Entrelib 2014 - Collection Development

On Friday, 17 October, I attended the 2014 Conference for Entrepreneurial Librarians at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. The sessions were thought provoking.

A New Collection Development Culture: Focusing on Individual Faculty by Sharon Holderman, Coordinator of Public Services at Angelo and Jeanette Volpe Library at Tennessee Tech University stood out for me. When Ms. Holderman arrived at Tennessee Tech, the collection policy could be summarized as doing what we’ve always done base on what we did twenty years ago. This include a well entrenched but poorly documented allocation formula and a culture of last minute spending to avoid losing allocated funds. This was replaced with a book policy of “if you want it, we will buy it” (within reason). There were no more allocated budgets, but items were tracked for purposes of understanding expenditures. The policy empowered faculty to add to the collection based on actual needs. Librarians were empowered to fulfill faculty wants and desires and the library received goodwill from the faculty. The library changed processes making the entire program more transparent and removing obstacles to selecting books.

At the same time several high cost per use subscriptions were cancelled and the Library instituted unmediated Get It Now for faculty and graduate students. Faculty were empowered to purchased urgently needed articles, but often still opted to use ILL to acquire materials. Materials that had been underutilized were replaced with access to more journals from many publishers. The changes in the policies allowed Volpe Library to save money in the serials budget and shift allocations to the departments the desperately needed additional materials. I believe the changes were largely successful because librarians were able to effectively communicate the changes to the faculty in a way that created goodwill.

Hopefully, Ms. Holderman will follow up with a full paper in the Journal for Library Innovation. I look forward to thinking about patron driven approaches like this further.

Quote for the Day

I just finished How the mighty Fall by  Jim Collins.  I really like this quote on page 120:

The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not he absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before. Great nations can decline and recover. Great companies can fall and recover. Great social institutions can fall and recover. And great individuals can fall and recover. As long as you never get entirely knocked out of the game, there remains hope. 

So, as long as you can keep moving there is no reason to lose hope. Carry on!

Risk Adverse

In the movie (and book) Moneyball, Billy Beane is faced with the task of replacing an all star with a limited budget. His recruiting staff is looking for  ways to assess players (workers) and have a list of requirements. The requirements they are coming up with are absurd and don't deal with the reality that the team doesn't have the money needed to hire an all star. Billy Beane tried with limited success to use different requirements to replace one all star with other players using on base percentage (OPB) to evaluate potential candidates.

Think of it this way, your team needs a 40/40 man who can compere for the batting title. This is someone with the speed and power of Barry Bonds on steroids, and with the finesse and patience of Ichiro Suzuki or Derek Jeter. And you want him to take the minimum salary and be a proven performer. In reality if such a player exists, he's going to be expensive, or cheating, or be unknown. Or  you are going to need to use Billy Beane's strategy and hire three players, all of who will be a bit more than the minimum salary but less than your all star.

In a way the player I've described is like the job ads my Father used to make fun of -

Entry level engineer. Mechanical or Structural. Must have ten years experience with ISO9001. A proven leader. Be able to lead projects. Background reviewing architectural drawings and CAD preferred. Management experience preferred.

Of course there are no entry level engineers with 10 years experience. I have heard recruiters have taken to calling these kinds of jobs - unicorns or purple squirrels - things that don't exist. Apparently the issue is some employers don't know what they want or are looking for "perfect" instead of "good enough". Businessmen don't like to take risks, and taking anything less that perfect is a risk. It's also a risk to leave a position unfilled and work undone. People don't get fired until something critical breaks. Or as the saying goes no one ever got fired for buying IBM. No one gets fired for not hiring a good enough candidate, but plenty get fired for hiring people that aren't good enough. So the message is clear, if you want to keep your job, play it safe.

Billy Beane's thinking could suggest some alternatives to stay in business and keep competitive. Here are some ideas:

1. Remember people can learn. What appear as gaps may be opportunities that can be filled quickly with a little training. Make certain minimum requirements reflect needs and not wants. You may want someone with experience in your industry, or someone who knows your particular brand of software. Both of these can be filled quickly if the individual can learn and if you are willing to teach.
2. Be realistic about costs. You may not be able to offer better than average wages, but you can offer a good work environment, and a good community. You may find if you live in a relatively low cost community and can offer a good work environment, candidates would consider to work for you. What may appear to be a pay cut, can work the other way if the candidate receives something of value. I have seen people take apparent pay cuts for  things like better schools for their children, shorter commute times, or more autonomy in when and how they do their work.
3. Consider hiring more than one person. If you can't find some one with all of your requirements you may be able to find more than one person with some of your requirements. 

Do you have any other ideas that could help hiring managers find better candidates?

More on how companies could be creating a skills gap:

Search for the Perfect Job Candidate an Imperfect Strategy
Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

Feedback Loops

One of the main challenges to the Theory of Evolution is Spontaneous Generation. Not the largely discredited folk theory that life pops up out of nothing, but the nearly undefinable moment when un-living matter becomes Life. It is that instant when some process becomes self-sustaining, self replicating and separate from its environment. Right now for chemical based life, the best guess hypothesis involves the idea of auto-catalytic loops. Auto-catalytic loops are the bio-chemical equivalents of placing a microphone too close to a speaker. If they don't have some sort of regulation, the process soon spins out of control consuming all the available resources, and dies from starvation. So at some point a collection of interconnected loops might have been separated out of the primordial goo, and could have started self replicating and had enough regulators to respond to external conditions. In essence you want feedback loops that create enough, not too much, or too little of something.

Only recently bio-chemists have been understanding the importance of regulators. Some cancers can be thought of as poorly regulated loops. People have long observed patches of DNA that were considered "junk" that produced small RNA strings, or microRNA. It turns out microRNA can act as a regulator for some processes. And some cancers have a genetic origin in these bits of microRNA, either because the microRNA is not restricting the process enough or the microRNA is over restricting the process.

In some ways this is analogous to the ways we communicate in organizations. If leaders under regulate communications, you may compromise your clients' or employees' privacy, or your organizations security. If leaders over regulate communications, leaders may not get important information and may unintentionally foster a culture of blame. I have observed the following unintentional bad communication policies:

Don't tell me you have a problem unless you have a solution. I remember a quality initiative that wanted to include employees. There were two important caveats. First, employees need to solve the problems and second, any problems that involved the provided software tools were off limits. I'm sure the corporate leaders thought they were sending the following message - we care about your work and want to empower you to make it better and easier. The message many employees received was - we won't invest time or money in you, fix your own problems. The end result was employees lost interest in the quality initiative, and stopped telling their managers about problems.

The Performance Improvement Plan is a tool managers use to salvage an employee who is not performing adequately. It is a way to clearly communicate expectations and required actions. It is a way to reform a "bad" employee into a "good" employee. Typically, when an employee is under a performance improvement plan, they are not permitted to apply for any other jobs in the company. The manager is hoping to communicate - we care about your contribution to our organization and would like to help you continue to make a contribution in your current role, and I'm going to be committed to working with you until that happens. The message the employee may receive is - it's my way or the highway. Generally, employees either leave the organization, or stop communicating honestly with their managers and become compliant yes men.

I've also observed some really good practices that regulated communications.

Periodically attend team meetings. Several years ago, I had a vice-president who would attend product review meetings. He didn't attend every one - there were over 20 departments with 3 teams each, but he attended often enough that everyone in the lab knew who he was. This sent two strong messages - I care about what you are doing and regardless of your positions you can talk to me.

Eating in the common Cafeteria can be another effective way to regulate communications. It makes a leader visible. The same vice-president ate at least two days a week in the lab cafeteria. At least two days a week, the vice-president was sending the message, I'm just like you and you can talk to me.

Get rid of the executive bathroom. My Father has a friend who is a plumber. He's a very down to earth guy who speaks in a very direct manner. This is the advice he gave to mutual acquaintance who was starting a machine shop with two partners. If you want to know what your people are doing, don't have an executive bathroom. The message sent when you don't have an executive bathroom, is I'm no better than you, you can talk to me.

What good practices have you seen? Leave a comment.

More information about microRNA:

High Hopes for a New Kind of Gene, Sylvia Pagán Westphal, Smithsonian Magazine, July 2009

Do well or win?

Chris Kearns has this wonderful analogy to describe life. Think of life as a sports event - he used soccer, we were in europe after all. There are two teams with two different goals. Your team has a very wise coach - he has set the goal for your team - become the best player you can. He is actively working to help each play improve. The other team has a different kind of coach with a different goal - win. So when these two teams play there are some predictable things that happen. First, the players on your team are trying really hard. Second, your coach is giving everyone  a chance to play regardless of skill or experience. Third, the other team is cheating.

It doesn't matter the other team is cheating. If you believe in karma, the other team will eventually receive a penalty for cheating. And remember, your team's goal is to become the best possible players. If you lose today, there is another game tomorrow. And another on the day after. And another. As your team gets better, they start to win more often. And the other team is isn't learning as fast and doesn't have a deep bench, because only their best players are in the game. This presents an apparent paradox - in order to win in the long run, you have to avoid focusing on winning.

This paradox is important in business. The team that is interested in winning - in business terms, the results oriented team, is not the team that is going to be successful for the long term. The team that will do well for the long run will have leaders that are actively allowing people to develop. Of course this is a scary prospect because it means giving up control. It means you will no longer be the smartest person in the room. It means stepping back from reports and looking at behaviors. It means stepping back from behaviors and looking at motives. And it means you will need to create novel solutions to difficult, perhaps intractable problems. Or as it was put so succinctly, "whosoever shall be great among you, ... be [the] servant of all."¹

1 Mark 10:43,44 KJV