Where we’re headed, people who hedge their bets and seek optionality when the going gets rough won’t make it. Navigating uncharted territory requires an irrational pursuit of something beyond self-preservation.
In four short years, the ups and downs we’ve experienced writing our own startup blueprint have already proven a bit too rigorous for people merely interested in libraries or working for a startup.
While neither are as glamorous as you think, both are more rewarding than you could imagine. Understanding your why matters, not just what you’re doing or how you’re doing it.
Organizations that optimize against optionality outperform those who don’t. Mature industries contain a spectrum of workplace cultures to accommodate the variety of worker expectations. Given the difficulty of the task at hand for Skilltype in the library industry, we are developing an organizational culture structured to meet the vocational expectations of high performing professionals.
This is akin to the recreational to competitive spectrum within sports. While many organizations create work environments equivalent to the YMCA or local parks and recreation department, who are the NBA, PGA, or USTA equivalents in libraries — organizations consisting of professionals who find joy and reward in the pursuit of excellence and craftsmanship?
These are the types of organizations that must be created to make progress on the grand challenges facing the profession this decade.
The moment library leaders no longer say “wow that’s a pretty ambitious goal” is when we know Skilltype is successful. Sure we can quantify our impact today. But until the information profession embraces the optimism that anything’s possible, there’s work to be done.
I remember sitting in Susan & Ennio’s kitchen one morning when the first stream of possibilities hit me for the library profession. Ask anyone who knows me. They’ll be talking about something seemingly unrelated. I have to be rude, take out my phone and capture the adjacencies.
In time, your vocation becomes a lens through which you see the world. Inspiration hits you at the most unsuspecting moments. You don’t expect everyone to relate — you appreciate them too for what they teach you. But when you find people who do, there’s no need to interview.
I view cynics as a key piece to this puzzle however. Firstly, growing up how I did, cynics are extremely motivating to me. I tend to play to the level of my competition. I will conserve energy and coast if until pressure comes. Procrastinate until the paper’s due. You get it.
The particularly vocal type of cynicism in libraries today can be overwhelming, discouraging, or downright debilitating. But it’s these environments where I operate at my best. And I now know what to look for in others who do too. We’re usually historically underrepresented.
It’s why a part of our interview process is understanding what a potential colleague has to prove. Not for the sake of asking what they have to prove, but because our goal is so ambitious that we will need them to find the inspiration to prove it in their work.
Cynics behave like hyenas. I remember encountering hyenas on a safari in Tanzania when I was younger. They present as friendly and will walk alongside you when alone. But can instantly become aggressive and find boldness in numbers and want to attack.
Me while in Tanzania during the 2007 great migration
Maximalists on the other hand behave like lions. They are confident unto themselves, able to peacefully coexist alongside cynics, and will only defend themselves when threatened. This lion playing and exploring the savannah is the perfect metaphor.
The beauty of the savannah as an ecosystem is that all of these interactions, no matter how tense and uncomfortable at times, are necessary for it to evolve over time. Things expectedly get a bit chippy when the water dries up.
The digital shift in libraries is a great migration of sorts. We should understand that not everyone will make it. But those of us who do have a responsibility to continue on in the things that sustain the profession, if for nothing else to ensure that others’ work isn’t in vain.
So while I can’t work with them, I appreciate our community’s cynics. I respect their role and value, and find motivation in how they challenge our status quo. But it takes maturity to keep the vision in mind and understand we’ll never be the same.
You can mind everyone’s opinions or totally ignore them. Either way, opinions can’t validate you and your ideas — only time can.
Say someone endorses you but you turn out wrong. Time invalidates you both. Same if they disagree and you turn out to be right. Time validates you.
One trick is to become a voracious reader, a student of history — not just of your domain, but others that you could apply. Base your ideas on principles that time has validated. This helps you weather the storm of people’s opinions. Because like all storms, they must pass.
It’s also important to understand that hot takes, click bait, and blind endorsements (eg likes, retweets, etc) are the currencies of Web 2.0 — a phase of the internet that was designed with the express intent to prevent time from doing its validation work.
So what do we do as we’re working things out? A healthy social media diet must be balanced with safe spaces for half-baked ideas, because life has more than 280 characters or 640 pixels:
We’ve spent almost four years rethinking every aspect of talent management in libraries. Feels long but not when you consider it’s a 4,000-year old vocation relying on a 400-year old culture and using 40-year old technology.
Reimagining an institution with such entrenched techniques, cultures, and practices as libraries requires the perfect balance of proximity and distance: hard to identify the problems without navigating them yourself; hard to see another way when it’s all you’ve ever known.
Few institutions are as central to society as the library. Each year 2.5M libraries across 200 countries spend $30B serving over a billion people’s information needs. Ensuring the 2.5M library workers have the requisite skills to serve their communities in the future is critical.
Arguments framing technology as a replacement for the library are generally misinformed and overstated. The library is society’s anti-fragile container for technology — whether parchment, periodicals, .PDFs, or some other form of pixels — taking on new forms for new generations.
As long as society needs access to information, there will be a need for people trained in serving society’s diverse points on the information learning curve. The more information to navigate, and the greater the digital divide, the greater the need for librarianship.
In my first post as an entrepreneur in residence at BU Libraries, I mentioned that I would revisit the topic of vendors competing themselves away through “red ocean” iteration. It’s a very intricate topic that will require several posts to dissect. But I wanted to begin this commentary by defining the vendor conundrum that universities find themselves in today.
The other day I was invited to my first meeting as a library employee with a vendor. After thousands of these meetings as a vendor over the past 10 years, I had a very unexpected light bulb moment. Before I get into my epiphany, I want to share a sincere apology to previous clients for all of the times you’ve had to endure my droning on about a product or service that was completely irrelevant to anything you were currently focused on at the time.
I’m genuinely sorry.
Over the years I’ve learned that there is pretty substantial distance between the world of a vendor and the world of a librarian. And the points of intersection between these worlds are actually few and far in between.
This didn’t click for me until I began to meet with deans, directors, university librarians, CIOs and their ilk back in 2014. These were the days when the “business of higher education” was first introduced to me. Prior to this, I along with my colleagues had a well-established understanding that as for-profits, we were the capitalists with “real” business objectives, and our customers were the socialists who had the ability to prioritize ideals.
The level of staff I interacted with held to this worldview (oftentimes both personally and professionally), and propagated it through most of our interactions. This had an unintended downstream effect: vendors developed a blindness towards the notion that libraries and universities themselves have business needs too – needs that are increasingly impacting the decision-making process vendors solely cared about historically: if and when you will buy my product.
The Vendor Conundrum
Now, the other day I had the surreal experience of hearing how I sounded all of these years: Knowledgeable, tech-savvy, and perhaps at times intelligent. But the three traits I was missing in that repertoire were humility, relevancy and empathy.
The vendor representative recited a pitch and the expected alternate angles to overcompensate for missing two immutable facts:
Every library leadership team today has vast internal pressure
That pressure is most likely not what a company assumes it is
The obvious solution would seem to be to lead with questions not statements, to listen more than talk, then work diligently to meet those needs. But the incentives at each point in the value chain are misaligned.
First, commercial vendors are not consulting firms who design responsive solutions for clients, but oftentimes firms that have made large, irrevocable bets on product investments which require a multiple ROI back to shareholders.
Second, employees who work for these firms are compensated based on generating said multiple ROI.
When a company’s business interests compete with those of the institution, the library’s representatives aren’t aware of the conflict, and the vendor’s representatives are financially incentivized to keep them unaware—herein lies the vendor conundrum.
This creates a situation where institutions run the risk of funding potential competitors in the short term, or worse, outsourcing the institution’s value in the long term, thereby disintermediating itself out of the supply chain between consumers of higher education and service providers.
I’m reminded of a conference I attended a few weeks ago in Baltimore with Academic Impressions. We had an icebreaker session where academic leaders predicted trends that will impact universities leading up to 2030. One was tech companies competing directly with universities for tuition revenue, either by acquiring a university and competing head-to-head with other institutions, or by picking apart different verticals within the higher education experience and offering them a la carte to students.
Conclusion
Now, it should go without saying, but is worth noting that I’m not anti-vendor. I believe that libraries benefit from third-parties to best serve their stakeholders. But I also believe that in order for this relationship to remain mutually beneficial, the power dynamic needs to be rebalanced.
While there’s no magical antidote to this issue, here are some pragmatic solutions to help future-proof libraries from an unfavorable future outcome.
Educate vendors on your situation. The companies that serve you, and especially the representative you work with, most likely isn’t aware of the operating context you have to navigate within your institution. The best vendors will take this to heart and develop products, policies, and pricing models that accommodate your needs.
Expose staff to the business of higher education. Far too many vendor relationships are managed by employees who are not versed on the financial situation of their institutions.
Develop a vendor relations policy. Increase your organization’s leverage by creating rules that govern the way your staff interacts with vendors. Iterate on it throughout the fiscal year.
Share best practices with peers. Despite the amount of backchannel conversations that take place about vendor experiences, best practices that inform what happens after the contract is signed, post RFI/RFP, to set the library up for success are still lacking.
I’m thinking through this everyday and curious to get your thoughts or talk through specific scenarios. Let’s chat @zanders on Twitter or by email at tony [at] skilltype [dot] com.
Thanks to Louisa for giving me another set of eyes on this.
