Leader's Digest March 2007

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Leader's Digest March 2007

by Leslie Dillon

March 6, 2007

Harvard Business Review

The March issue of Harvard Business Review looks at talent management. I've chosen to summarize 3 of the more relevant articles. If you want to read an article in full, the March HBR is available via EBSCOhost or you can order a reprint from HBR for $6.00.

"Leading clever people"

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones talk about how to manage your most gifted staff--people who don’t want to be led and may be smarter than you.

Seven things you need to know about clever people

1. They know their worth.
2. They are organizationally savvy.
3. They ignore corporate hierarchy.
4. They expect instant access.
5. They are well connected.
6. They have a low boredom threshold.
7. They won't thank you.

Five more things you need to know . They respond better to a benevolent guardian than to a traditional boss.

9. They want freedom to explore (and to fail).
10. They need some degree of "systems and discipline" or "they may deliver very little.”
11. They want to stay close to the “real work,” often to the detriment of relationships with the people they are supposed to be managing.
12. They are quick to recognize insincerity and respond badly to it.

Seven things to do with clever people

1. Cut back on "managing" them.
2. Create an environment where they can thrive.
3. Don't push them.
4. Protect them from bureaucratic rules and politics.
5. Keep them on a long, flexible lead.
6. Demonstrate that you are an expert in your own right.
7. Don’t kowtow.

Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones, "Leading clever people", Harvard Business Review, March 2007.

"Crisis at the summit"

Do you tend to get bored and lose interest--just when you've conquered a job? This is called the "summit syndrome", it affects people who thrive on challenge, and it can derail careers.

After conquering the demands of their current position, overachievers (who are incapable of coasting) "can lose their bearings and question their purpose." The best defense for this is "early intervention." The article discusses the 3 phases--approach, plateauing, and descending--and lists steps to avoid this crisis:

  1. Understand how you approach a situation and the "part it plays in feeling stale or losing your edge"
  2. "Reconnect with your core purpose in life"
  3. Recast your job to better align your inner aspirations with your work requirements
  4. "Create a developmental path by honing a handful of core leadership competencies."

George D. Parsons and Richard T. Pascale, "Crisis at the summit", Harvard Business Review, March 2007.

"What it means to work here"

You can dramatically improve your employees' engagement and performance by communicating explicitly how your organization is unique. What's needed is a “signature experience”--something that "tells the right story" about your organization. The signature experience empowers "the people who share your values and enthusiasm for work." It's a "visible, distinctive element of an organization’s overall employee experience." This signature experience not only creates value for an organization, but also "serves as a powerful and constant symbol of the organization’s culture and values."

(It seems to me that this is particularly important now for libraries as we try to recruit technical and other staff from outside librarianship.)

Tamara J. Erickson and Lynda Gratton, "What it means to work here", Harvard Business Review, March 2007.

Librarians as public policy change agents

Mary Alice Baish, Associate Washington Affairs Representative, American Association of Law Libraries, reviews library-related issues for the 110th Congress and gives suggestions on how to advocate for libraries.

Issues include:

  • The Digital Media Consumers’ Rights Act (DMCRA)
  • The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)
  • Net neutrality
  • The Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government (OPEN) Act
  • The Orphan Works Act
  • The Restore Open Government Act

(Mary Alice Baish, "Librarians as change agents, how you can help influence public policy in the 110th Congress", Searcher, March 2007, via ResourceShelf, Mar. 2, 2007.)

Web 2.0-based peer review comes to U.S. patents: Are scholarly publishers next?

The Washington Post announced that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office plans to introduce open Web peer review for patent applications using social networking technology. The planned online system will let the public "post comments on patent applications and to have those comments rated by their peers." Analyst John Blossom thinks this will help the patent office evaluate patents more efficiently. Will scholarly publishing move in this direction?

The key to moving scholarly publishing forward into more profitable and efficient methods will revolve around innovative approaches to peer review similar in general concept to the USPTO initiative. The key problem with scholarly peer review today is that there are too few peers willing and able to review too much potentially publishable content within the constraints of the existing system.

(John Blossom, "Web 2.0-based peer review comes to U.S. patents: Are scholarly publishers next?", ContentBlogger, Mar. 5, 2007.)

Quick takes

Shelfari: Social bookmarking for books

Shelfari is a social network and recommendation service that lets you flaunt your book collection to others, and discover new titles worth reading. Shelfari announced a round of funding, with Amazon.com being the top contributor. (Webware, Mar. 1, 2007 via ContentBlogger, Mar. 2, 2007.)

Online health sites

Paula Hane has a great list of online health sites in "A checkup of online health sites", Information Today NewsBreaks, Mar. 1, 2007.

Science.world

Paula Hane offers an in-depth look at "a global science gateway that aims to make science information resources of many nations accessible via a single Internet portal." Science.world is a collaboration of the U.S. Department of Energy and The British Library and is based on Science.gov. (Paula Hane, "Get ready for Science.world", Information Today Newslink, February 2007, via ResourceShelf, Mar. 2, 2007.)

March 13, 2007

Harvard Management Update

Are you familiar with Harvard Management Update? It's one of the newsletters from Harvard Business Online, and it's designed to help you generate ideas and understand management trends. I've summarized three articles from the March issue; the first two are available in full in EBSCOhost's Business Source Premier.

"Creative leadership"

Research demonstrates that there is definitely a link between an organization's work environment and the quality of its creative problem solving. Here's how to create a work environment that incubates novel ideas and value-added innovations:

  1. Establish clear goals and then let your people find their own way to them.
  2. Monitor your staff's work—-at a distance.
    • Clarify roles and objectives.
    • Recognize and reward good work.
    • Support people.
  3. Facilitate your staff's work.
  4. Create fruitful idea-generation and idea-evaluation processes.
    • Separate idea generation from idea evaluation.
    • Aim for quantity with idea generation.
    • Seek connections.
    • During evaluation, apply affirmative judgment and check your objectives.

(Judith A. Ross, "Creative leadership: Be your team’s Chief Innovation Officer", Harvard Management Update, March 2007.)

Stop saying "Don't bring me problems-—bring me solutions"!

I never liked hearing that remark from a manager, so imagine my relief when I read this article! Apparently it's one of the more counterproductive things a manager can say.

Frances Frei, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, believes you can improve your organization's performance by "creating an environment that encourages both identifying and solving problems." Insisting on only solutions actually encourages your staff to ignore problems they can't "figure out how to fix." What you're really telling them is “I only want to know about the [problems] you can solve.” That stifles collective solutions.

Research shows that in environments where it's not safe to talk about problems, performance lags. Frei advises readers to create a "culture of accountability that doesn’t limit recognition only to those who find both the problem and its solution... The bottom line is that you can’t improve performance if you’re not solving problems, and you can’t solve problems you don’t know about." (Christina Bielaszka-DuVernay with Frances Frei, “Don’t bring me problems—-bring me solutions!”, Harvard Management Update, March 2007.)

Know-how: The 8 skills that separate people who perform from those who don't

Harvard Management Update summarized their adaptation from Ram Charan's recent book, Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't, this way:

Setting priorities is hard—but extremely necessary—work. Whereas goals are set at 50,000 feet, priorities are set at ground level, where leaders must have the willingness to probe into messy details and the tenacity to decide on the most important actions and think through their consequences.

Here's a list of the 8 skills Charan believes are necessary for success (which I got from Amazon, not Harvard Management Update!):

  • Positioning (and, when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs... (Charan stresses repositioning)
  • Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others.
  • Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business.
  • Judging people by getting to the truth of a person.
  • Molding people into a working team of leaders that equals more than the sum of its parts.
  • Knowing where you want to take your organization by developing goals that balance what it can become with what it can realistically achieve.
  • Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals.
  • Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures

Know-How is the missing link of leadership. (Harvard Management Update, March 2007, and Amazon.com product description.)

Government agencies must reform to meet workforce challenges

Federal agencies must transform their organizations to meet new and complex workforce hurdles in the near future, said Christopher Mihm, managing director of strategic issues for the Government Accountability Office. He believes that workforce management is at high risk because the government lacks a framework to advance workforce reform. Agencies "don't always have the right people in the right jobs at the right time" to handle impending retirements and the resulting loss of leadership. Agencies must compete for talent and are "hampered by lengthy hiring processes and in some vital occupations, uncompetitive salaries." In addition, agencies haven't created "a clear line of sight between individual effort and organizational results," which is necessary for transformation.

Mihm outlined 4 elements necessary for successful workforce transformation:

  1. Sustained leadership. Embrace reform and integrate the workforce into core planning and business processes.
  2. Strategic workforce planning. Strategic planning is the centerpiece of transformation, and helps align the workforce with mission and goals and create long-term strategies for recruiting and retaining staff.
  3. Acquiring and developing talent. Streamline the hiring process and design ways to compete for talent with the private sector.
  4. Results-oriented culture. Build effective performance management systems that align individual performance with organizational results.

(Richard Walker, "Agencies must reform to meet workforce challenges, GAO analyst says", FCW.com, Mar. 7, 2007.)

Tech trends for librarians 2007

Michael Stephens' trends echo some of what's been said in the articles above. He sums up his list of trends for 2007 this way:

  • Learn to learn
  • Adapt to change
  • Scan the horizon

"How does this impact libraries? A thread running through all of these trends is the idea that the general public to some degree has adopted tools and technologies that allow them to interact with media. This will not stop..."

The trends are:

  • Conversations: People want to talk to each other. Web 2.0 tools encourage conversations.
  • Convergence: Convergence is a process "distinguished by changing consumer flows through the media landscape" that changes existing relationships.
  • Content: User-generated content. "Libraries can and should tap into this trend."
  • Redefining LIS jobs: Duties of these new jobs "may include creating online tools for collaboration and creation, developing innovative programs, and serving as instructors and 'strategy guides' for users."
  • Citizen journalism: (And their stories are everywhere, true or not.)
  • We're human: People want to make connections.
  • Openness & sharing: "Openness is the new trend...it's an open world... Sharing content, thoughts and ideas should be the norm."
  • Participation: "The best libraries will recognize participation should carry over to their Web presence," e.g. tagging the library's resources.
  • Experience & play: "Let's make this stuff fun."

(TameTheWeb, Feb 28, 2007.)

What business are libraries in?

Karen Schneider's eloquent post on the ALA TechSource blog last week called for transformation in libraries. The library profession is in a state of emergency, she said. Tinkering around the edges, as LC's Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control seems to be doing, won't help.

To paraphrase Andrew Abbott's point in The System of Professions, we are behaving like the train companies, who thought they were in the train business, not the transportation business, and like them, there are already signs that the “train business” we do is on artificial life support. We are not even close to being the first service of choice for information seekers; we are pretty much down there with asking one's mother. Libraries across the country are increasingly asked to justify their existence in order to receive continued funding, and some have been unable to do so.

(ALA TechSource blog, Mar. 8, 2007)

Study forecasts 988 billion gigabytes of digital information created in 2010

The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010, an EMC-sponsored report from IDC, reveals how much and what type of information is created in a given year with forecasts of an explosion through 2010. Primary drivers of this explosion include rich media, user-generated content and 1.6 billion Internet users. The complete study (24-page PDF) and a 4-page executive summary are available [www.emc.com/about/destination/digital_universe here].

Key findings:

  • The 2006 digital universe was 161 billion gigabytes (161 exabytes).
  • The amount of information created and copied in 2010 will grow more than six fold to 988 exabytes, a compound annual growth rate of 57%.
  • Nearly 70% of the digital universe will be generated by individuals by 2010.
  • Organizations will be responsible for the security, privacy, reliability and compliance of at least 85% of that information.

(CNWGroup, Mar.6, 2007 via ContentBlogger, Mar. 6, 2007.)

History digitized and abridged

The lead article in the New York Times Sunday Business section (March 11) looks at how much information is becoming inaccessible because it's not being digitized, either because it's too costly,or because of copyright.

Since there's this illusion that all the world's information is on the Web, "we haven't begun to glimpse what is out there in local archives and libraries. Material that is not digitized risks being neglected as it would not have been in the past, virtually lost to the great majority of potential users."

The article gives pretty detailed estimates of what's digitized and what's not, and includes costs. It's estimated that Google has spent "at least $5 million" on the 1 million books it's digitized thus far. (Note from Leslie: that seems pretty low to me!) There's proof that digitized materials on the Web receive increased use. Google digitized 101 films from the National Archives. Prior to digitization, the National Archives received 200 requests per year for the films. In the first month after they were available on Google "there were 200,000 hits on them--a thousandfold increase."

David Eun, Google's VP for content partnerships urges that we not dwell on what's being left out. "If you look at the glass as half-empty, it becomes too overwhelming." (Katie Hafner, "History digitized (and abridged)", New York Times, March 11, 2007.Registration may be required.)

Quick takes

Google to index subscription-based content

It seems that Google is working to index subscription-based content. Described in a [Google Groups post, this content will show up in Google search results but still require a login. There's no indication of a timeframe for this, only "Stay tuned :)". (SearchEngineWatch is right when they call this big news! We'll all have our eyes peeled for news of more developments.) (SearchEngineWatch, Mar. 5, 2007.)

Oregon State's LibraryFind

LibraryFind is a multi-search tool and harvester that provides hits from the catalog and article databases and is apparently "very excellent." They've also harvested 200,000 items and are investigating "what it'll take to scale up to two trillion items." (Circulatable, Mar. 2, 2007.) (Note from Leslie: Quite frankly, though, I'd be watching what Google's doing to index paid content and how to integrate searching with them.)

Keesing's World News Archive puts Web 2.0 into practice

Keesing's World News Archive was launched recently, bringing 76 years of objective, well-written historical reporting online. It uses an open source content management system, MySource Matrix, to bring historical information into a Web 2.0 world. (Information Today NewsBreaks, Mar. 5, 2007.)

Nature Publishing Group introduces networking site for scientists

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) just released Nature Network, a new free online networking site for scientists worldwide. This Web 2.0 toolkit will help scientists connect with other researchers, conduct online discussions, showcase their work via personal home pages, share information with groups (open or private), and tag content. ('Weekly News Digest", Information Today NewsBreaks, March 5, 2007.)

March 27, 2007

Competency de-railed

How do you identify your organization's core competencies? It isn't a snap! Here are some tips from an expert:

  • Don't try to roll out an organization-wide competency management project in one step.
  • Start with a project that will get meaningful results in a short time.
  • Align the project with your organization’s strategy.
  • Make sure all stakeholders "are adequately engaged and represented."
  • Don't waste their time. "Keep the process moving...and be conscious of using stakeholder time wisely."

(Inside Training Newsletter, Mar. 8, 2007.)

Persuading through negotiation and compromise

Effective leaders are skilled at persuading others to get things done. This includes not only getting better results from your direct reports (influencing performance), but also "greater cooperation from your peers (lateral leadership), and stronger support from your own boss and senior management (persuasion)." Successful persuasion is a multi-step process:

1. Establish credibility. "Credibility comes from expertise (sound judgment and successes) and relationships (ability to listen and work in others' best interests)."

  • To bolster your expertise:
    • Get the expertise you need through formal and informal education.
    • Hire recognized, outside experts.
    • Launch small pilot programs.
  • To fill relationship gaps:
    • Meet one-on-one with key people.
    • Involve like-minded coworkers who have a proven track record.

2. Frame your goals on common ground. Your audience must understand how these goals will benefit them.

3. Present vivid evidence to support your position.

4. Connect emotionally with your audience.

  • Learn how similar events have been interpreted in the past to help gauge what the response will be.
  • Test key individuals' reactions to your proposal.
  • Adjust your emotional tone when you present a proposal to match your audience's ability to receive your message.

("Persuading through Negotiation and Compromise," eLearning Alert from Harvard Business School, Mar. 5, 2007.)

Toxic emotions at work

Many everyday workplace activities result in painful emotions. "When leaders fail to manage that pain, it poisons the workplace: Employees lose enthusiasm for work, suffer bruised egos, and feel disconnected from the company and its goals; morale erodes, and productivity plummets."

A new book from Harvard Business School, Toxic Emotions at Work and What You Can Do About Them by Peter J. Frost, explains how to prevent organizational pain from becoming "a debilitating poison--and how to use compassion to transform pain into a force for healthy...functionality." Frost explains the dangers of assigning 'toxin handlers' to soften the blow of emotional pain for others, and describes skills that employees can use to make compassion a part of their organizational culture. He "makes a compelling case for why painful emotions matter at work and why ignoring them carries a high price. Rich examples show how effective leaders can manage the inevitable pain that arises in their organizations." (Harvard Business Online.)

Turning creativity to business advantage

This comes from Jill Stover, whose blog, Library Marketing--Thinking Outside the Book, I've been quoting a lot lately. This time she's writing in Designing Better Libraries, another blog that deserves our attention!

The book, Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity into a Powerful Business Advantage, by Pat Fallon (head of Fallon Worldwide ad agency) and Fred Senn, describes how to use creativity to gain a secure competitive advantage. They argue that “Imagination is the last legal means of gaining an unfair advantage over the competition.” (There's a review of the book in Business Week and additional reviews on Amazon.com.)

"What’s significant from a librarian perspective is that the authors don’t rely on huge sums of money to carry out these campaigns. Rather, they employ something called 'creative leverage' to get the job done. As they define it, creative leverage is the ongoing process of making creativity accountable for eliciting changes in consumer behavior. In other words, they make creativity work and achieve concrete results."

How to seize our creative potential? Here are some steps:

  • Hit the pavement.
  • Define the problem.
  • Don’t underestimate emotions.
  • Welcome risk.

(Designing Better Libraries, Mar. 12, 2007.)

Finding your innovation orientation

Here's more from Jill Stover, again in Designing Better Libraries!

How do you foster an environment conducive to producing innovations? This is the subject of an article by Dr. Christopher Brooke Dobni that "offers an innovation model for financial services firms" but that could "be applied successfully to libraries with some modifications."

Innovative organizations share four common characteristics:

  1. Employees recognize that innovation is a group effort.
  2. The organizational cultures are marked by creativity, excitement, and desire to succeed.
  3. Competition drives companies to learn and do more.
  4. Organizations purposely weave innovation into their daily operations.

However, research finds that while many organizations want to be innovative, few report that they've achieved it

Dobni’s innovation model has three components:

  1. Context--What management does to support innovation.
  2. Culture--Employees’ collective thoughts and actions.
  3. Execution--Making innovation happen.

Each component has sub-parts, and Jill has outlined the major points from each in her post. (Jill Stover, Designing Better Libraries, Mar. 26, 2007.)

The State of the News Media 2007

The annual report on the health and status of American journalism from the Project for Excellence in Journalism lists seven major trends that are occurring in journalism:

  1. News organizations need to do more to think through the implications of this new era of shrinking ambitions.
  2. The evidence is mounting that the news industry must become more aggressive about developing a new economic model
  3. The key question is whether the investment community sees the news business as a declining industry or an emerging one in transition.
  4. There are growing questions about whether the dominant ownership model of the last generation, the public corporation, is suited to the transition newsrooms must now make.
  5. The Argument Culture is giving way to something new, the Answer Culture.
  6. Blogging is on the brink of a new phase that will probably include scandal, profitability for some, and a splintering into elites and non-elites over standards and ethics.
  7. While journalists are becoming more serious about the Web, no clear models of how to do journalism online really exist yet, and some qualities are still only marginally explored.

(Shore Communications Commentary, "News headlines for the week of March 12, 2007.")

Wiki technnology

Business Week's March 12 issue had a special report on wikis. I've summarized what I thought were the major points in several articles. BW defines wikis as "fairly focused Web sites compiled and constantly edited by a dedicated group of people--all of whom can not only post material to the site but edit it at will." Examples outside of Wikipedia include the Open Guide to London, with "an extensive and ever-changing list of places to see, eat, and generally have fun." There's also the Tolkien Wiki for everything related to the Ring and TrekWiki for Star Trek fans.

Corporate teams are "using wikis as a speedy way to collaborate without having to endure endless back-and-forth e-mail exchanges or dealing with complex and expensive groupware, such as IBM's Lotus Notes" In fact, wikis "are gradually rewriting the rules of collaboration at companies as varied as Sony, Xerox, Disney, and Microsoft... [A] 'comprehensive survey of Fortune 1,000 companies...would probably find some sort of wiki in all of them,' says a Harvard Business School professor specializing in technology and management operations. Software developer Nicholas Pisarro Jr., the founder of software maker Aperture Technologies Inc., is using wikis at work. "Two dozen of the...company's 100 employees use them to brainstorm, track projects, write and edit documentation, and coordinate marketing. That has eliminated countless meetings, conference calls, and back-and-forth e-mails." Says Pisarro: "Wikis allow this collaboration much better than anything else, so we get things done faster." (Business Week, March 12, 2007.)

Quick takes

Twitter about Twitter

Have you heard about Twitter yet? It's a new mini-blogging service for mobile phones. And some pundits are calling it the next YouTube. "Users of Twitter post short messages--up to 140 characters--that can be viewed either on a website or on mobile phones... Though launched publicly last summer, use of Twitter started to take off in the middle of March after it was adopted by tech­nology bloggers attending the South by Southwest conference in Texas." (Richard Waters and Chris Nuttall, "Mini-blog is the talk of Silicon Valley", FT.com, Mar. 26, 2007 via ContentBlogger, "Headlines for March 26".)

Lost time

Employees spend an average of 36 minutes per day (three hours a week) attending to personal tasks at the office! Executives estimate their staff members average 43 minutes a day on non-work activities. (Inside Training Newsletter, Mar. 8, 2007.)

New directions for serials cataloging

"Catalog/cataloging changes and Web 2.0 functionality: New directions for serials" by Rebecca Kemp will be published in The Serials Librarian later this year.

This article presents an overview of some of the important recent developments in cataloging theory and practice and online catalog design. Changes in cataloging theory and practice include the incorporation of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records principles into catalogs, the new Resource Description and Access cataloging manual, and the new CONSER Standard Record. Web 2.0 functionalities and advances in search technology and results displays are influencing online catalog design. The paper ends with hypothetical scenarios in which a catalog, enhanced by the developments described, fulfills the tasks of finding serials articles and titles.

(Catalogablog, Mar. 15, 2007.)

Non-English growth of Wikipedia

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says, "The most important growth...in Wikipedia is in the non-English versions. Although [there are] more than 1.5 million articles in English, that's less than one-third of the total." (Press TV, Mar. 13, 2007, via Shore Communications Commentary, "News headlines for the week of March 12, 2007".)

How to check out 3,000 books in a day: Go to Google

"Since the university [of California] partnered with Google last summer, the company has scanned about 130,000 UC volumes at its Mountain View headquarters. Every afternoon, a panel truck arrives at the Richmond site to drop off one load of books and pick up 3,000 more." (ContentAgenda, Mar. 16, 2007 via Shore Communications Commentary, "News headlines for the week of March 12, 2007.")

Your turn: Talk about it

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