Put people first. Insist on people-friendly HR policies. Consider flex time. Look for ways to accommodate those who want to work part time.
  • Support volunteerism. Publicize your organization’s community service efforts. Recognize community need and make a commitment to serve it.

“What role do passion and compassion play in your organization? What role--if any--do you want them to play?”

(John Baldoni, “You Need Both Passion and Compassion To Lead,” Conversation starter, Jan. 14, 2008.)

Management quick tip: How can I become better at delegating?

Delegation is a “basic” management skill that can be difficult to master. Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith suggests that you remember that your goal is “to delegate more effectively”, not more frequently. Delegate only to those who are ready to accept the challenge.

Goldsmith recommends that you schedule individual meetings with each of your direct reports. Ask each of them to list their key responsibilities. Then ask:

  1. Are there areas where I need to delegate more to you?
  2. Are there areas where I need to get more involved or provide more help to you?

Now you’re ready to tailor your delegation strategy to fit the unique needs of each staff member.

After you’ve gotten feedback on how you manage your managers, ask your staff how you manage yourself:

  1. Do you ever see me doing things that I don’t need to be doing?
  2. Can I let go of some of my work and give it to my staff members?

You’ll learn what tasks you’re actually wasting time on. “By delegating these activities to staff members you will simultaneously free up some of your own time for more strategic work and help develop staff members’ skills in the process.”

(Marshall Goldsmith, “Management Quick Tip: How Can I Become Better at Delegating?” Harvard Management Update, Dec. 2007.)

Make every meeting matter

In today’s workplace, time is in short supply. Unfortunately, meetings aren’t. But at their best, “meetings can mean everything to an organization.” People can use meetings to be creative together and to integrate different perspectives, knowledge, and experiences. Part of the reason there are so many meetings today is that the more collaborative and democratic workplace requires more meetings to “share information, receive people’s input, and make group decisions.”

Here are some good suggestions for making your meetings productive:

  • Don’t always have a meeting. It may not be necessary. Ask yourself the purpose of the meeting. If it’s just to share information, find another way to do that.
  • Don’t just discuss. “Productive meetings depend on clearly defined objectives toward which people can work and against which they can measure progress.”
  • Spend time to save time. Meetings need to be well planned and communicated. Spend 30 to 60 minutes preparing for meetings you are organizing or leading. Distribute a precise, time-conscious agenda ahead of time, with clearly stated objectives. And assemble the right people.
  • Park digressions; deflate windbags. Often meetings take longer than necessary because people wander off topic. Put off-topic ideas in a parking lot. “On a whiteboard or a piece of paper, list the thoughts and ideas that can be pursued (or not) at a more appropriate time.” Try politely interrupting to cut wordy monologues short, and prompt reluctant speakers to keep everyone involved.
  • Declare a meeting-free day or time. (This has worked well for library managers I’ve known.) Some organizations now have something called “stand-ups”--“brief huddles where participants work through lean-and-mean agendas in rapid-fire fashion, literally standing up all the while.”

Bottom line? “Use meetings sparingly, and use them well.” (Tom Krattenmaker, “Make Every Meeting Matter," Harvard Management Update, Dec. 2007.)

Signs of unrest

Misery in the office is nothing new, unfortunately, but maybe bosses will get more adept at spotting it before it’s too late. Patrick M. Lencioni, author of The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and Their Employees), notes workplace-misery truths and red flags:

  • “A miserable job is not the same as a bad one. A bad job lies in the eye of the beholder,” he says. “But a miserable job is universal. It is one that makes people cynical, frustrated, and demoralized when they go home at night. It drains them of energy, enthusiasm, and self-esteem.”
  • The first of Lencioni’s “three signs” is anonymity, “the feeling employees get when they realize their manager has little interest in them as a human being, and knows little about their lives, aspirations, and interests.”
  • Second, beware of irrelevance, which, he says, “takes root when employees cannot see how their job makes a difference in the lives of others. Employees need to know the work they do impacts someone’s life--a customer, a co-worker, even a supervisor--in one way or another.”
  • The third sign is something Lencioni calls “immeasurement,” which he describes as “the inability of employees to assess for themselves their contribution or success. Employees who have no means of measuring how well they are doing on a given day, or week, must rely on the subjective opinions of others, usually their managers, to gauge their progress or contribution.” So, in other words, if you let them know their misery is not in vain, they may never be miserable in the first place.

(”Signs of Unrest”, Inside Training, Nov. 21, 2007.)

Knol: Google’s answer to Wikipedia

Google’s Knol is a new experimental website that intends to make online information easier to find and more authoritative. Unlike Wikipedia, “Knol articles will have individual authors, whose pictures and credentials will be prominently displayed alongside their work.” Right now, participation is invitation only, but will eventually be open to the public. Readers will be able to rate articles; the better the rating, “the higher it will rank in Google’s search results.”

The term “knol” is meant to denote a knowledge unit. According to Udi Manber, a Google vice president of engineering, “the key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors.”

Because authors are attributed, articles are more likely to have legitimate information. Knol’s features to establish an article’s credibility include references to its sources and information about the author. This may well “attract experts who...prefer the style of attribution common in journalistic and academic publications.”

(Andrew Schrock, “Google’s Answer to Wikipedia,” Technology Review, Jan. 14, 2008.)

Here’s Barbara Quint’s take:

The mainstream press viewed Knol as a Google offensive against Wikipedia. “However, a closer look at the model and a closer read of Manber’s announcement … indicates … a strategy of building Google into a powerhouse publisher, possibly integrating with Google Books, Google Scholar, Google Custom Search Engine, and even Google Base.”

(Barbara Quint, “Google Knol: The ‘Grassy Knoll’ for Publishers or Just Wikipedia?” Information Today NewsBreaks, Jan. 7, 2008.)

Editor's note: Knol may have Google's name behind it, but Citizendium has been building an authoritative resource since March 2007.

January 21, 2008

Making talent a strategic priority

There’s no question that it’s difficult to find and retain talented employees, but many organizations “compound the problem by failing to make talent management a strategic priority.” Executives need to “focus on all workforce segments and not just on the top performers…” They need to “create different value propositions for employees with different characteristics” (a value proposition is “senior management’s explanation of why a smart, energetic, and ambitious person might want to work for one company as opposed to another”). And they need to “increase the role and capabilities of the human-resources (HR) function.”

This article identifies seven obstacles to good talent management:

  1. Senior managers don’t spend enough high-quality time on talent management.
  2. The organization is siloed and doesn’t encourage constructive collaboration or sharing of resources.
  3. Line managers aren’t sufficiently committed to developing people’s capabilities and careers.
  4. Line managers are unwilling to differentiate their people as top, average, and under-performers.
  5. Senior leaders aren’t sufficiently involved in shaping talent management strategy.
  6. Senior leaders don’t align talent management strategy with business strategy.
  7. Line managers don’t address underperformance effectively.

“To manage talent successfully, executives must recognize that their talent strategies cannot focus solely on the top performers.” This is a long article whose focus is on international for-profit companies, and I’ve summarized only one section of it, but it’s worth reading in full.

(Matthew Guthridge, Asmus B. Komm and Emily Lawson, “Making Talent a Strategic Priority,” The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2008.)

Book club for executives

Sandra J. Sucher, the teacher of Harvard Business School’s literature class, The Moral Leader, believes that “bringing executives together to read and discuss literary works can be a potent leadership development tool.”

Executives (and other staff as well) must often make moral or ethical decisions that they’re unprepared for. For example, what do you do if a colleague is being mistreated, or how do you explain to your staff a decision from senior management that you don’t support?

Organizations don’t train their staff to understand moral challenges. The value of the course taught by Sucher lies in “how the students reason through the moral challenges together and debate the perspectives that the literature evokes. Managers responsible for developing other leaders can use this type of literary debate to spark very revealing conversations.”

The books they read aren’t about business. A complete list of readings is available here, but they include Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Machiavelli’s The Prince, Conrad’s "The Secret Sharer" and several others that allow readers to discuss moral challenges.

The value of a book group for executives is the opportunity to exchange ideas. People “come to understand how their own moral codes constrain them--and how they might approach decisions with a more nuanced understanding.” Hearing other people’s arguments “is one way to strengthen your own moral reasoning skills.”

Sucher also points out that these discussions can “create a powerful bond within a group” and she suggests that organizations “might consider integrating discussions of texts into their leadership development programs or even creating a book club for senior leaders--or for any group that confronts moral decision making.”

Is there a role for libraries here? Could your library sponsor an executive book club?

(M. Ellen Peebles, “Harvard Business School’s Sandra J. Sucher on the Value of a Book Club for Executives," Harvard Business Review, Jan. 2008.)

Business technology trends to watch

A recent article in The McKinsey Quarterly identifies eight emerging trends that are transforming many markets and businesses, some of which are relevant to libraries. This article is worth reading in its entirety and offers reading lists to explore each trend more thoroughly.

Managing relationships

1. Distributing cocreation. In many business sectors, companies are involving their customers, suppliers, etc. in the creation of new products. Outsiders can “offer insights that help shape product development... Information goods such as software and editorial content are ripe for this kind of decentralized innovation.”

2. Using consumers as innovators. Consumers increasingly want to engage each other and organizations online. Organizations “can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their...benefit.”

3. Tapping into a world of talent. “As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, [organizations] can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work…”

4. Extracting more value from interactions. By 2015 employment in jobs “that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions” is expected “to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today. Europe and Japan will experience similar changes in the composition of their workforces.”

Managing capital and assets

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation. The rate of adoption of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies is disappointing so far, “but as the price of digital tags falls they could very well reduce the costs of managing distribution” and help organizations “manage supply more effectively.” There’s still lots of room to automate repetitive tasks.

6. Unbundling production from delivery. Technology helps organizations use “fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components... Amazon.com, for example, has expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services.”

Leveraging information in new ways

7. Putting more science into management. Technology helps managers exploit increasing amounts of data “to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models.” The more an organization knows about its customers, the better it’s able “to create offerings they want [and] target them with messages…” For example, recommendation engines like Amazon’s “seem to be paying off: CleverSet, a pure-play recommendation-engine provider, claims that the 75 online retailers using the engine are averaging a 22 percent increase in revenue per visitor.”

8. Making businesses from information. Accumulated data captured in multiple systems “or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.” One kind of new information business could play “a pure aggregation and visualization role, scouring the Web to assemble data on particular topics.” (Is this a business for libraries?)

(James M. Manyika, Roger P. Roberts, and Kara L. Sprague, “Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch,” The McKinsey Quarterly, Dec. 2007.)

You might find it interesting to compare these with the top tech trends identified at ALA Midwinter, which are summarized below.

LITA top technology trends Midwinter 2008

Speakers’ predictions at ALA Widwinter’s LITA Top Technology Trends included increasing open source, open access, interoperability, and user-created content, plus new computer gadgetry and the end of privacy. Below is a summary of speakers’ main points. This is long, so if you’re in a rush, just scroll through it and read what you know nothing about!

Karen Schneider

  • Interoperability and standards implementation, such as ISTC (International Standard Text Code). By mid-2008 several large publishers plan to implement the standard, which “identifies the intellectual property that could be manifested in any number of ISBNs. For example, the book Moby Dick, Or the Whale would be identified with an ISTC; the Bantam edition, the Barnes & Noble edition, the Signet edition, the Norton Critical edition would each be assigned a different ISBN....ISTCs are not limited to books. They can be assigned to poems, articles, essays, short stories--any written work.” (Laura Dawson)
  • Open source and open data. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) may help libraries improve ROI by providing better access to and aggregation of licensed information resources. E.g., with SOA, library consortia could build systems sharing common bibliographic/resource data but with different interfaces and search systems. SOA can allow libraries to use and improve information resources contributed by others and customize its delivery to customers. When you think SOA, think web mashups. (Eric Schnell) Librarians seem more open to non-library software, savvier about software selection and increasingly aware of user needs.

Karen Coombs

  • Ultra-light and small PCs. They cost $300-$400, have limited storage and rely “heavily on the network and open source software to meet users needs.”
  • New uses of wireless. Delft (Netherlands) Public Library can push content to people’s wireless phones, which means they could notify people about new books, fines due, or books available for pick up.
  • Blogging ceases to exist as blogging. People don’t necessarily recognize anymore (or care) that what they’re doing is blogging. “For many blogging has simply become the way in which content is being created…”
  • On the Go Applications and Data. Many people today do most of their business using web applications, and they’re starting to expect the same of their data. They also want to use the “smallest device possible” to complete their tasks. “Increasingly library users are expecting the same things. Therefore we need to make sure our systems interact well with these technologies that support portable applications and data.”

Sarah Houghton-Jan

  • Tough budget, Tech stays. In spite of tightening belts and less funding, “libraries will at least hold their technology budgets steady, realizing that a lack of outlay now means that next year the library will be even further behind and its users further disenfranchised.”
  • Widening Digital Divide and our Inattention to It. The “digital divide is a reality in our communities, and one that we aren’t paying enough attention to.”
  • User-Centered Content Production. Libraries are becoming more customer-centric, letting users create content on library web sites and drive the appearance and the organization of that content as well.
  • Virtual Reference Software. New ways to provide reference services include “non-library-world software” such as Skype, Live Person, and “commercial text-messaging programs to provide live cell phone text-messaging (SMS) reference to their users.”
  • We Stop Being So Bossy. Libraries “are starting to realize that instead of acting in a paternalistic and patronizing way toward our users in the realm of technology, we should act toward them exactly as we do in any other situation that bears on customer service: we collaborate, we share, and we work together.”
  • Open Source. Libraries, especially publics, are starting to look more and more to open source to fulfill their users’ needs.

Eric Lease Morgan

  • Open source. The use of Linux as a server platform and as a desktop platform will increase.
  • Open access. NIH grant recipients will be mandated to submit articles to PubMed 12 months after publication. Hopefully this will create more open-access content from publicly funded sources. If so, it’ll “be a boon to acquisitions departments.” It “behooves libraries to collect and index this content.”
  • Social networking will continue to grow. “Facebook, with its ability to allow people to create programs for it through its application programmer interface (API), will probably grow faster than the others…”
  • Blogging will continue to affect the way we communicate. “One of the powers of writing is that it transcends both space and time... Blogs amplify this power.”
  • Network of globally accessible computers. “Each one of those words (”network,” “globally,” “accessible” and “computers”) packs a wollup, and combined into a single thing represent a huge change in the way we live and work.”

John Blyberg

  • DRM. There may be a move afoot to abandon DRM for music downloads in favor of digital watermarks. That means that music downloads will have unique serial numbers embedded in them that tie each file to the original purchaser. “Obviously, this carries with it some significant privacy concern.” Also, it doesn’t look like DRM is being dropped from audiobooks.
  • Converged Digital Media Hubs. “The Apple iPhone...allows users to take advantage of a convergence of media types–music, video, text, and two-way voice communication.” These types of devices are highly beneficial to consumers, and the market for them will only get bigger. “Many interesting possibilities for libraries there too.”
  • Location Awareness. Most [new] cell phones are now equipped with a GPS locater chip. This technology will soon “couple with online social networking sites like Dodgeball so that friends and contacts can triangulate on your physical position at any given time.” This has very serious privacy implications.
  • Surface Computing. Tactile “computing will become much more widespread as notions of what ‘computing’ actually means begin to broaden and extend into non-traditional types of devices (think Chumby).” The Chumby is a “small touch screen device that functions as a clock and also displays information from the web such as news, stocks, photos and more by connecting to the internet via WiFi.” (The Gadgeteer.) “Maybe someday...we’ll be able to use surface computing platforms in a convergence of reference, circulation, research, and instruction.”
  • Fat PAN Pipes. Adoption of Personal Area Networks “has been slow because of bandwidth restrictions. That will probably change [when] devices begin to take advantage of Ultra Wideband (UWB)–an extremely high-bandwidth, short-range radio specification. Think USB or Firewire without cables.”
  • Privacy is Dead. “We basically have the choice to connect or live out our lives in quiet and total obscurity.”

If you want to read more technology predictions, Stephen Abram, SirsiDynix’s Vice President of Innovation, has 30 listed on his blog!

January 31, 2008

Succeeding at innovation: Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker

Why bother reading an interview of Mozilla’s former CEO, Mitchell Baker? She (surprise!) has overseen the growth of Firefox to 150 million users--15% of the browser market. Moreover, in 2006, Mozilla’s “revenue-sharing arrangement with Google...delivered revenues three times greater than Mozilla’s expenses, an impressive rate of return.” Mozilla’s success at collaborative innovation can serve as a model for libraries.

  • Decentralization. Mozilla lets people participate “in a very decentralized fashion.” Where people are actually touching code, extreme discipline is necessary. But there are lots of areas where that level of discipline isn’t necessary. Forty percent of the Firefox code isn’t from Mozilla employees. “If you took away the volunteers...we would die.”
  • User power. “Firefox has about 150 million users worldwide.” It doesn’t come installed on new machines, so that means that there have been “150 million individual decisions to use it...and you cannot buy that.”
  • Commitment to open internet. A “desire to maintain an open and participatory internet” has been an important motivator for Firefox contributors. “The internet is hidden to human beings except for this piece of software we call the browser.”
  • Community. Firefox contributors take ownership of the product, and they see themselves as part of a community. “The community is reinforcing once you get started. We can’t ship Firefox or get it onto people’s machines without that community. So that means it’s very much a two-way street, and if we start to think of ourselves as the center, we will fail.”
  • Enabling innovation. Just “giving people permission does wonders.”
  • Motivated staff. People whose motivations align strongly with Mozilla’s mission and “people who can handle large amounts of their work being public” do well as Mozilla employees.
  • Collegial management style. “You can try to tell an employee what to do, but if the two of you disagree the employee may be right. There’s much more negotiation here...Our decision-making process is highly distributed and unrelated to employment status…”

What can leaders learn about innovation from the Mozilla model?

  1. “Turning people loose is really valuable.”
  2. Decide “where you want input. There are different varieties of input and user-generated content. Figuring out what you really want is very important... But if you’re doing one thing and sending out a message that you’re doing another, I think you’re dead.”
  3. Look for “areas where you can give up some control, because the returns are great.”

(Lenny T. Mendonca and Robert Sutton, "Succeeding at open-source innovation: An interview with Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker," The McKinsey Quarterly, January 2008.)

Freed from the page, but a book nonetheless

Randall Stross, writing in the New York Times, predicts that widespread “digitization of personal book collections” is coming soon because “display technology” can now compete “page-to-page” with paper.

The article refutes Steve Jobs’ claim that ebook readers aren’t necessary because nobody reads books anymore, using statistics from the Book Industry Study Group, which estimates sales of 408 million books and revenues of $15 billion this year in the United States.

The article concludes that the “object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell” and reminds us that “Amazon should be credited with … replacing the book business with the reading business.”

(Randall Stross, “Freed From the Page, but a Book Nonetheless," The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2008.)

Report on librarians’ feelings About automation

In case you haven’t already heard about Marshall Breeding’s report examining librarians’ satisfaction with current ILS products, here’s a summary of it.

Based on a survey, Perceptions 2007: An International Survey of Library Automation ranks products. But Breeding points out that readers need to take the results “with the proverbial grain of salt.”

  • Polaris ILS received the highest user-satisfaction ratings. Others receiving high scores were TLC’s Library.Solution, Innovative Interface’s Millennium, Book Systems’ Concourse and Follett’s Circulation Plus and Winnebago Spectrum.
  • Follett’s Athena and Ex Libris’ ALEPH 500 and Voyager fell into the mid-range tier.
  • TLC’s Carl products and SirsiDynix’s Unicorn and Horizon received low scores.

An interactive section of the report lets readers view “sets of results sorted by individual products or questions so they can do deeper analysis on their own.” Note: “results for satisfaction with the ILS itself differ from results for satisfaction with the actual vendor and with its support services.”

Asked about the likelihood of considering open source ILSs, respondents indicated that libraries “still aren’t ready for wide adoption.” One reason cited was “not having enough technical staff… Breeding agreed that this might indicate a lack of awareness that, today, there are vendors you can hire to support open source systems.”

Breeding said the survey “turned up few surprises” and results were “pretty consistent with the real world…”

(Kathy Dempsey, “Report on Librarians’ Feelings About Automation Is More ‘Validating’ Than ‘Surprising’," Information Today NewsBreaks, Jan. 28, 2008.)

More 2008 trends

If you haven’t yet had your fill of trends to watch, you might want to take a look at these, which Information Today’s Paula Hane will be watching in 2008--if only to corroborate what you’ve already seen:

  • Accelerating number of mobile content applications--and new devices.
  • Increased spending for online ads with further declines in print [ads].
  • Increasing popularity of widgets for content delivery.
  • Increasing popularity of niche community networking sites as people grow weary of MySpace, Facebook, etc.
  • Increasing use of social networking capabilities in enterprise settings.
  • New collaborative workflow tools emerge as companies demand more collaboration.
  • Increasing popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
  • Growth of open source tools and services.
  • Ongoing book digitization projects (Google, Open Content Alliance, etc.).
  • Continued progress and growth in open access initiatives.
  • Further movement from fee-based to free content.
  • Continued buzz around user-generated content; publishers test new publishing models.
  • Increased interest in text analytics, data extraction and mining, semantic search, etc.
  • Continued interest in testing visualization tools for information discovery and analysis.
  • Security and privacy remain major concerns.

(Paula J. Hane, “Review of the Year 2007 and Trends Watch,” Information Today NewsBreaks, Jan. 17, 2008.)

Leading with authenticity: A review of True North

The book True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership by Bill George and Peter Sims (Wiley, 2007) argues that authentic leaders, guided by their most sacred values (their true north) “lead with their hearts as well as their heads, inspiring loyalty and commitment from those they lead.”

How does one become an authentic leader? To discover this, the book’s authors interviewed 125 business leaders, many of whom reported “that crucible experiences forged the principles that define their leadership.”

To begin your journey as an authentic leader, ask yourself questions in these key areas:

  • Self-Awareness. What are my strengths and weaknesses? How do others see me?
  • Values. “What are my most deeply held values?”
  • Motivations. “What drives me?”
  • Support. Whom do I count on?
  • Integrated life. “How can I integrate all facets of my life to be a whole, balanced person?”

“An engaging book filled with richly detailed stories, True North will inspire new and established leaders alike to consider how well they follow their own true north in their personal and professional lives.”

(Rolf Dobelli, “Leading with Authenticity: A Review of True North," Harvard Management Update, January 2008.)

How can I improve collaboration within my team?

Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, Dartmouth business school professor and author of the Ask the Coach blog, shares his four-step process for “team building without time wasting.”

  1. Assess the teamwork gap. Ask team members to consider the questions “How well are we doing?” and “How well do we need to be doing?” Have them score their results from 1 to 10 and ask one team member to calculate the averages. Results will show the gap (e.g., “We are a 5.8. We need to be an 8.7.”)
  2. Identify behaviors to close the gap. Have team members identify, then share, needed behaviors and have someone record them. Then have the group vote on behavior changes that will have the greatest impact.
  3. Have team members interview each other. Each should ask their partner to “suggest one or two positive changes” they can make to help the team work more effectively.” Each person can choose “one behavior to focus on improving.”
  4. Make the learning ongoing. Have regular follow-ups where team members ask each other for suggestions on how to continue improving.

There are two rules for these conversations:

  • The listener may not critique the suggestions. Just “listen and say thank you.”
  • The speaker must focus on the future not the past.

Goldsmith has learned that those who use “this process can make huge improvements in teamwork in very little time.”

(Marshall Goldsmith, “How Can I Improve Collaboration Within My Team?” Harvard Management Update, January 2008.)

Your turn: Talk about it

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