Leader's Digest June 2007
From PLN
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Leader's Digest June 2007
by Leslie Dillon
June 7, 2007
Harvard Business Review
As usual, the June issue of Harvard Business Review has some excellent articles that library managers can benefit from reading. Here are brief summaries of two of them. Several of this month's articles are freely available.
If you love your information, set it free
This brief article in Harvard Business Review is especially relevant for today’s libraries, and it’s free!
Customers would rather go to Web sites that aggregate product information than to individual, separate company pages. That’s because aggregated information has added value. Some companies are surprised that they actually benefit from having their information pooled. Their presence in the marketplace is broadened and the cost of providing information to users is lowered. And the aggregator drives “business” back to the source organization.
According to the author, the key to all this is metadata. It’s what drives the aggregation.
(Of course, WorldCat.org is a great example of this for libraries. Yet another example is the work being done by the University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives unit to integrate the UW Libraries Digital Collections into students’ information workflow by inserting links into Wikipedia. Since only 2% of college and university students begin searching for information at an individual library’s web site, the UW group believes it is “incumbent upon Librarians to look for new ways to reach out to our users where they begin their information search.” If you haven’t already read about the UW project, check out the article in D-Lib Magazine. In my humble opinion, libraries nationally--and internationally--need to collaborate to link Wikipedia and library materials. Here’s a great rant about this and about the need for libraries to edit Wikipedia entries from Jeff Pomerantz, a faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science if you want to read more!)
(David Weinberger, “If you love your information, set it free,” Harvard Business Review, June 2007. Free! Just click on the link)
How successful leaders think
The June 2007 Harvard Business Review cover story, “How successful leaders think,” points out that the focus on what a leader does is misplaced. Instead, we need to look at how leaders think, i.e., to examine the “ways in which leaders’ cognitive processes produce their actions.”
Successful leaders have a rather unusual trait in common: they can “hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.”
The author, Roger Martin (Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and author, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, calls this process of consideration and synthesis “integrative thinking.” He believes it’s “a defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.”
Decision making involves four separate and distinct stages. Everybody goes through these stages, but integrative thinkers approach the steps differently.
- Determining salience: Conventional thinkers focus only on obviously relevant features; integrative thinkers seek less obvious but potentially relevant factors.
- Analyzing causality: Conventional thinkers consider one-way, linear relationships between variables; integrative thinkers consider multidirectional, nonlinear relationships among variables.
- Envisioning the decision architecture: Conventional thinkers break problems into pieces and work on them separately or sequentially; integrative thinkers see problems as a whole, examining how the parts fit together and how decisions affect one another.
- Achieving resolution: Conventional thinkers make either-or choices and settle for best available options; integrative thinkers creatively resolve tensions among opposing ideas and generate innovative outcomes.
(Roger Martin, “How successful leaders think,” Harvard Business Review, June 2007. Full text is available from HBR for $6.00 or on EBSCOhost's Business Source Premier.)
How to get the best solutions from your team
Research shows that the results obtained by a cooperating group are not just better than those of any single group member; in fact, they’re “better than even the group’s best problem solver functioning alone.”
Frequently, however, proven leaders don’t solicit input from others. And often, team members may relinquish responsibility to senior leaders, without providing important input. “Don’t go it alone!” urges the author of this article, first because one problem solver can’t match the diversity of a team, and second because the single solution seeker loses “the power of parallel processing.”
“If you’re the brightest person in the room, you’re in trouble.” James Watson and Francis Crick believed they cracked the DNA code precisely because they weren’t the smartest scientists pursuing the elusive DNA code. The brightest among them, Rosalind Franklin, “rarely sought advice” and didn’t crack the code. Another type of error, captainitis, stems from the passivity exhibited by flight crew members who won’t take responsibility, even when the captain has made a decision that’s clearly wrong. This problem isn’t limited solely to air travel.
“Leaders attacking a knotty problem must collaborate unfailingly with team members toward its resolution--even when they are the best informed or most experienced or ablest of the group.” That doesn’t mean leaders should engage in joint decision making. The final decision is the leader’s, but the key to the success of the decision is that the leader not engage alone in the decision-making process. “By assuring team members that their contribution will inform the final decision, leaders communicate the value they place on each member’s effort.” And when they do that, leaders can gain the full benefit of group problem solving.
(Robert B. Cialdini, “How to get the best solutions from your team,” Harvard Management Update, May 2007, repurposed from “Perils of being the best and the brightest,” Reprint # C0404A, Harvard Management Communication Letter. Available on EBSCOhost's Business Source Premier.)
Why change management fails
A recent email alert from Sales & Marketing Management led me to a great post by change-management expert Mary Donato on S&MM’s SoundOff blog.
A 2004 Gartner study identified the ten most common reasons why change management projects often fail to achieve the desired results:
- Management has little involvement
- Rewards and incentives are tied to old objectives
- Limited or no input from the customer
- Staff culture resists change
- The organization thinks that technology is the solution
- Lack of specifically designed, mutually reinforcing processes
- Poor-quality customer data and information
- Little coordination of multiple departmental initiatives and projects
- Creation of team happens last and does not include business users
- No measures or monitoring of benefits
Ms. Donato suggests that for your next project that requires change, think through this list of factors. (Sales & Marketing Management, Management Advisor, May 22, 2007.)
Managing performance management
The recently published Ultimate Performance: Measuring Human Resources at Work (Nicholas C. Burkholder, Scott Golas and Jeremy Shapiro, Wiley, 2007) advocates new ways of measuring employee potential and performance and provides the framework, tools and techniques to implement a new system of human metrics in any organization.
The book is filled with practical advice, tips, strategies and plans. Here are some tips you can use right now.
- Keep track of data
- Measure consistently
- Monitor activity indicators weekly
- Make adjustments
- Don’t be afraid to experiment
The metrics presented in Ultimate Performance:
- Measure results associated with customer-defined performance objectives
- Are limited to 3-5 specific metrics for any outcome or result
- Drive continuous performance improvement
- Are easy to calculate
- Are easy to compare
- Can be periodically reviewed and refined
(Sales & Marketing Management, Managesmarter, May 29, 2007.)
The Twitterization of blogs
The cell phone may soon be the blogging tool of choice.
Most blogs don’t have many readers—-averaging seven for each of the 12.5 million blogs on LiveJournal. And the majority of bloggers prefer to post mundane tidbits rather than deep thoughts. The whole concept of blogging is evolving, according to Eric Case, product manager for Google’s Blogger. “This thing we understood as blogging is vanishing and it is reframing as people develop new ways of posting and sharing things.”
With the introduction of Twitter, the cell phone has really begun to show its potential for blogging. “Twitter’s popularity shows how eager people are to share...tidbits of life in real time.” In May, Six Apart announced that LiveJournal users would be able to speak their blog entries by phone. And Microsoft has technology that it will be able to leverage for call-in blog posts.
So the future of blogging could be brief spoken posts to a few “friends” on your cell phone.
(Catherine Holahan, “The Twitterization of blogs,” Business Week, Jun 4, 2007.)
June 15, 2007
Building the civilized workplace
“Nasty people don’t just make others feel miserable; they create economic problems for their companies.”
Organizations that tolerate jerks have greater difficulty recruiting and retaining staff; they have damaged reputations, and diminished confidence. Innovation and creativity suffer, and cooperation is impaired. Unfortunately, abuse in the workplace is widespread and the toll is high. But “leaders can take steps to build workplaces where demeaning behavior isn’t tolerated and nasty people are shown the door.”
The article’s author, Robert Sutton, (who also authored a recently published book on the subject) defines the workplace jerk this way: “do people feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled after talking to an alleged jerk? In particular, do they feel worse about themselves?” Sutton lists 12 ways that jerks do their dirty work:
- Personal insults
- Invading one’s “personal territory”
- Uninvited physical contact
- Threats and intimidation
- Sarcastic jokes and teasing
- Withering e-mail flames
- Status slaps intended to humiliate
- Public shaming
- Rude interruptions
- Two-faced attacks
- Dirty looks
- Treating people as if they were invisible
Some very successful organizations have “no jerks” policies; here’s how they enforce the rules.
- Make the rule public by what you say and, especially, do.
- Weave the rule into hiring and firing policies.
- Teach people how to fight.
- Apply the rule to customers and clients too.
- Manage the little moments (intervene).
(Robert Sutton, “Building The Civilized Workplace,” The McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 Number 2.)
Software as a service reduces total cost of ownership
An article in The McKinsey Quarterly asserts that software as a service reduces total cost of ownership.
The model for acquiring computer software is changing. Traditionally, organizations have bought, installed and maintained software on their own machines. Now organizations are starting to buy subscriptions to software over the Internet from developers that host that software.
Fallout from this will mean new revenue models for these companies that will require “fees over time rather than large up-front license purchases.” These developers will “need to work hard to retain existing customers [who will] want guarantees of favorable subscription pricing under the new model.” Software companies “will also need to adjust to the reality of ongoing relationships with customers rather than periodic upgrades.”
Advantages of the software-as-a-service model include “more frequent, (and potentially less painful) upgrades, a lower cost of ownership...and a higher level of service from vendors that must become more responsive to customer needs or risk losing subscription revenues.”
Risks include reliability, security and data privacy. And IT managers must make changes “to capture the full value of this new model.”
(Abhijit Dubey and Dilip Wagle, “Delivering Software as a Service,” The McKinsey Quarterly, June 15, 2007.)
Freebase
Have you heard of Freebase? If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard of it but it hasn’t really been on your radar, though you might be aware that it’s part of the mysterious Semantic Web. Well, maybe it’s time we sit up and take notice. It’s already attracted the attention of the New York Times, Jon Udell (Library Lookup), Tim O’Reilly, who believes “the idea is huge,” and the folks at Talis, an ILS vendor in the UK. Now there’s an article in the June 9 issue of The Economist. Here’s a summary. (By the way, this article is part of The Economist’s Technology Quarterly report, which is always worth at least a look.)
Freebase is a free, shared database of collaboratively-edited, cross-linked data, driven by technology from Metaweb, a firm established by the Freebase founders. The website describes Freebase as a data commons, with data all linked together. It’s still in alpha, with a limited number of users; the beta will be open to anyone. In contrast to Wikipedia, “Freebase is more of an almanac, organized like a database, and readable by people or software.” When Freebase and Wikipedia cover identical topics, Freebase will link to the Wikipedia article. Like Wikipedia, the information in Freebase will be subject to peer review.
How will Freebase be used? Someone who collects data on butterflies might upload the data so that others can add their information on butterflies. But then another researcher might add data on lizards, and still others might combine the butterfly and lizard data with geographical data to create maps. “The fact that users will not know in advance how their data might be used is precisely the point.”
This means that the database must have a new level of flexibility. Most databases today use schemas to describe “the types of records in the database and the relationships between them.” Metaweb’s database is “based on a more flexible structure known...as a ‘graph,’ which allows users to contribute and use not just data, but schemas as well.” This lets them ask the database any kind of question. In contrast to other databases, such as Oracle’s or Google’s Base, Metaweb “reconciles conflicting data and ensures that each object exists only once in the database. But each object can be tied to every other object, so that the resulting web of associations looks rather like the neural networks in a brain.”
What’s the business model? Danny Hillis (a founder of Thinking Machines and a co-founder of Freebase) isn’t worried about that yet. “For now, he is much too excited about the technology to worry about the money.”
Implications for libraries? Plenty. Libraries might find a use there for library data--collections, circulations, usage, etc. That data could then be used in various ways: linked to survey data, commercial activity, census, etc.
(”Sharing what matters,” The Economist, June 7, 2007.)
Trust: The Secret Weapon of Effective Business Leaders
A recent book by Kathy Bloomgarden, Co-CEO of Ruder Finn, Inc., a top global public relations agency, Trust, The Secret Weapon of Effective Business Leaders (St Martin’s Press, 2007), stresses the importance of trust in an organization’s corporate strategy.
From the book:
- In today’s environment, leaders who add the most value to their companies tend to make decisions based not on short-term financial goals, but on strongly-held values. They develop a reservoir of trust among their key stakeholders and use it to speak frankly as challenges arise. These leaders are inspired by an adherence to principles that form, for each of them, a platform of rock-solid values they will not violate.
One review describes the book as “an essential read” for business leaders. Well-written and relevant, it “defines what it means to be an effective leader in today’s rough and tumble business environment.”
In a Harvard Business Review IdeaCast interview, “Bloomgarden explains that for modern-day business leaders to be successful, they must create for themselves a reputation of trustworthiness, both for their own job security and for the future success of their organizations.” A recent Gallup Poll reveals that only 20% of the American public views CEOs as trustworthy, and in 2006 almost 1500 CEOs were forced out of their positions. Performance alone isn’t enough any more. Trusted leaders can draw on established trust to navigate through tough spots, and their organizations attract top employees. To establish a reputation for trust, leaders must:
- Stick with long-term goals.
- Be committed to onging communication.
- Proactively reach out.
- Be visible and accessible.
- Inspire--share your long-term vision.
Branding 101
Jill Stover, undergraduate services librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University, has a great list of tips on her blog for branding your library:
- Know your customers: Understand what makes your customers tick by finding out what’s important to them and what they hope to achieve.
- Know yourself: Come to grips with who you are as an organization and who you aren’t. By doing so, you’ll see where you and your patrons meet, and where you may need to make some changes to better accommodate their needs. Remember, you can’t be all things to all people, but you can do a better job of being yourself.
- Find your inspiration: Great brands stand for something big. What gets you up in the morning? How can you get patrons excited too? If you don’t care about something, you have nothing to build your brand on.
- Find your aspiration: What, ultimately, do you hope to become? Great brands connect their aspirations with those of their patrons. Think beyond today to the possibilities of tomorrow. Develop your vision with patrons and involve them in getting there.
- Write it down: Everyone inside and outside of your library should know what you stand for. Communicate it every chance you get.
- Live it: Here’s where brand-building happens. Some ways you can live your brand include maximizing every point of contact you have with patrons and becoming their advocate in everything you do.
(Jill Stover, Library Marketing--Thinking Outside the Book, Jun. 14, 2007.)
Training Magazine
There’s a new digital edition of Training Magazine that you really need to take a look at for two reasons:
- It’s a really innovative new online approach. It’s a little hard to navigate at first, but try turning the pages if you do nothing else. We need to get used to this.
- There are also some interesting articles on leadership and training--two of which I’ve summarized below.
“Microsoft’s leading edge” tells us about Microsoft’s leadership development program. On the surface it looks like other programs, but what sets it apart is the intentionality “that underlies and guides all those activities.” The purpose of the program isn’t just to build leaders, but to grow people who can “make Microsoft precisely the kind of company it wants to be.” They identified cultural attributes and then looked at competencies by asking, “What does ‘differentiated performance’ look like today, and what must it look like in the long term?” They identified leadership competencies, such as “deep insight” and “building organizational capability.” Looking at how leaders grow at Microsoft, their thinking was influenced by the book The Leadership Pipeline (Josey-Bass, 2001), which identifies six distince career stages. For each stage, competencies were identified, and then “key events that foster deep and sustained learning.” This led to a “taxonomy of pivotal experiences.” Together, these all drive the way leadership development is thought about at Microsoft.
“Leadership drivers” describes a leadership development and best practices roundtable held in New York that gives a glimpse of what some companies are doing to strengthen and promote leadership development. A few highlights include:
- Leadership development is very different from training.
- Align leadership development with business objectives.
- Some companies have simple goals: zero outages (replacements are always available); and succession, not replacement.
- A major problem is getting agreement on defined competencies for a position. One solution was to define 3 elements: technical knowledge; strategic thinking process; and execution.
June 21, 2007
What holds leaders back
Executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, co-author of What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful (Hyperion, 2007) discusses some of the 20 behaviors that hold leaders back.
One of those behaviors involves wanting to win. Winning isn’t the problem; it’s wanting to win all the time. What’s important is to win the big stuff; don’t bother to try to win the trivial stuff. As you move up, let others win. Before you speak, stop and breathe; ask yourself, “Is it worth it?” Most of the time it’s not.
Playing favorites is another behavior that needs to stop. People don’t recognize that they play favorites, but it’s widespread and it creates an environment where people are taught to suck up. We say we don’t like suck-ups, but when Goldsmith asks clients who gets the most attention at home, it’s usually the dog. Why? Because the dog is a suck-up!
Do you play favorites? To see if you do, take this little test. Rank order your direct reports four ways:
- How much does this person like me?
- How much is this person like me?
- Rank each person in terms of their contribution to the organization and its customers.
- How much positive recognition do I give each person?
You’ll see that recognition is more highly correlated with items 1 and 2 than with item 3.
What are the consequences of playing favorites? It’s a big waste of time. It’s not productive. Bosses start believing the sucking up, and they get positive recognition for their dysfunctional behaviors.
Additional challenges include:
- Adding too much value (the higher you go, the more your suggestions become orders, so be careful what you say)
- Making destructive comments (even if it’s true, it’s not worth it)
- Exalting our vices as virtues (it’s just part of who we are)
Listen to what everybody says. It takes awhile, but behaviors can be altered. The motivation for change comes from within.
(Interview, HBR Ideacast, Harvard Business Online, May 31, 2007; Marshall Goldsmith, “Three habits that hold leaders back and how to overcome them,” Harvard Management Update, June 2007; available on EBSCOhost.)
Leading change when there's no crisis
How do you create change when things are good and there’s no emergency? This article suggests four things to do:
- Communicate and educate constantly. Make the case for your initiative in irrefutable terms and communicate it repeatedly.
- Set boundary conditions. You can dictate the requirements that need to be met, but let employees decide how they’ll fulfill them.
- Acknowledge difficulties and admit your mistakes. Probe for difficulties that may be hampering the transition. Acknowledge your own errors and be willing to make midcourse corrections.
- Adjust your leadership style. Know when to dictate and when to use a more collaborative approach.
(”Leading change without a burning platform,” Harvard Management Update, June 2007. Available on EBSCOhost.)
What you can do right now to grow as a leader
Opportunities to build your leadership skills are everywhere. You don’t need to change jobs to develop as a leader. In your current job, you can can take on challenges that can substantially expand your leadership knowledge and skills and not even significantly increase your workload.
Here’s where you can find new leadership challenges:
- Reshape your current job to find new challenges.
- Rethink your approach to current responsibilities; trade tasks with a colleague.
- Take on temporary assignments that offer new challenges.
- Look for short-term projects, task forces and activities that you can participate in briefly.
- Seek challenges outside the workplace.
These are the skills to develop:
- Handling unfamiliar projects.
- Leading change.
- Embracing higher visibility and greater accountability.
- Managing across boundaries.
- Dealing with diversity.
And while you’re at it, be sure to set yourself up for success by learning to consider others’ viewpoints and seeking feedback and coaching.
(Cynthia D. McCauley, “What you can do right now to grow as a leader," Harvard Management Update, June 2007. Available on EBSCOhost or from Harvard Business Online.)
Real leaders negotiate
Leadership often requires negotiation, and good leaders are invariably effective negotiators. Some of the people you lead will be smarter and sometimes more powerful than you. Getting such people to follow you requires that you “appeal to their interests, communicate with them effectively, and sell your vision.” This article draws on ideas explored by the author in his book Leading Leaders: How to Manage Smart, Talented, Rich, and Powerful People (Amacom, 2005). He discusses “how to increase your ability to leverage three key aspects of negotiation—interests, voice, and vision."
- Practice interest-based leadership. If you believe that your charisma, position, or vision is sufficient to make people to follow you, you’ll fail. People follow leaders when they believe it’s in their best interest to do so.
- Find the right leadership voice. Shape your communications to meet individual concerns, interests, and styles.
- Negotiate a vision for your organization. To set a group’s course, its leaders must forge “a single vision out of the multiplicity of visions held by the group’s members.” Articulating that vision requires negotiation--”in particular, multilateral negotiation, which usually requires intensive, face-to-face coalition building.”
(Jeswald Salacuse, “Real leaders negotiate,” Harvard Management Update, June 2007. Available on EBSCOhost or from Harvard Business Online.)
Risk aversion
Managers are reluctant to encourage risk-taking by their workers, according to a nationwide telephone survey of 690 employed Americans conducted for Princeton, NJ-based consultancy BlessingWhite. Just 26 percent of respondents say they often are asked by an employer to seek new solutions, and 41 percent report they are never encouraged to take risks. (Inside Training Newsletter, May 31, 2007.)
