Leader's Digest September 2007

From PLN

1 September 17, 2007
2 September 24, 2007
3 Your turn: Talk about it

by Leslie Dillon

September 17, 2007

Harvard Business Review

The September 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review has some excellent articles that library managers can benefit from reading. Here are summaries of two of them.

Women and the labyrinth of leadership

Why do so few women make it to the top in the corporate world? “It’s not the glass ceiling, but the sum of many obstacles along the way.”

The glass ceiling metaphor that has persisted for the last 20 years “implies that women and men have equal access to entry- and midlevel positions.” But they don’t. And the problem with believing this incorrect metaphor is that it leads people to propose incorrect solutions to the problem, which other kinds of interventions might attack “more potently.” So the authors propose a better metaphor: the labyrinth. “If we can understand the various barriers that make up this labyrinth, and how some women find their way around them, we can work more effectively to improve the situation.”

Obstructions include:

Vestiges of prejudice. In general women are paid less than men and promotions come more slowly.
Resistance to women’s leadership. Women and men are perceived to have different traits. Men are associated with more “leadership” traits; women are associated with more “compassionate” traits. Assertive behavior can actually reduce a woman’s chances of advancing in her career. One study showed that people suspect that highly successful female managers must not be very likable or nice.
Issues of leadership style. Women managers frequently struggle to develop an appropriate leadership style, trying to reconcile the communal qualities expected in women with the qualities expected in leaders. But research has shown that female managers are actually more transformational leaders than male managers, “especially when it came to giving support and encouragement to subordinates.”
Demands of family life. Women are the ones who interrupt their careers, take more days off and work part-time. Subsequently, they have less job experience, slower career progress and lower earnings.
Underinvestment in social capital. Social capital may be “even more necessary to managers’ advancement than skillful performance of traditional managerial tasks.”

Management interventions that work:

Increase people’s awareness of the causes of prejudice toward female managers, and work to dispel those perceptions.
Change the long-hours norm, if there is one in your organization.
Reduce the subjectivity of performance evaluations. Use open-recruitment tools (advertising, etc.) to fill positions, rather than informal social networks and referrals.
Ensure a critical mass of women in executive positions “to head off the problems that come with tokenism.”
Avoid having a sole female member of any team. In those situations, women tend to be ignored by the men.
Help shore up social capital. “When a well-placed individual...takes an interest in a woman’s career, her efforts to build social capital can proceed far more efficiently.”
Prepare women for line management with appropriately demanding assignments.
Establish family-friendly human resources practices. Family friendly HR practices have been shown to increase the proportion of women in senior management.
Give employees with significant parental responsibility more time to prove themselves.
Encourage male participation in family-friendly benefits.

“With a greater understanding of what stands in the way of gender-balanced leadership, we draw nearer to attaining it in our time.”

(Alice H. Eagly and Linda L. Carli, “Women and the Labyrinth of Leadership,” Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2007. Available on EBSCOhost Business Source Premier, or from Harvard Business Online for $6.50.)

Performing a project premortem

Projects often fail, in part because people aren’t willing to speak up about their reservations. “Prospective hindsight--imagining that an event has already occurred--increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes.” A premortem uses prospective hindsight at the beginning of the project to see how it can be improved. The premortem assumes that the “patient” has died and asks what did go wrong--rather than what could go wrong.

Typically a premortem begins once the team has been briefed on the project. The project manager announces that the project has failed. Each team member is asked to individually list possible reasons for the failure. All the possibilities are recorded and discussed. The project manager then reviews the list and looks for ways to strengthen the project plan.

The premortem offers benefits that other risk analyses don’t. Sometimes it can prevent an ill-conceived project from going forward. Team members feel valued, and others learn from them. The premortem also helps the team recognize early signs of trouble once the project has begun. “In the end, a premortem may be the best way to circumvent any need for a painful postmortem.”

(Gary Klein, “Performing a project premortem,” Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2007. Available on EBSOhost Business Source Premier or from Harvard Business Online for $4.50.)

The science of happy workers

Workers’ moods affect the dynamics of your entire organization, according to “21st Century Well-Being, Commitment, and Productivity.” Here are some key findings from the Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital study:

Employees who see themselves as productive quarrel less with their colleagues, work fewer hours and are employed longer at that organization. Research also indicates that married people are more productive.
The more hours employees work, the worse the group climate. Individual moods (e.g., sadness and distress) also negatively affect group mood.
As group-level quarrels increase, group productivity decreases.
Workplaces with “positive environments that foster interpersonal trust and good personal relationships create the most committed and productive employees.”
“Outstanding leadership today means much more than just doing your job. Success is creating an environment that fosters happy, committed, productive team members.” How to create such an environment?
Provide environmental support: Great employers manage their physical environments as much as the workload. (E.g., add flowers.)
Practice “uneventful management”: Be prepared for a crisis but, day-to-day, present yourself as prepared, calm and assertive.
Exude leadership: Workers commit to leaders who demonstrate confidence, credibility and flexibility.

(Inside Training Newsletter, Sept 13, 2007 and aboutflowers.com.)

Anatomy of a healthy organization

This article in The McKinsey Quarterly discusses how organizations can ensure that they perform well now and in the future using “a mental discipline founded on the...metaphor of human health, which improves when cared for and deteriorates when neglected.” The authors also describe how leaders can “embed healthy attitudes” in their organizations.

Three things make it difficult for leaders to nurture health in their organizations:

The “mindfulness” trap.' This is the tendency to revert to a short-term performance perspective.
The cognitive traps. This is a preoccupation with near-term performance and what’s needed to produce it.
The self-knowledge trap. This is the “tendency to say (and believe) one thing and do another”.

Characteristics of truly healthy organizations include:

Resilience. Healthy organizations spot and manage risks, and “they build mechanisms...to get through difficult periods.” For example Wal-Mart was able to quickly reopen 125 stores affected by Hurricane Katrina because of an alternative railroad supply system.
Execution. Healthy organizations “get the basics right, make good decisions and perform essential tasks.”
Alignment. Healthy organizations work toward a common cause. They achieve this “when they sketch a compelling vision of the future for everyone connected with them--employees in particular--by articulating a shared identity that rises above individuals, functions, and [work] units.”
Renewal. Healthy organizations invest in their future by expanding into areas “where existing assets and competencies provide real leverage.” Renewal also requires the “ability to generate ideas and adapt to change, both culturally and strategically.”
Complementarity. “Effective communication and collaboration are crucial...and management practices act in concert.” In healthy corganizations “information flows across the organization, as well as from top to bottom, tapping into social networks beyond the formal organizational structure.”

(Aaron eSmet, Mark Loch, & Bill Schaninger, “Anatomy of a healthy corporation”, McKinsey Quarterly, 2007, Issue 3. Available on EBSCOhost Business Source Premier.)

Jumpstarting innovation: Using disruption to your advantage

Disruptive change, a force that can threaten established organizations, can also be a source of salvation.

“Innovation is not an option today.” A 2006 IBM study confirmed the importance of innovation. In a survey of over 750 CEOs, 65% “said they were planning significant change over the next 2 years” and another 22% planned moderate change. But, more importantly, only 15% said they had been “very successful” at previous attempts to manage significant change and another 15% had had “little or no success.”

This innovation imperative “is being spurred by radical change and disruption” in today’s environment. These disruptions allow forward-thinking organizations “to introduce innovations...that transform the way companies do business and consumers behave.”

Disruptors that innovators exploit to create value include:

Technology: What are the key emerging technologies, and how are they being used inside and outside your industry?
Business Models: What new business models are emerging? Can you expand your market share by adding any of these new business models?
Industry Dynamics: Are there opportunities to deliver significant value through consolidation?
Globalization: What’s happening elsewhere in the world that you could adopt in your environment?
Outsourcing: Are there opportunities to create value by outsourcing?

These disruptive changes can be viewed as opportunities or threats. Innovators who view them as opportunities ask how they can leverage these changes to create value. “They look for disruptors that will ‘unfreeze’ a stable industry and...for business models that...can be adapted.” They realize that they must listen to customers and also educate them to new approaches. And they identify new ideas “by raising their head above day-to-day operations and expanding their vision.”

(Lynda M. Applegate, “Jumpstarting innovation: Using disruption to your advantage,” Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, Sept. 4, 2007.)

Are you ready for the future of media?

Deloitte’s 2007 State of the Media Democracy survey reveals how different generations are “consuming” media:

High demand for user-generated content. Industry-created content has stiff competition from user-generated content, which is in tremendous demand across the generations. Half of all consumers (51 percent) watch and/or read content created by others. millennials are at the forefront, but Xers, Boomers and Matures are also participating.
Long live traditional media. In spite of the popularity of the Internet, all generations are still deeply engaged in traditional media--TV, magazines and books. People are passionate about their favorite TV shows and use DVRs to view shows when they want. Almost 3/4 of consumers read magazines. And 23 percent of Americans “want to pick up a book in the coming year.”
What does the future hold? Most consumers want to easily connect their TVs to the internet; many want an all-in-one device. Most Millennials and many Xers want to be able to easily move their TV shows, podcasts, movies, etc., to devices/platforms they own.

(The State of the Media Democracy: Are You Ready for the Future of Media? via OCLC Abstracts, Sept. 10, 2007.)

September 24, 2007

Branding fundamentals for leaders at all levels

This article, which is excerpted from Lessons on Leadership by Jack Stahl, Revlon CEO and former president of Coca-Cola. Although Publishers Weekly found the book disappointing, this excerpt has some useful insights on marketing and branding. Here are some of Stahl’s key points:

Creating value “for most organizations is the ability to design and develop a product or service to serve a targeted group of end users.”
A “brand” represents a promise to your end users of what they can “expect from a product or service.” “Brand positioning is the process of establishing that promise” in the minds of your end users.
Powerful brands are those that deliver on their promise.
The brand promise guides your marketing decisions and actions.
How does your brand help its users? What does your brand deliver--physically or emotionally--to those consumers? The sum total of your marketing actions (advertising, packaging, promotional materials, in-store merchandising, etc.) should answer these questions for your consumers.
“Always think about your product as a potential solution for the consumer... This focus is entirely different from being centered on the internal attributes of your product, such as its technical makeup.”
“Your brand positioning must be clear and straightforward. You should be able to define for others what your brand represents in a simple statement. It must ring true to you and be stated in a way that consumers understand. Only then will your people have a clear positioning around which to build effective marketing programs that strengthen your brand in the eye of your target consumers.” “One way to define what your brand delivers to your consumers is to have a clear understanding of those consumers’ habits as they relate to your product.”

(”The seven fundamental management skills for leaders at all levels,” managesmarter, the online home of Sales & Marketing Management, Aug. 24, 2007.)

Sensible sabbaticals

According to Bill Blades, a professional speaker, consultant and author specializing in sales training and leadership development, structured, paid sabbaticals recharge workers and remind them of their goals. Here are some insights on how to do them right:

Deliver a pre-sabbatical mentoring session. Have a four- to eight-hour mentoring session to “uncover areas for personal improvement, and steps to implement the changes with assigned deadline dates.”
Act on it. After the mentoring session, the employee works from home “to think through the agreed-upon steps and begin acting on them.”
Beat burnout. Sabbaticals can keep workers productive. High-level employees in high-stress jobs request six- to 12-month sabbaticals to avoid burnout. But sometimes burnout comes from being “bored to death and dreading more of it.”
Invaluable. Often people want to use their sabbatical to learn new job skills. “New skills and a little extra time off beats a 5 percent raise almost every time.”

(”Sensible sabbaticals,” Inside Training Newsletter, Sept. 19, 2007.)

Evaluating U.S. Institutional Repository deployment

This study by the Digital Projects Coordinator at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro Libraries paints a gloomy picture of the progress made by Institutional Repositories. Here’s a brief summary.

An Institutional Repository (IR) is defined for the purposes of this study as “an institution-wide service...intended to collect, preserve, and provide access to...faculty scholarly output...[and] actively taking submissions.”
“[C]ontent recruitment continues to be difficult at U.S. academic institutions.”
Many institutions “have difficulty gathering even a 100-item starter collection.” These are largely Baccalaureate colleges, but all but the RU/VH (Carnegie classification very high research activity doctoral-granting) fair “comparatively poorly in repository size evaluations.”
The majority of IRs saw less than a 500 item net annual growth rate; the few that had higher growth rates were at research-intensive schools.
“At a median growth rate of one item a day, IRs in America will likely not achieve the critical mass to significantly impact open access or change modes of scholarly communication for some time to come.”

(Cat S. McDowell, “Evaluating Institutional Repository deployment in American academe since early 2005, repositories by the numbers, Part 2,” D-Lib Magazine, Sept./Oct. 2007.)

The world on your desktop

An article in the September 6, 2007, issue of The Economist describes “GeoWeb,” the result of the internet’s becoming “intertwined with the real world.” Here’s a summary:

Google Earth. The foremost example and tool of the budding GeoWeb is Google Earth, a significant wonder that provides a searchable satellite view of earth. Its availability in 2004 provided images of earth striking in their sharpness and utility, and used, for example, by home buyers to study the neighborhood of a potential abode and tourists reviewing sights on a forthcoming trip. Google Earth was used to coordinate relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina. And on our nightly news, images of Iraq. A striking example in the recent news, Google Earth was used to search for Steve Fosset, missing in his small airplane over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Some 50,000 volunteers scanned current images of the rocky terrain looking for evidence of a plane crash, unfortunately without success. This example, though it failed in its aim, illustrates the key attribute of the “network effect” where each additional link in a network increments the totality by much more than a single unit.
GeoWeb. GeoWeb is Google Earth on steroids. The key addition is the contribution of users equipped with a means of annotating the images the system provides. The concept is called “crowdsourcing,” where the system is open to modifications from its network of users. “So far 850,000 users have contributed millions of annotations [to Google Earth] and more than 1m images, vetting one another’s contributions.”
Mashups. According to Wikipedia, “A mashup is a web application that combines data from more than one source into an integrated experience.” Google Earth offers a set of standard mashups to its images: roads, restaurants, parks, etc. “Google says its maps are used in more than 4m of them. In April the company added features to Google Maps to make it easier to create mash-ups.” Google is not alone in recognizing the potential of the GeoWeb combined with user-created mashups. Consider what you can do on GeoCommons: Access more than 1,500 geodata sets on population, environment, health, education, crime, politics, traffic, employment; move beyond pushpins on maps to intuitive and exciting visualizations of geographic data; create and share intelligent maps to answer questions, gain insight & make decisions.
Standards: The road to Web 3.0. Annotations, or additions of any sort to a database as complex as Google Earth’s, can’t be managed without robust standards. A new standard, KML, has been devised based on XML that controls much of what happens in the Google version of GeoWeb. KML is a file format for displaying geographic data and uses a tag-based structure similar to the one used in XML. “Standards for dynamic geodata, the sharing of 3-D models of buildings and geodata from sensor networks ought to be in place by next year. All this will ensure interoperability and do for geodata what the web did for other forms of data.”
Dangers. As with most innovations, this one is not without its dangers. Many of the images available on Google Earth, those that might make targets for terrorist groups, have been deliberately obscured to reduce their utility. There are also privacy issues, with an occasional image showing up with a recognizable individual.

(“The world on your desktop,” The Economist, Sept. 6, 2007.)

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web

In a post to his blog, Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media and a renowned technology expert, clarifies the difference between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web as a response to an article in The Economist.

The Semantic Web is about developing languages so that meaning can be encoded into documents to make them more accessible to computers.

A core attribute of Web 2.0 is “collective intelligence.” O’Reilly explains that “the paradigmatic example of Web 2.0 is Google’s Pagerank” because it approaches the true meaning of “collective intelligence.” Web page creators were already encoding meaning into the Web when they linked one page to another. Google’s “understanding that a link was a vote” enabled its better search results.

Pagerank illustrates the difference between the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The Semantic Web sees meaning as being added to documents so that computers can understand them. Web 2.0 looks for ways that meaning has already been implicitly encoded then seeks to extract that meaning.

While he expects that there will be a lack of clarity between the two for at least awhile, O’Reilly believes Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web will eventually meet somewhere “in the middle.”

(Tim O’Reilly, “Economist confused about the Semantic Web?,” O’Reilly radar, Sept. 18, 2007 via ContentBlogger, Sept. 18, 2007.)

What's happening with ebooks?

Amazon and Google will enter the eBook business later this year, but they’re taking different tacks. Amazon’s Kindle is a proprietary stand-alone device that will connect wirelessly to an Amazon eBook store. Google will simply index selected titles and charge for access to them (this project is separate from Google Book Search).

An article in the September 18 issue of BusinessWeek isn’t optimistic about Amazon’s foray into digital downloading. “The economics just don’t add up. And that’s unlikely to change with the company’s plan to ratchet up its digital merchandising this fall.” Usage restrictions are preventing wider adoption, and for Amazon, “there’s still much more money to be made shipping real stuff.”

(OPLIN 4cast #72, Sept. 18, 2007, “Amazon does downloads, sort of,” BusinessWeek, Sept 17, 2007 and “Envisioning the next chapter for electronic books,” New York Times, Sept. 6, 2007.)