Dean Cloonan: [0:12] Hello and welcome to this edition of GSLIScast. On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Ann Wolpert gave the keynote address for the GSLIS Alumni and Professional Development Day. Wolpert spoke about the dearth of nonprofit information management and how this vacuum will create opportunities for new leaders to emerge in the 21st century. Wolpert is the Director of Libraries at MIT. [0:36] Now, Ann Wolpert...
Ann Wolpert: [0:39] Thank you, Dean Cloonan for your overview of everything that's going on here at Simmons and for hosting today's event. Thank you Margaret and the organizers for inviting me to talk today. In particular, thank you, who are here sitting at these tables, for being here this morning. It's 9:00 a.m. on a cold Saturday morning. [1:06] [laughter]
Ann: [1:07] You got up at the crack of dawn on your day off, put on office clothes, navigated through spring construction, vernal potholes and the Saturday tea schedule to get to Simmons to network with your GSLIS colleagues and friends. You are bold enough and brave enough to want to consider and discuss what it takes to be a leader. [1:36] Now, as we all know, one of the first criterion of being a leader is showing up.[1:42] [laughter]
Ann: [1:43] So, I think by virtue of the fact that you are here this morning, you are automatically at the first tier of leadership in our profession. In fact, I was thinking, maybe I should just sit down and we should have a discussion about leadership. [1:57] [laughter]
Ann: [2:01] It might be a lot more interesting. But, I do hope that we will have time at the end of this morning's program for some discussion before we go to the break and I hope that discussion will continue throughout the break because this is a really important topic for us, leadership. [2:19] That's why I think it's a particular pleasure and privilege to have been invited to address the theme of this year's GSLIS Professional Development and Alumni Day. The theme, as you know from your brochure, is "Educate, Transform, Empower: Preparing Leaders for the 21st Century."[2:41] So, the first part of this theme is easy for us. There is not a GSLIS alumnus in this room who does not greet every day prepared to educate, transform and empower their patrons. We provide these services directly and we provide these services indirectly. We do these things because they are embedded in our professional mission.
[3:06] We have a lot of living, breathing examples of educators, transformers, empowerers in our midst right here in this room and more generally, among the alumni of GSLIS. I was interested in Michele's litany of only the latest accomplishments of GSLIS faculty and alumni. I'm particularly proud of the fact that one of this year's GSLIS graduates who received the Movers and Checkers Award is at MIT.
[3:40] Indeed, the GSLIS network of graduates is a powerful force for leadership in the library community today. GSLIS graduates are everywhere and to understand our impact and influence, both nationally and internationally, one need only talk to a colleague whose professional network was disrupted when their library school program closed or merged with an incompatible school.
[4:09] In the education we earned at Simmons, the highly regarded faculty help many of us become the transformers and leaders we are today. Peter Hernon, as Michele mentioned, is only the most recent of Simmons GSLIS faculty to receive national and international recognition. So, educating, transforming and empowering are pretty much no brainers for us.
[4:38] The second part of this year's theme is a little more challenging however. Preparing leaders for the 21st century when we still have 92 years to go would give any thoughtful person pause, especially at 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. You may well be thinking to yourself, "Sleep! Sleep is what it takes to prepare to be a leader in the 21st century."
[5:04] [laughter]
Ann: [5:09] Well, when we consider what leadership means, we might very well commit to just doing what we're already doing. We're pretty successful at it, we've come a long way, our profession is very well regarded. But, for my part, I would consider it unworthy of our profession and a disservice to the discipline of Information Science if we were to settle for what we're doing now. [5:37] In pondering the question of preparing leaders for the 21st century, we are fortunate in that there are books to guide us. Are there ever books to guide us? On Thursday, March 27th at 6:45 in the evening, I went on to Amazon and I searched for books on leadership. My search returned 254, 955 results.[6:08] Now, I'm a librarian and I love books and reading, as we all know librarians do, but that's a lot of books even for a millionaire graduate of a speed reading program. So, I went to OCLC's WorldCat and frankly, they weren't a whole lot more selective. The same search on WorldCat returns 111,106 books. But, isn't it nice to know that at least 80, 000 of the books that are cited in the Amazon database were deemed not worthy of selecting by librarians across the land?
[6:50] [laughter]
Ann: [6:53] But, here's where a book search on the question of leadership gets interesting: search WorldCat for books on leadership and nonprofit and the number of hits drops to 112. If we can believe these results, only one percent of the books on leadership purport to even try to provide advice on leadership to those of us who work in organizations and operate in professions for purposes other than the bottom line. [7:27] Now, please don't misunderstand me. I'm a big fan of moneymaking and of the moneymaking sector of the economy. I spent over a decade in the for profit world. I am privileged at MIT to have oversight for several important enterprises within the institution and frankly, if and when I'm able to retire, I expect to eat regularly, thanks to the US equities market.[7:55] But, the relative dearth of leadership books on the "are dominant" sector which is the non profit sector is an interesting issue to consider.
[8:05] In my personal experience, leadership in the academy for example, is stylistically very different from the styles of leadership I exercised when I was in the for profit sector. The underlying principles may be the same but the modes of execution can be quite radically different.
[8:25] When I moved from consulting to the academy, one of the first months I was at Harvard, I was asked to write a memorandum on a particular topic. I used the skills that I had honed for a decade in the private sector and produced what I thought was just an extraordinarily effective, half page memorandum with pithy bullets and succinct conclusions.
[8:55] I should it to the faculty chair with whom I was working at the time and he looked at me and he said, "This will never do."
[9:03] [laughter]
Ann: [9:04] He said, "This is way... people will be insulted if they read this. This is so brusque, it's so short. You're so to the point with people. You will insult your colleagues if you give them this memorandum." I had spent ten years learning how to write a memorandum like that. I went away and I turned my half page memo into a three page dissertation on... [9:29] [laughter]
Ann: [9:31] Explicating the reasons for why we needed to do something and drawing in example from history and quotations from philosophers. [9:41] [laughter]
Ann: [9:43] And he said, "Oh, this is much better. This is going to work. This is going to work." [9:50] Something as simple as communication which everyone knows is one of the top five things you have to be able to do if you're in leadership is going to vary enormously. Not in concept or principle but in the way you execute and in the stylistic approaches that you take to how you exercise leadership in a particular sector.[10:12] I have personally watched with great interest the growing number of courses on leadership of the non profit organization that have been developing within schools, business schools in particular management schools such as the Harvard Business School and the Slone School at MIT.
[10:30] For example at the Harvard Business School, Michael Choo's course on Effective Leadership of the Social Enterprise is one such example. The course description for this course characterizes the leadership challenges of creating and sustaining high performing non profit organizations as being distinctly different from the challenges of managing a for profit organization.
[10:57] The course notes that the operating environment for non profit organization is changing as dynamically as it is for non profits as it is for businesses. I think those of us who manage in lead in that environment understand this to be true. The course also acknowledges that the theory of how to effectively manage non profits is in many cases just being formulated.
[11:21] We all have a lot to learn. As leaders as library and information science I think we are very well aware of this challenge.
[11:32] How should Simmons, the graduate school of library and information science, and the other graduate programs perhaps and the graduates of GSLIS think about how best to prepare for leadership in the 21st century? Seems to me that a good place to start is with an understanding of the landscape, current landscape of librarians and librarianship.
[11:58] The American Library Association estimates that there are about 152,000 librarians working in the United States today. 44% percent of us work in school libraries. 29% of us are in public libraries. 17% are in academic libraries and the remaining 10% are in employed in special libraries serving businesses, scientific agencies, hospitals, law firms and NGOs. I don't know how the numbers work here at Simmons but they're probably not too different from that.
[12:38] These are the numbers but what these numbers don't tell us is that as a profession, librarians are hot. Yes, I know, we knew it all along. We're hot, hot, hot.
[12:55] [laughter]
Ann: [12:57] But now it's official. In July in 2007 in an article in the fashion and style section of the New York Times... [13:06] [laughter]
Ann: [13:08] Librarians were declared to be hip. [13:12] [laughter]
Ann: [13:14] The article positively gushed over the magical blend of nerdy and nifty that librarians represent. We are an up and coming profession. The article pointed to the changing nature of the work of librarians. More computing they said, less shushing. It talked about the intellectual stimulation of working in a field where you learn something new every day. [13:46] The article described the diverse and animated lives of people who pursue librarianship as a career. To which I say to you, beauty and the geek all rolled into one.[14:01] [laughter]
Ann: [14:03] I particularly like the part of the article where they talked about the reference librarian who was proudly supporting a tattoo of the logo of the federal depository library program. [14:16] [laughter]
Ann: [14:22] I invite you to look at the ankles at your table. [14:25] [laughter]
Ann: [14:27] See if anybody at your table has an ankle tattoo of something that represents librarianship they're proud of. [14:37] I myself actually plan to do that at the libraries this summer when the sandals come out.[14:42] [laughter]
Ann: [14:44] Earlier this month, this very month, March of 2008 US News and World Report in one of it's annual listings, you know the US News and World Report list this and list that and so on, they had a listing of careers that were worth interest, that were worth looking at. US News and World Report declared librarians to be among the best careers for 2008. [15:14] To which of course we say, why so late to the party?[15:17] [laughter]
Ann: [15:19] Meanwhile, the occupational outlook handbook of the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics happily anticipates for us the rapid growth of job for librarian outside traditional settings. The handbook points in particular to librarian strengths in research and organizational skills as well as their knowledge of computer data bases and automated systems. [15:47] Again, I say, what took them so long to discover how interesting, dynamic and exciting our work is. We've been hot for a long time. There may be only 152,000 of us in the United States but we are mighty and we are cool![16:08] But, more soberingly, the theme of today's gathering in this afternoon's panel with Jessamine West, we are also on the cusp of a generational handoff to library leadership in the 21st century. More than two out of three librarians are aged 45 or older. Two thirds of us are 45 or older. This will result in the measured language of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in many job openings over the next decade as these librarians retire.
[16:46] So, it's especially interesting to think about leadership in the 21st century in the context of a profession that combines hip with changing where the underlying ethic of the profession combines traditional commitment to service with a newly reenergized social activism and the powerful skills of high technology.
[17:12] The New York Times describes us as a profession that attracts smart, well-read, interesting, funny people who seem to be happy with their jobs. I see a profession where a new generation of librarians is already moving into positions of leadership. They bring new skills and new purpose, whether the old guard is ready or not.
[17:44] We are also a profession that is still committed to one-on-one mentoring. We're committed to the guild model of learning by doing and we believe in information and knowledge sharing. Many of us still cling to the belief that we will find the best ideas and definitions of librarian leadership within the profession more so than outside. In my view, this is not a position that we can sustain going forward. So, I want to share with you two stories that seem to me to illustrate the leadership challenge for our profession as we look across the landscape.
[18:28] The first story was told by the Reverend Ray Hammond, keynote speaker at this year's Martin Luther King Celebration Breakfast at MIT. It goes like this: Two hunters were flown into the Alaskan woods to hunt for elk. A week later, the plane returns to pick them up and it transpires that a plane which was designed to handle four elk and two hunters and a pilot is now confronted with a pilot, two hunters and six elk.
[19:07] So, the pilot, being a sensible fellow, tells the hunters, "You're going to have to leave two of these behind. You can't possibly get these on the plane." Needless to say, the hunters are not the least bit interested in doing this. They bagged these elk, they want to take them back.
[19:24] So, they badger the pilot and they argue with the pilot and they point out repeatedly, most tellingly, that last year they caught six elk and last year, the pilot agreed to fly them out with six elk. And they go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and so finally, the pilot says, "Well, alright. If you managed it last year, maybe we can manage it this year. I'm a really good pilot. I think we can probably do this."
[19:55] So, they load the plane. The six elk go get put in the plane and the plane taxis down the runway and has a terrible time getting speed up and it's low coming up and sure enough it can't quite get the elevation that it needs and it can't quite get stable and down it crashes into the woods.
[20:19] So, the hunters are climbing out of the plane and grumbling and carrying on and one of the hunters says to the other one, "Where are we?" and his friend says, "I don't know, but I think we're about two miles from where we crashed last year."
[20:40] [laughter]
Ann: [20:48] So, I'll be really dismayed if the next generation of librarian leaders comes down in the same part of the woods where I've managed to crash my plane on a number of occasions, right? So, as we think about this generational handoff between librarians of my generation and maybe some of your generation and the generation that is going to come along to lead librarianship in the 21st century, we really need to make sure that we give them enough information, that we give them the right information, that we help them not to repeat our mistakes, that we don't give them so much information that they can't take off. [21:35] And I think we need to encourage them to look beyond the edges of our own discipline and professional practice because if we continue thinking that we're going to be able to do what we did before, we're really missing an enormous opportunity here to think and learn from others. Living at MIT has been really interesting for me because I have seen in the time that I have been there the impact of biology on science and engineering and I keep thinking to myself, if chemists can learn about biology and if biologists can learn about engineering, librarians really ought to be able to learn about business logistics and operations management and some of the new quantitative and analytical techniques that are coming out of disciplines and professions that have many of the same problems that we have in librarianship.[22:35] We have a fine professional practice and a strong history of looking at ourselves and learning from one another. But, we will be in very serious trouble in the 21st century if we don't understand how to look outside our own professional practice and to partner our intellectual discipline with the intellectual disciplines of others.
[23:01] So, here's my second story. This story was told at a recent MIT seminar by the institute's Buddhist chaplain. I'm going to mangle his name, but I'm going to try it, Tenzin Priyadarshi. We've got a floppy microphone here. If you can't hear me, holler.
[23:28] So, a young monk goes to sleep one night. He begins to dream and he dreams that he's climbing a beautiful mountain. As the dream goes on, the sunlight on the path starts to fade and large boulders begin to appear. Fissures and cracks develop and the young monk is forced into the woods to continue on his path in his dream. Soon, wolves can be heard rustling in the wood as the monk proceeds up the path of the mountain. And then, the young monk turns a corner and is confronted with the most horrific monster he has ever imagined. The monster pursues him mercilessly and finally corners him between a sheer precipice and the face of a cliff.
[24:33] Terrified, the young monk throws up his hands and shouts to the monster, "What do you want from me?!" at which point the monster steps back. He tilts his head sideways and he looks at the monk quizzically and he said, "How should I know? This is your dream."
[24:58] [laughter]
Ann: [25:03] So, I will be really dismayed if the next generation of librarian leaders is intimidated by the challenges of leadership and is unprepared for the financial, human, operational and technical management skills required to manage a 21st century library. So, another thing, it seems to me, we need to be attentive to, is understanding and managing the expectations of the next generation of library leaders. [25:38] What if they look at the leadership roles of today and say, "That's not my dream." What skills and experiences do we need to be offering now in our library schools and in our mentoring relationships with those who will be leaders within the next ten years so that the next generation of leaders will be confident and prepared to assume leadership roles in the 21st century?[26:08] Now, there are many strategies for becoming a leader. In fact, as we just heard, you can read over 100,000 books that will tell you how to be a manager. Most of those books will focus on what is known as "C level functions." "C" in this terminology means "Chief" as in "Chief Executive Officer, " "Chief Technical Officer, " Chief Operating Officer or "Chief Information Officer."
[26:38] These are important skills and it is important for librarians to achieve C level functions in their work. But, for librarians, archivists and information scientists, it seems to me there are other Cs that matter; community, citizenship, consistency in the best sense of the word, which means reliability. We customize the services that we provide to our communities. We provide camaraderie to one another and indeed, we think about children.
[27:16] So, there is lots of Cs in our lives that go beyond being a chief and that in my mind flavor the ethos and the ethic of what it means to be a librarian, archivist or information scientist. Attributes of leadership that are common across GSLIS graduates are all indicative of leadership as a reflective art.
[27:44] Other Cs that applies to our work as we become leaders includes courage. Not courage for the sake of courage, but courage based on conviction of the values that librarians bring to society. Our colleagues in Connecticut who stood up to the Patriot Act showed, in my mind, true courage. This was not an easy thing to do, but on a day-to-day basis, librarians all across the land confront the challenges of their work and their lives with a true courage that's based on conviction of the values of librarianship.
[28:29] Another indicative aspect of leadership of librarians is commitment. Commitment means, in my mind, the willingness to pursue that which is important to a community of service, even if we're not ready. Right now, some of us who work in the academic world have two enormous opportunities for which, in fact, we are not very well prepared. But, there is a moment in time now that if we don't take advantage of those opportunities based on our commitment to our community of service, we will have missed an extraordinary chance to move librarianship and library leadership forward.
[29:09] The first of these initiatives is the mandate to the national institutes of health to make available publicly the peer review papers that are written pursuant to an IH-funded research. This is an extraordinary opportunity for librarians to participate with the National Library of Medicine in developing a system whereby research, medical research in particular, is captured and made available to the tax payers of this country in a way that is open and freely accessible.
[29:47] Librarians have led the charge along with others in Washington to make this initiative possible and we now find ourselves in the position where we need to help implement the plan. So, across academic libraries and medical libraries everywhere, librarians are pulling up their socks, building repositories, talking with their faculty, pursuing strategic leadership roles in helping this country make available the peer-reviewed research results of federally-funded medical research. It's really an extraordinary opportunity and an enormous leadership challenge for us.
[30:31] A second opportunity that speaks to librarians' interest in commitment to communities of service seems to me to be flowing from an initiative in the National Science Foundation which is to develop a national cyber infrastructure to support science data that's generated with tax payer money again. A call went out from the National Science Foundation, earlier, I guess last year, asking for institutions to propose solutions to the capture and management of the large data sets that scientists create and need to use.
[31:13] Librarians lobbied hard behind the scenes when that RFP was being developed and as a consequence, the RFP specifies that librarians should be included in consideration of solutions. Now, who among us is ready to handle large scale scientific data sets? And the answer is, very few. But, we have commitment and we have courage and every one of the second round proposals that is moving forward has librarian participation in it. It's a very interesting point in time for us, a fantastic opportunity, if we are successful to redefine what it means to provide information service to the academy, to science, to the nation. We are poised to do this.
[32:08] We do this not because we're doing it for ourselves but we do it out of commitment to our community of service. We do it based on our fundamental assumptions about our responsibilities to our domain expertise and the practice of the profession of librarianship.
[32:29] Another "C" that defines librarians and librarian leadership is clarity of purpose. Libraries often serve the intellectually active but less powerful members of a community. In the academy, that's undergraduates, graduate students, post docs, junior faculty public libraries are filled with children, teens, the retired or underemployed. Those who can't afford or don't want to own everything they need.
[33:01] Ambitious businesses, too small to have their own libraries, take great advantage of information, scientist skills in their local public libraries. There's a wonderful, I've forgotten now which of the women's magazines it is, Women's Day maybe, there's a wonderful series being run on how my library made a difference in my life. I see Jasmine's nodding, yes. She'll say something about that later this afternoon. [laughs]
[33:34] It's really quite extraordinary to me that a magazine that reaches out to women across the country is featuring the ways that public libraries change women's lives, the way that public libraries support women in their efforts to build businesses. It's just a really wonderful example of the kind of clarity of purpose that libraries and librarians bring to their leadership roles.
[34:08] I hope that GSLIS will closely monitor the research and the theory that is emerging from business schools regarding the management of the non profit social enterprises. I hope that GSLIS will offer degree oriented and continuing education in this important area. I hope for more partnerships between computer science and information science. I hope that our confidence in our professional practice and our domain expertise will together take us to new insights and new heights of leadership.
[34:47] Meanwhile, I hope library leaders; those of you who are here in this room will lead up, will lead with integrity, will lead by listening and lead with your heads as well as your hearts. What do I mean when I say lead up?
[35:05] Most of the people that libraries end up reporting to; in fact know very little about libraries and what they do. When I was a young librarian I remember being at a cocktail party talking to a business man and when I said I was a librarian he said to me, "How interesting, what wonderful work that must be. Tell me do you aspire to own your own library at some point in your career?"
[35:33] [laughter]
Ann: [35:39] We need to lead up when we talk about what it is we do and what our values and what are services that we provide. [35:49] One of the high points in my personal career in the category of leading up came not too long ago. A senior academic officer who has a significant role in my budget at MIT, looked me in the eye and said, "I have no idea what you do. I have no idea how you do it. I don't know what it costs us and it's probably not much in the scheme of things. I just know that everyone whose judgment I trust knows who you are, knows who your staff are and says, we would be dead without an excellent library and we need to fund you adequately. I don't know what I'm thanking you for, but thank you."[36:41] [laughter]
Ann: [36:47] We need to lead up. I think we need to lead with integrity and we're very proud of our integrity. I say this not because I think we need to be exhorted to have integrity but just to remind us that in integrity is an important part of how we think about our leadership role in our profession and in our communities. [37:07] Mark Twain famously remarked that when it came to integrity he had a higher, grander standard than did George Washington. George Washington, Twain said, cannot tell a lie. I on the other hand can perfectly well lie but won't.[37:27] [laughter]
Ann: [37:30] Integrity is an important part of how we imagine ourselves and we need to continue to lead with integrity. [37:38] Lead by listening. The leaders from whom I have learned the most over the course of my career were those who listened the best. It's been my privilege in my career to work with mayors and deans, with university presidents and chairmen of the board, with five star generals and noble laureates. I will say that the leaders who most influenced me were the ones who, when I walked into the office to talk to them said, "Sit down. How are you? What's going on with you? Tell me what's up? What do I need to know?" They listened carefully to what I had to say.[38:21] We need to listen carefully as we sit on the cusp of a leadership transition to those who have knowledge of the past and some wisdom and insights. We also need to think carefully to the next generation of leaders who are coming along who have great ideas, fresh insights and new tools and skills.
[38:43] Finally, I think we need to lead with our heads as well as our hearts. I am impatient as you can probably tell. For better understanding of the ways we can adapt to business principles to the unique dimensions of non profit library organizations.
[39:00] Management approaches and frameworks created specifically for our sector of the non profit world would be in my mind, most welcome. Collection management shares a lot with business logistics. Cataloging shares understandings with inventory control. The organization of libraries cannot but benefit from business process techniques that have developed in the for profit sector.
[39:29] At the end of the day leadership is not about you. Leadership is how behave because of you. In the 15th century Lao-tze wrote that when the skillful leader is gone, the people will say, "Progress happened naturally."
[39:54] Thank you for listening.