SLA2005 - closing keynote - Wednesday 09:00

... some SLA business ...

total attendance: 5273
2245 members
industry partner reps 1584
over 600 first-timers

SLA Mission: We are the global organization for innovative information professionals and their strategic partners.

New Click University in addition to existing SLA Professional Development

Study on the role of librarians in the workforce.

... talking about money ...

... talking about other stuff accomplished this year ...

Board of Directors
New President - Pam Rollo

Integrated program to communicate SLA's value.

Infopromo about SLA 2006 in Baltimore (June 11-14, 2006).
"Horizon planning" sessions.

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keynote speaker intro

Gary Hamel
Chairman of Strategos
Woodside Institute - how to help large organizations do continuous renewal

Facing up to the future: Helping your organization thrive in a world of accelerating change

A challenge for everyone.  Everyone needs to be resilient and change.
The big challenge for your organization may simply be that you become irrelevant.

The Goal: searchable, timely, relevant, accurant, unbiased etc. etc.

The goal hasn't changed, but the way you reach the goal has changed.

Closer than ever: Factiva, Wikipedia, Google, Podcasting, ...

Proposition #1: The future is less and less an extrapolation of the past.

"Change has gone hypercritical in our lifetimes"

The accelerating pace of evolution.

cultural change now happening generation by generation rather than over hundreds of years
different generations have different cognitive capabilities

Evolving fastest of all is information itself.

As an organization, are you changing as fast as the world around you?

"Accelerating change is the signal characteristic of the world we live in today."

Recalibrate priorities to learning and creating over executing.

"We are all become ignorant at an accelerating pace."

Proposition #2: Success has never been so fragile.

"We live in a world where incumbency is worth less and less"

Proposition #3: As change accelerates, so must the pace of strategic renewal.

List of industries striving for renewal.

Music industry challenged by Apple iTunes, HP (and others in the PC industry) challenged by Dell, etc.

"all the stories of deep change are stories of change driven by crisis, with a change in leadership"

That is "transformation tragically delayed".

"How do we make deep change continuous and intrinsic?"

Change should be: automatic, spontaneous, reflexive.

The real challenge is lowering the cost of strategic transformation and renewal.

Proposition #4: Every one of us has to become an enemy of entropy.

The problem is not knowledge, the problem is the way we look at knowledge.

Spend more time trying to understand the lenses through which people see knowledge.

Diagnosing inertia:
1) Perception - how people see the problem - blind to new possibilities
The future may not be unpredictable, but it may be unpalatable.

Seeking refuge in denial: Dismiss, Rationalize, Mitigate, Confront.

Comparison with the music industry.

2) Power
3) Principle

Have to be able to get new information to the leadership, bypass the filter layers.

You have to have a positive vision of where you're going.

Where does innovation come from?
1) Unexamined dogma
2) Unexploited trends
3) Unseen assets
4) Unvoiced needs

How do you help people develop the perceptual skills to see fundamentally new opportunities?

Challenge orthodoxy:
1) Surface the dogmas
Think about places where your views are indistinguishable from those of your competitors.

example from the food industry

2) Find the absurdities

3) Go to extremes

Rather than a 5% or 10% improvement, why not a 90% improvement?

"Think about offering an MBA program for $250"

"If you never ask the question, you never get the answer."

"Where aren't your competitors paying attention?"

Nokia example - took them to see young people so they would understand the youth market.

Leveraging discontinuites:
1) Find the fringe

Look in places where your competitors are not even paying attention.
See the small things that are already changing that have largely gone unnoticed.

Took Best Buy to visit Amish country.

2) Amplify the weak signals

What are those small signals that have enormous potential for my organization?

You could see video over Internet coming for years.

But the cable industry has... just discovered this.

"the specter of viewers going directly to content providers" - the distintermediation of television

3) Look for the big picture

Pattern recognition.

Leveraging embedded resources

e.g. Disney... on Broadway

Need to have an emotional sense of how it feels to be a customer of your services.

example: Magazines vs Television

TV should learn from magazines: it's always on, you can skip the ads, it will wait for you, there are dozens of specialty titles

operating model - on top of which is business model - on top of which is mental model - on top of which is the political model

political model - who has the power

The more concentrated is power, the less resilient the system will be.

Mental models decay quicker than political power.
A small number of people can hold the organization hostage to change.

if you have to wait for the top to give you permission, you have to wait a long time, because it has to be a huge thing to get their attention

Google model
- try to create new "googlettes" - new services
- 20% time working on whatever interests them
- small project teams (3 people)
- new services on Google Labs

"how do we become architects of decision-making processes?"

If it all depends on people on the top making decisions, it's going to go really slow.

Alternative decisionmaking...

Example: William Hill betting shop

pricing of uncertain events
betting shops use "collective wisdom"

What if top management had to publish probabilities of success for their actions, then they employees bet.

If no one is willing to take the bet, maybe it's not such a good idea.

Our practices are held in orbit around the ideology of efficiency.
1. Specialization
2. Standardization
3. Hierarchy
4. Planning and control
5. Extrinsic rewards

The above principles were built in a world of much slower change.

Where do we look to find new, resilient principles?

* Life is resilient
- comes from variety
huge number of ideas -> smaller number of experiments -> smaller number of projects -> smaller number of winners

Cemex (cement company) innovation days.
Hundreds of ideas are generated through successive rounds of innovation "ping-pong".

Innovators receive recognition and honors.

* Markets are resilient
- rapidly reallocate resources from yesterday's ideas to tomorrow's ideas

Shell Gamechanger Process
1. Idea
2. Peer review
3. Test and Mature ($25k)
4. Expert Review
5. First tollgate: Value proposition
6. Technical feasibility
7. Second tollgate: Business logic

Submission to experimental capital: 5 business days.

* Democracies are resilient

Example: W.L. Gore
- no titles
- every employee gets 10% dabbling time
- there's a market for talent
- no division can grow to more than 200 people

* Faith is resilient

Meaning -> Resilience

What is the meaning of your work.

* Cities are resilent
- they offer the possibility for serendipidity
- whereas in your organization you may have the same people talking to the same people, year after year

Principles:
- variety
- serendipity
- meaning
- activism
- flexibility

Proposition #5: You are not just librarians

New roles - raising your value added
1. Court jesters
2. Mindset engineers
3. Future-seeking radar
4. Decision architects

Move from being custodians of information to catalysts for renewal.