Leader's Digest June 2008
From PLN
Leader's Digest June 2008
by Leslie Dillon, published July 2, 2008
June 16, 2008
Access not ownership: the new age of innovation
The New Age of Innovation: Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks (McGraw Hill), a recent book by University of Michigan professors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan, revolves around two ideas:
- "Value is based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers"
- Since no organization can satisfy all the varied expectations of its consumers, it must diversify the way it operates. Organizations' "internal focus should be on gaining access to resources, not necessarily owning them."
The book "hammer[s] home the details of this shift from impersonal to customized, vertical to horizontal, with a wealth of examples from an array of industries." For example, UPS' shift from requiring that customers bring parcels to a central location to picking up packages from them is "a significant transformation from a business process focus on the firm to a business process focus on each unique customer experience." Organizations that can rethink their "fundamentals and implement appropriate changes will provide the driver of success..."
The authors make it clear that "this transformation is neither optional nor reversible."
(Today's libraries certainly stress access, but have we really transformed our processes from focusing on the organization to processes that "focus on each unique customer experience?")
(Helen Walters, "C.K. Prahalad: The new age of innovation", BusinessWeek, May 19, 2008.)
Learning to innovate
What's needed for organizations to be able to innovate effectively? According to MIT Sloan Management Review, you must "prepare your organization to be open to innovation by creating a learning organization." Research has shown that the five most important characteristics needed to create a learning organization are: "experimentation, risk taking, interaction with the external environment, dialogue and participative decision-making."
- Experimentation: The degree to which the organization sympathetically deals with new ideas and suggestions. Experimentation enables the organization to search for innovative solutions and "challenge the established order."
- Risk taking: "Tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty and errors." Risk-taking organizations understand "the value of learning from both successes and failures. Risk-averse organizations... fail to see that the nature of innovation requires some uncertainty."
- Interaction with the external environment: "Relationships with factors" beyond the organization's control or influence. An organization's ability to respond to the turbulence in the environment is "the key to learning."
- Dialogue: "Sustained collective inquiry" into everyday "processes, assumptions and certainties." Use dialogue to spread information and create multiple viewpoints.
- Participative decision making: The amount of influence employees have in an organization's decision-making. "Employee involvement, job satisfaction and organizational commitment all increase when stakeholders feel involved in the decision-making process."
Organizations can use surveys and other metrics to measure their "ability to learn and innovate. If an organization measures an improvement in its learning capability, it will very likely see a concurrent increase in innovation."
(David Wagner, "Learning to innovate," MIT Sloan Management Review, Fall 2007. Free online)
Changing the world from the edge
More than 100 “student-led innovation initiatives…are well under way and illustrate the broad scope of innovation.” John Hagel and John Seely Brown, co-chairman and independent co-chairman of Deloitte LLP's Center for Edge Innovation, believe these successful activist programs can provide some important lessons for executives.
- To transform the core, start at the edge. When fundamental change is needed in an organization, many executives start with a massive reorganization that fails to achieve the desired results. Instead, “start on the edge and move back into the core over time. By engaging the edge first, it is often possible to find innovative leaders with energy and passion to try new approaches.”
- Demographic edges are a deep source of energy and creativity. Today’s organizations have new generations of workers who want to make a difference. This energy and creativity are essential to innovation and change. Senior managers need to find better “mechanisms to connect with the younger generation…and inspire them with the opportunities for achieving change.”
- Innovation is not just about ideas, it is about impact. A “multitude of big ideas” are usually percolating in many areas of large organizations. “The key is how to make these ideas more visible, how to mobilize support for the most promising ideas and how to scale the development and deployment of the ideas.”
- Achieving results requires making connections across multiple edges. Often the resources needed to drive innovation are isolated within “disciplinary and institutional silos.” A common theme of successful student innovation initiatives “has been the need to inventory relevant resources [including those outside the organization] and find creative ways to connect these resources.”
“By bridging the edges that define our daily lives, we may indeed change the world.”
(John Hagel and John Seely Brown, "Changing the world from the edge," BusinessWeek, May 30, 2008.)
Use roleplaying to drive frontline change
How do you get buy-in from frontline employees who are wedded to old processes and resist change? One of the most effective techniques is to use roleplaying. According to Elaine Weinstein, consultant and former HR executive, here's how to win them over:
- Have staff perform skits that contrast the old with the new. Change initiatives can seem like empty abstractions to many frontline staff. Choose staff who are already on board to act out scenarios for their colleagues. The scenarios will demonstrate that new processes can make employees' work easier and more interesting. Roleplaying can also serve "as a quality check on the change initiative’s goals."
- Use roleplaying to prepare "trust figures" to be change agents. Change makes people fearful, and when people are fearful, they're "less likely to trust." Identify “'trust figures'--well-liked, well-respected middle managers and individual performers"--and recruit them as change agents.
This exercise can help "persuade resisters to suspend disbelief and consider that the change might be positive."
(Christina Bielaszka-Duvernay, "Use role-play to drive frontline change", Harvard Management Update, Jun. 2008.)
Wikipedia use grew 8,000% in five years
Wikipedia traffic has skyrocketed over the last five years, increasing nearly 8,000 percent between April 2003 and April 2008. Most of Wikipedia's visitors came via Google and Yahoo. “The site’s rapid ascent ... demonstrates the success of its collaborative nature..." according to Nielson Online.
(OCLC Abstracts, June 9, 2008.)
Crucibles of leadership development
What makes ordinary people into great leaders? Robert J. Thomas, author of Crucibles of Leadership: How to Learn From Experience to Become a Great Leader, believes it’s how they handle their experiences, especially the traumatic “crucible” events. Leaders who grow through crucible experiences are distinguished from others by their approach to learning. They develop a “personal learning strategy” that helps them confront challenges and extract valuable lessons about leadership.
Thomas’ recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, which is based on his book, discusses how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club have “mastered the art of turning crucible experiences into leadership gold.” Both organizations are large, complex and durable, and have grown rapidly in the last 30 years. Each one uses a specific activity as a crucible for leadership development. For the Mormon church, it’s the missionary experience; for the Hells Angels, it’s motorcycle runs.
These two “fringe” (or formerly fringe) groups provide important lessons about leadership development:
- Both organizations demonstrate how core activities can “serve as practice fields for leaders.”
- They make “elaborate preparations” before sending potential leaders “out into the field.” They teach technical skills and “critical leadership intangibles”, e.g., rules of the road, how to sense trouble; when to say no.
- They provide “supporting infrastructure” during the crucible experience. Senior supervisors, whose job it is to demonstrate commitment to the individuals and to the organization’s mission, are on the scene.
- They recognize the need for individual and organizational renewal. The crucible events are designed to “foster a new generation of leaders” and “enable the organization to replenish itself.”
These lessons require “an openness to experimentation and risk taking in the area of leader development…” Properly developed and managed crucible experiences can help organizations develop their next generation of leaders.
(Robert J. Thomas, “Crucibles of leadership development”, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2008.)
Perspectives on innovation
Eric Schnell, Associate Professor and Assistant Director for Technology and Digital Initiatives, Prior Health Sciences Library, Ohio State University, is leading an innovation task force to help the library develop a five-year plan. He has posted some interesting perspectives on innovation. Here they are:
Michael Schrage
- Innovation is more social than personal. It is a byproduct of how well or poorly one plays with others. Behavior--not knowledge, not insight--drives innovation.
- You can’t be a serious innovator unless you are willing and able to play.
Clayton Christensen
- You have to be careful which customers you listen to, and then you need to watch what they do, not listen to what they say.”
- The problem is when you say “listen to your customers,” your customers are only going to lead you in a direction that they want to go in. Generally, that will never lead you to disruptive growth. You’ve got to find that new set of customers, and listen to them and follow them. That’s the trick.
Andrew H. Van De Ven
- People and organizations are largely designed to focus on, harvest, and protect existing practices than pay attention to developing new ideas. The more successful an organization the more difficult this is. (Christensen echoes this theory)
- While the innovation of conception process many be an individual activity, innovation is a collective achievement of pushing and riding those ideas.
- The process of transforming innovation into practice involves so many individuals that those involved may lose sight of the big picture.
- Innovations transform the structure and practices of an organization. The problem is creating an infrastructure conducive to innovation.
(Eric Schnell, The medium is the message, Jun. 10, 2008.)
What will you regret?
John Izzo’s new book, The Five Secrets You Must Discover before You Die, is based on 250 interviews asking people ages 59-106 from different walks of life to reflect on their lives and careers. Here are some of the themes that emerged:
- People don’t regret their failures as much as failing to take risks. The happiest people pursue their dreams and stretch themselves. We’re “more likely to regret having not tried for a dream than to have failed at it.” While most people fear failure, they should be worrying more about playing it safe.
- Listen to your inner voice! We have inner voices that tell us if we’re sacrificing too much or not being true to ourselves. “If you think your work-life mix is out of whack it probably is.”
- Continued learning and growth are critical to success. People who “never got stuck in a rut” were always eager to learn from others. The “more we keep learning the more success we discover.”
- To thine own self be true. It’s absolutely critical to “follow your own definition of success.” People’s deepest regrets came from not being true to themselves.
- You won’t remember status and power. “The money in your wallet is not the definition of your success but how many lives you touched.”
(Marshall Goldsmith, "What will you regret?," Ask the Coach, Harvard Business Blogs, June 15, 2008.)
June 23, 2008
More competition for reference?
Some libraries have grown accustomed to declining numbers of reference questions over the years, and to the many new types of questions librarians get now, but there are some interesting new developments on the horizon that libraries need to keep our eyes on. Microsoft’s SearchTogether and ChaCha are two cases in point.
SearchTogether
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 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
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.
What if?
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
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.)
June 30, 2008
OCLC Symposium: Mashed-up library
I couldn't go to the 2008 ALA Annual Conference, 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 mashups 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 is 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."
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 mashups at their libraries.
Some of the key points:
Michael Schrage
Major theme: Managing the challenge of an institution – how to be innovative within an institution.
Innovation:
- Innovation 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 mashups.
- 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 “Libratories” that attract talent and inspire hypotheses. (Libratories = 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.)
- Editor's note: I wasn't there either--but it strikes me that subsidy is a needlessly negative term for public expenditures. Do we call police and fire departments "subsidized" operations? Recreation and parks? Streets? How about "commonly funded for the public good"--or is that insufficiently market-oriented? I note that one of the bloggers whose reports form the basis of this summary also took issue with the characterization, saying "Should libraries be a business or a public good?"
The next step in open innovation
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:
- Capture value from the cocreated product/service.
- Capture value by providing a complementary product or service (e.g., Red Hat sells services to Linux users).
- "Benefit 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.)
The information experience
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% and 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.)
Yahoo Answers: another competitor?
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's 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.)
Why dogs wag their tails
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 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.)
