November 24, 2004 - New Board Member Needed!

As I've written before, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. The message is so simple: let us be thankful.

For all the acrimony that surged around our election season, most of the people in Douglas County are free of so many of the ills of humanity. Few of us go hungry, are tortured or enslaved, are trapped in brutal, dangerous jobs, or suffer outrageous physical challenges. Plus, we get turkey.

Another reason to be grateful is the remarkable service given to the county by our volunteer boards and commissions. One of our Library Trustees, Cindy Hegy of Lone Tree, is stepping down at the end of this year after almost 15 years of service. She was appointed in 1990.

In 1990, our library was still a small county department. Cindy came on just after we had established the independent county-wide library district. She served as President of the Board during the reconstruction of our Lone Tree Library. She also served as Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary, chair of our Building and Grounds Committee, President of our Foundation Board, and much more. Thank you, Cindy!

However, her departure means that we will have a vacancy on our Board of Trustees. If you're interested, please follow the instructions at the end of this column.

First, some facts about the Board.

* There are seven Trustees. They are appointed by the County Board of Commissioners. In general, we have two representatives from each of the three commissioner districts, and another at-large. The current vacancy is at-large.
* Since our Bylaws revision in 2002, Trustees serve terms of 3 years. They may serve a maximum of 4 terms.
* Trustees are responsible for the governance (not the operation) of the library. This involves setting policy, long range planning, adopting and overseeing the district's finances, and conducting the annual evaluation of the library director.
* The Board has at least 10 official meetings a year; typically, one regular monthly meeting (sometimes the Board takes a summer month off).
* All Board members belong to at least one committee, which meets as needed. Among those committees are: Building and Grounds, Bylaws and Policies, Finance, Government Relations, Long Range Planning, and Personnel.

Second, here's what the Board is looking for this time around:

* A woman! Of our six remaining Trustees, five are male. Yet by the overwhelming majority of our users are female.
* Although the position is at-large, our next development area probably falls within the triangle of Lone Tree, Castle Pines North, and Parker. We'd like to find somebody from that area.
* Lots of local connections. As the district has grown, we find we deal far more often with other local entities. The Board would like to find someone who knows her way around the local (municipal, county, and regional) political and community structure.
* A financial background. Cindy had strong financial skills.

Applicants will be interviewed by the Board's nominating committee, which will then make a recommendation to the County for appointment.

If you're interested, please send a letter of interest, and a resume of your business and community experience to:

Board of Trustees
Douglas County Libraries
100 S Wilcox
Castle Rock CO 80104

I'd be thankful if you considered it.

November 17, 2004 - change management

The beautiful thing about ignorance is that everything is so simple.

You can spin out love advice to people you've just met. You can consult for somebody else's company, and whip up a detailed long range plan after just a couple of meetings.

Why? Because you don't have time to know ... all the little things.

Sometimes that means you actually do give good advice. You aren't distracted by things that may seem pressing, but really aren't important. That lets you see to the heart of an issue.

Of course, when it comes to your own life or business, things just aren't that obvious.

Why not? Well, it could be that those unimportant but pressing things have confused you, clouded your vision. You have no objectivity.

More likely, though, it's as as H. L. Mencken once said: "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." Some problems are complex.

I've been reflecting on this since giving a presentation back at my home town library, a town I haven't lived in for over 30 years. The topic was "change management."

Obviously, I'm not up to speed on everything that's gone on at that library since 3 decades ago. But I did an honest and thorough job of research about the topic before my talk.

Here's the main insight of the experts: the greatest single resistance to organizational change is the resistance of staff. I even ran across a pseudo-mathematical formula: D x V x F > R. It means that Dissatisfaction (with the way things are) times a Vision (of something different) times First steps (to get people moving) is greater than Resistance.

Why do people resist change? Most frequently, because they haven't been consulted or informed. They want to know why. They want to know when and how. They want to know who is supposed to do what.

So many people fear change. That falls into distinct categories, too: they fear a loss of status or power, they fear some other loss in the pattern of their relationships with other people, they fear that the cost of change (learning new things, having to work with new tools or co-workers) is greater than the benefit. They don't want to feel foolish or incompetent. No one does.

What can managers do to make change easier? The experts say:

* communicate. This is key. Start by asking what your staff thinks should change. Understand and be able to articulate why change is necessary, and where the organization needs to go. Don't tell people how. Let them figure it out, and thereby take ownership of change.

* encourage staff to take risks. Change happens when people try something new!

* minimize the risk of failure. But everything new doesn't work. If people are punished for taking risks, then everybody gets cautious. Don't say, "You failed!" Say, "THAT was interesting! What did you learn?"

* seek changes compatible with the past in important ways. That might mean gradual changes in procedure or techniques. But more important is to stay focused on core institutional values.

* seek buy-in not only within an organization, but around it.

* recognize success. When things work out well, celebrate.

It all seems so ... simple.

Or as I asked my colleagues in Illinois, "Remember the good old days, when nothing changed?"

Me neither.

November 10, 2004 - scaling the organization

I do a lot of reading about technology. And philosophy. And management. They're all connected.

Take, for instance, Linux, the computer operating system. It began as the hobby of a Finnish college student. Linus Torvalds wanted to wring a little more work out of his new DOS-based computer, so tried to program a free clone of Unix. He launched this project on the Internet.

Today, Linux is a collaborative, truly international project. It runs the web servers of IBM, of Yahoo, of Google, and even of Microsoft.

But along the way, Linux ran into a couple of walls. The first was wholly human. One guy, Linus, just couldn't keep up with all the corrections (or "patches") people were submitting. Some important new features weren't being picked up or adequately tested. Linus seemed to have reach his administrative limit. He was getting cranky, too.

The second involved what was called "the scalability" of Linux. It was marvelously efficient at some tasks. But when those tasks got to a certain size or complexity suddenly there were unacceptable slow downs. To be successful in big business, Linux needed a redesign of some core functions -- and it looked like Linus wasn't up to it.

Same problem. Scalability of administration. Scalability of function.

The odds are good you've seen this in any organization you've ever belonged to. Strategies that work, well enough, in your own family, don't work in your church group. The communication style that was so efficient you didn't even have to think about it when your business was small ("hey, everybody, come here and look at this!") stopped working when you had people in four different locations, on three different shifts.

The library has had its challenges, too. I'm an intuitive manager, which worked great when our district was small. Then, some years back, in a period of rapid growth, I started dropping appointments and project details. I was becoming, in my own judgment, an organizational problem.

I had to sit down and retool. I took time and project management classes, read up on the topic, designed my own date book, and eventually moved to the Palm Pilot. I'm still an intuitive manager, but now I have a skill set, and some technologies, that help me keep up.

More recently, the library's administrative and communication structure -- the operating system of an organization -- started running into those unacceptable slowdowns and dysfunctions. Again, that's not a criticism of a previous model; it USED to work.

Over the past year, we've been working on addressing that. And I think we'll solve it -- for the period of time that such things can BE solved. (I don't believe in the perfect administrative structure. Things change.)

Linus, incidentally, did pull out of his funk. There was a slight reordering of the administrative structure -- with a little more trust and decision-making authority placed in the hands of a few subordinates. He also adopted some different software tools to manage the various versions of his kernel hacking.

And Linux is a big success.

As Linus said in a recent interview, "So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed." Wise words from a programmer -- and excellent management advice.

November 3, 2004 - AV is Popular

First: this column is not about politics. Isn't that refreshing?

Second, this week I wanted to air an internal library discussion. We're trying to figure out what percentage of our collection should be "AV" -- audiovisual formats, including DVD's and VHS films, books on tape, books on CD, CD-ROM's and music CD's.

The library tracks the use of all kinds of very specific categories. We don't just keep statistics on cassettes, for instance, we break them down into adult, children, and teen, and from there, into fiction and non-fiction. We have similar divisions for everything else.

Overall, though, AV stuff is popular. Last year, it accounted for almost a quarter of all our checkouts. Another library statistic is "turnover rate" -- how many times things get checked out, divided by how many copies we own. For books, it's about 5.5 (as if every book gets checked out five times in a year). For AV, it's 8.5.

That's impressive enough evidence of AV popularity. It's even more impressive given that, as of the end of October, 2004, AV accounts for less than 15% of our collection.

We're trying to grow it fast. For the past couple of years, we have spent a little less than a third (about 30%) of our materials budget on AV materials. We've built up a collection of over 80,000 items.

AV costs more than books. It takes a little longer to process. It tends not to last so long -- probably because it often has more parts to get misplaced or broken. DVD's have proved to be especially fragile in a library setting. So even spending a lot of money, it takes a while to build up the percentages.

Not only that, many of these formats are fairly new -- DVD's haven't been around all that long, for instance, at least compared to how long we've been buying books. The change in formats means that now our VHS tapes will start to decline statistically, as we add more DVD's. Ditto for cassettes versus CD's -- and who knows what comes next?

The point, of course, isn't just to have a certain percentage, but to have what people are looking for.

For awhile, staff have been thinking about setting a goal of 30% HOLDINGS of AV. That's an arbitrary number, of course, but not unreasonable given the demand for it. But what the above numbers suggest is that to build that collection, we might have to spend closer to 50% of our materials budget. Even then, more of it might be checked out when you walked in, so it still wouldn't SEEM as if we had enough.

AV isn't our only popular category, of course. Right now, children's print materials account for about a third of our collection, but over 40% of our checkouts, for a turnover rate of about 7.5.

And adult bestsellers are hot.

There is, I hasten to add, more to a library than its popular collection. There is its staff! There's a growing demand for meeting space. There is research -- both formal and casual, in print, and online.

But all of the above leads me to believe that a collection optimized for high volume checkouts might look something like this:

* a little over a third AV,
* about a third children's materials, and
* the remainder a combination of bestsellers, series and perennial favorites (cookbooks, pet books, travel, etc.).

Could this be a (partial) blueprint for smaller libraries?

October 27, 2004 - rethinking the library

Suppose everything you know about libraries is wrong.

For instance, suppose we have way more than books. The books we do have aren't hidden spine-out on metal shelving. It's OK to carry around a cup of coffee or can of pop. (Yes, for those of you paying attention, we already made those changes!)

Now, suppose libraries don't need service desks. Suppose you don't have to look for staff to ask a question. We look for you.

Suppose that instead of having library staff barricaded behind those desks, we were roaming all over the place, maybe with headsets that let us instantly summon expertise from all over the organization -- including our crackerjack online reference librarians.

You don't have to ask at all for the stuff that everybody is already asking for. Books, popular music and topical information are posted on a kind of cultural billboard. You could walk in the door and SEE what's hot.

Suppose that you didn't have to wait for books to get put back out on display. Right now, much of what people want from a library is waiting to get shelved. Suppose we put the hot stuff right back out by the checkout stations. We save steps (and costs). You save time.

Suppose that when something went NOT-so-hot -- a bestselling book, for instance -- it immediately moved to the in-house library sale. You could pick it up for a song.

When you were done, you could give it back to us. We could sell it again. And again. This is, incidentally, an excellent strategy to recycle intellectual content to a community, leveraging an original purchase through many levels of use.

Suppose that our computers let you not only do email and search databases, but also request notifications of unknown but upcoming titles, or new electronic articles, on topics of interest to you. Suppose that our catalog told you about these new options by sending a message to your Palm Pilot or cell phone, just as you stepped through our doors.

Suppose your local library was THE place where teenagers came to find high-end workstations, enabling them to engage in intense multi-player computer games. (Before some of you older folks have apoplexy, riddle me this: why is it OK for you to check out books on golf or tennis or chess, or sit and read fashion magazines, or spend hours online fora discussing various personal or recreational options, but NOT OK for young people to play games?)

Suppose that library hours started to look like your own life?

Over the next year, your local library district is going to make history. We're going to take some outrageous risks, try some truly radical experiments.

Oh yes: some of them will fail. Not all of them!

Our first roll-out of some of these ideas, incidentally, will be at Roxborough, probably around March of next year. Our next big roll-out will be at Lone Tree. But you'll be seeing pieces of all this everywhere.

I have the very strong sense that our society (local, state, national, international) is on the edge of transformation. As always, we have a choice: we can be victims of change, or we can be agents of improvement.

We choose to be leaders.

October 20, 2004 - I am an Earthling

It was a perfect Colorado day: crisp and clear. Autumn burned on the bluffs.

I was walking down the main street of my home town. Suddenly, all I could hear was the roar of traffic.

Just as suddenly, I was angry, irritable.

I have striven my whole life to cultivate calm. So with my anger came disquiet. WHAT was wrong with me?

I have two answers. Here's the first: it was America. America the loud, America the intrusive, America the land of the big, honking automobile.

Second answer: my real problem was something called acculturation. A couple of weeks before, I was in eastern Europe. I was able to walk for hours at a time on streets that meandered under trees, ambled along river beds, and had learned the trick of dodging traffic.

My deep anger was, of course, ridiculous. Right? Yet it was real.

For the past decade or so, I've been a member of Rotary International. I've always taken a keen interest in our exchange students.

Every year, we interview a handful of very bright, surprisingly poised high school students. We send a few of them off to live with loving families in other countries.

About nine months later, they come back. And they all report a similar thing: coming back to America is at least as hard as leaving it.

Over there, they were sometimes overwhelmed by all the differences from the life they knew. At the same time, it was invigorating. The brain is wired to notice what is new. When everything is new, life is intense.

These students expected their travels to be strange. But they didn't expect HOME to seem strange. When they returned, they made a deep discovery: what so many of us believe is basic and right, a given, is only cultural. Other places, other people, have other premises.

In my own travels, I thought I'd adapted well. I was booked from dawn to dusk and beyond, but always with very kind, even gentle people. I enjoyed myself tremendously, even if I did feel, on occasion, that I needed more time alone, more time to process my experiences.

When I got back, I was plunged into the crazy season of my job: library budget preparation.

So chalk up some of my crankiness to being overscheduled, overstimulated, then suddenly caught up in the finicky business of fiscal decison-making and strategic planning.

I strongly suspect that I am not nearly as adaptable as I'd like to think I am.

But issues of personal stamina aside, I feel a lingering rebellion against ALL countries: my own for its artless arrogance and careless abundance; Bulgaria for its legacy of entitlement, the blunt humiliation of the Soviet era. The rest of the world's nations ... well, because of the whole idea of borders.

On the 2000 census, after long thought, I listed my race as "Earthling." I meant by this that as a very young man I had seen a photo of our planet from space.

It was so achingly beautiful. I wanted to clasp it to me, as an infant hugs a balloon.

I still do.

October 13, 2004 - Bulgaria, Part 2

The costs of my recent trip to Bulgaria were underwritten by a grant from the US Department of State. Why would the State Department be interested in Americans traveling to Bulgaria?

There are two reasons. First, after some 60 years of continuous occupation in Germany, many of our military bases are being dismantled. They are relocating to Bulgaria. From a geopolitical perspective, Bulgaria is certainly closer to such hot spots as the Middle East.

Second, as a former Soviet country, Bulgaria is deeply enmeshed in the transition to democracy and capitalism. The end of Soviet socialism in Bulgaria was bloodless -- but as several people told me, not without troubles. The abrupt withdrawal of guaranteed pensions and health care has led to deaths, particularly in the rural areas. Many people feel a deep nostalgia for what they remember of the Communist era -- glossing over the persistent loss of individual freedoms one of my translators described as "a humiliation of the soul."

On the other hand, the economic growth in Bulgaria has been nothing short of amazing. In Sofia, the capital, there are endless rows of bustling shops and restaurants. There is the thriving outdoor bazaar, the Ladies Market. In Dobrich, a city of 150,000 people, enormous pedestrian plazas were lined with cafes, clothing stores, pottery shops, and more.

While unemployment is still high -- up to 14 percent in some areas -- the cities are transforming almost overnight into something quite new in Bulgaria's long and rich history. They are becoming vital economic hubs based not on agriculture or centralized planning, but on thousands of independent, entrepreneurial ventures.

Exchanges between the public sectors of Bulgaria and the United States are a stabilizing influence. The United States' own history of economic and political development rests not only on business, but on a host of institutions that provide the glue of a society, an undercurrent of meaning and purpose.

I saw the influence of three such institutions. The institutions of faith -- Orthodox Church, Islam, Judaism -- were once strongly discouraged. Now, buildings have been restored, and attract a steady stream of visitors. (The trip to Bulgaria is worthwhile just to hear the Orthodox Church choirs, their music soaring into impossibly high arches.)

Incidentally, these faiths coexist quite comfortably in Bulgaria.

I saw the influence of museums. In some respects, the standards of display and care are far less rigorous than those in the US. I was able to reach out and touch the real bones of a caveman -- something I can't imagine would be permitted here.

Bulgaria was one of the crossroads of the very earliest migrations of humankind. Then there is the whole period of Roman occupation -- many ruins from the 2nd and 3rd century are still visible (and in some cases, are in better shape than the Soviet-era apartment complexes). Then came the long history of Christianity in the area, a tale told in icons. All of these long precede the European discovery of our continent.

And, of course, there are public libraries.

But public institutions also face a challenge, just as they do in the United States. Many leaders consider history and culture worthy of respect, but also consider them too backward looking. To be deemed worthy of funding, in Bulgaria as well as the United States, public institutions must learn to capture significant use, and make an active contribution toward the forging of a local future.

My colleagues in Bulgaria are certainly up to the task. They were very smart, savvy, conscientious, and industrious. I believe in them.