It’s all fine and good to say learn from your failures, but how? First you need to acknowledge that they will happen. Especially right now in the current economy. Rita McGrath notes: Despite widespread recognition that challenging times place unpredictable demands on people and businesses, I still run across many managers who would prefer to avoid the logical conclusion that stems from this: failure is a lot more common in highly uncertain environments than it is in better-understood situations. Then you plan for failure. Sim Sitkin talks about intelligent failure in his article “Learning through failure: The strategy of small losses.” Intelligent failure? Yep. Essentially planning your projects to be certain that you will learn something from them succeed or fail. What do intelligent failures look like? They are carefully planned, so that when things go wrong you know why They are genuinely uncertain, so the outcome cannot be known ahead of time They are modest in scale, so that a catastrophe does not result They are managed quickly, so that not too much time elapses between outcome and interpretation Something about what is learned is familiar enough to inform other parts of the business. McGrath adds two more in her article Are You Squandering
Best Practices
Is Good Enough good enough?
I don’t know, but it’s what I’m thinking about thanks to Jason Griffey Think about the services in your library, and the amount of effort and resources poured into making your services as good as they can possibly be. What if good enough is really enough, and instead we should be expanding our range of services instead of seeking perfection in any single one? How does that change the way libraries operate? He cites a Wired magazine article – The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine which he quotes …it happens to be a recurring theme in Good Enough products. You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough… Aaron Schmidt responded in the comments This is great, mostly because just yesterday I was thinking about just the opposite! My thoughts aren’t fully formed but my basic line of thinking is that good enough services are probably wholly unremarkable and don’t leave
How social media can hurt your library
We’ve all seen warnings and stories about people getting fired from their jobs because of status updates or photos on social medial sites like Twitter, Facebook and blogs. CNN is has a new one with some social networking don’ts 1. Don’t announce interviews, raises or new jobs 2. Don’t badmouth your current or previous employer 3. Don’t mention your job search if you’re still employed First I think number 2 should include – “or coworkers”, really nothing good can come of that either. But the point I want to add for librarians (library workers) everywhere is 4. Don’t badmouth your customers. We all get frustrated, we all have bad days, I understand that, but venting on social media sites isn’t the solution and it could cause real problems for your library. Your customers may read what you wrote, they are more tech savvy than you give them credit for. In addition to some old fashioned hurt feelings this can lead to some real problems for your library. They could complain to someone at the library, which means staff will need to spend time dealing with this issue. They could email it all their friends or maybe the newspaper, this is
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