Living in More Than One World

Improving your life at any time of year can seem overwhelming. That is especially true for mid-late January, with many people trying to implement new year’s resolutions or similar goals and strategies. Last year I wrote about keeping on track at a time when the weather is bleak and things don’t seem to be changing fast enough. I believe that my thoughts from last year are still valid, but you might want to add the ideas of Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman to the mix. I wrote about him in 2009 and 2011, and he has a new book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. It has drawn lots of attention, in part because it reminds us that not all self-help is helpful, and that we don’t necessarily help the situation by constantly putting pressure on ourselves to improve.

Burkeman addressed the resolutions issue last month in a guest article for Newsweek/The Daily Beast, which among other things introduced me to “the Buddhist-influenced Japanese psychologist Shoma Morita.” He quotes this advice from Morita, about essentially starting where you are, with what you have, warts-and-all, to “begin taking action now, while being neurotic or imperfect or a procrastinator or unhealthy or lazy or any other label by which you inaccurately describe yourself.”  Burkeman’s clear-eyed, realistic and fairly gentle way of bringing you back to earth is also evident in his latest column, about creative thinking, another area that is fraught with unreasonable expectations. A key takeaway for me is that there are many paths to improvement, happiness and enlightenment; you have to find what is right for you. The best authors in these genres forge a direct connection with their readers, a worthy aspiration that can slowly lead to improved lives.

Last week I wrote about my experiences in Claremont, California at Drucker Day, on November 10th. However, I also had the pleasure of spending November 8th and 9th, and part of November 7th, on the campuses of The Claremont Colleges and The Claremont Graduate University. In between meetings with friends at the Drucker School and the Drucker Institute, I also managed to take advantage of a few on-campus activities.
After arriving in town mid-day Wednesday, I attended a fascinating talk by John Bachmann, senior partner (and retired managing partner) of Edward Jones, and chairman of the Board of Visitors of the Drucker School and trustee of Claremont Graduate University. He was interviewed by Rick Wartzman, the Executive Director of the Drucker Institute, on “How I Became a CEO.” Bachmann is also a Distinguished Visiting Assistant Professor at the Drucker School, and was a longtime friend and consulting partner of Peter Drucker. He is a perfect example of the many high-profile, highly accomplished leaders who were followers of Drucker.
A trait that Bachmann shares with Drucker, and so many of Drucker’s followers, is intense intellectual and cultural curiosity. This played out for Drucker in his interest in and collecting of Japanese art. During the Drucker Centennial in 2009, I attended the opening of an exhibit, “Zen! Japanese Paintings From the Sanso Collection,” of this collection on campus, at the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, at Scripps College. I returned there during this visit for another Japanese-themed exhibit, “Genji’s World in Japanese Woodblock Prints.” Maybe it was because it was late Friday, but I had the gallery all to myself.
I always enjoy going to the Honnold/Mudd library on campus, including the Honnold/Mudd Café. On Thursday I attended the library’s Claremont Discourse Lecture, “How American Bandstand Created the American Teenager,” by Scripps College professor Matt Delmont. It was based on his new book The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ‘n’ Roll, and Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia. As a pre-teen during that decade in Scranton, Pa., I religiously watched the show when it was a weekday, after-school offering. Matt’s lecture was highly interesting and intriguing, the same qualities I’m finding so far in the book. It provides new perspectives on Bandstand’s host, the late Dick Clark; and on rock music’s central role in the growing power of teenagers in the early baby-boom years. And gaining new perspectives is a perfect reason to spend a few days on a college campus.

How can sustainability become a profitable source of innovation? And how can we go beyond economic and environmental sustainability to achieve social sustainability through individually flourishing lives? Those were some of the main themes of Drucker Day 2012, an all-day gathering I attended on November 10th at the Drucker-Ito School at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif. The event (which I also wrote about last year) serves many purposes: as a tribute to Peter Drucker, a coming together of alumni, faculty, staff and friends of the school for fellowship, food and networking; and to examine challenging topics of importance in business and society. This year included a panel presentation on sustainability in Costa Rica, with Gabriela Llobet, general director of Cinde; Roberto Mata, CEO of the carbon-neutral coffee cooperative Coopedota; and Carmen Irene Alas, who is based in El Salvador, as the Chief Editor of the magazine Estrategia y Negocios.
Jeremy Hunter, an assistant professor at the Drucker School whom I wrote about in the recent post Mindfulness at Work (and Beyond), was featured in two sessions. The first, Re-envisioning Sustainable Business: From Cost Advantage to Flourishing; was in the morning for the entire group, presented with Chris Laszlo, a visiting professor at Drucker who is based at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland. (I also enjoyed Laszlo’s afternoon breakout session The Sustainability Frontier: Embedding Sustainability into Strategy for Competitive Advantage, with Drucker School professor Vijay Sathe, who also moderated the Costa Rica panel.)
Jeremy led a participatory afternoon breakout session, Cultivating Your Resources: Building Resilience from the Inside Out. The idea was that living in today’s hyper-connected, perpetually busy world has given many of us stress levels that are too high, producing unsustainable lifestyles that are potentially harmful to social sustainability. He led our group in a brief meditation, while we remained in our seats in the classroom. It was structured around ways to discover internal resources (such as positive experiences, favorite places or pieces of music) and external ones, such as “values, beliefs and experience that sustain and nourish you.” The act of briefly thinking deeply about, and paying attention to one of these resources produced positive changes in both body and mind for many of us. Of course, most of us won’t have Jeremy to personally guide our future meditations. As with sustainability, it is up to us to put it into practice.

Every autumn since 2009, when Berrett-Koehler published my book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, I have attended the inspirational BK Authors Cooperative Retreat, which I blogged about in 2011 and 2010. Once again it was held in a lovely setting, the Trinity Conference Center (which unfortunately will be closing soon), located in West Cornwall, Ct.
As always, I learned a lot from both the dedicated writers and members of the BK publishing team. Surprises and revelations were around every corner, all four days. I loved when the entire group came together, but especially meaningful were the small group sessions, where people were unfailingly open, giving and humorous.

Particularly interesting and meaningful were the extended “Deep Dives” into various topics. There were several on offer simultaneously; on Friday I chose Living & Working Proactive Leadership, led by Roberto Vargas; and Happiness vs. Growth, led by John de Graaf, on Saturday, which revolved around the Happiness Initiative. Roberto also led the deeply moving opening and closing ceremonies, on Friday and Sunday mornings, which blended the sacred and down-to-earth. The talent show and dance party were terrific. Music was weaved throughout the entire weekend, especially as we listened to and sang along with Barbara McAfee and connected with the ethereal flute-playing of Holly Blue Hawkins. The voice of Rachel Bagby was a revelation. A particular highlight was an intimate concert by singer/songwriter/author Marisa Handler on Saturday night.

There was also space for solitude, or spending time outside in the beautiful surroundings. Noah Blumenthal led a silent, walking meditation along a path that started at the conference center and then dramatically opened up along the Housatonic River. With train tracks on the other side, you could have been in the late 19th century. The spirit has continued in the days since, as people have been sharing photos, music and related reflections and memories. I am looking forward to next year’s retreat in Minnesota, with its inevitable sense of surprise and serendipity.

The new semester has started for many teachers and students, and more will join in after Labor Day. Although I am not teaching this semester, I’ve decided that now is a good time to write an updated version of my 2010 post about self-management for the new semester and school year. Even if you are not a teacher or student, it’s possible that teaching is part of your work, and all of us are engaged in continuous learning.
1.    Get Attuned to Your Well-Being. The influential psychologist/author Martin E.P. Seligman has extended his work on happiness into this area, under the acronym PERMA: positive emotion (including happiness), engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement.
2.    Look For Flow. Mihaly Csiskszentmihalyi introduced the world to the concept of flow. He is another psychologist/author who, like Seligman, is connected to the field of positive psychology. If you are in this state, inside or outside of class, you are completely engaged in a task and lose sense of time.
3.   Maintain Your Health. Because teaching and learning can be draining and stressful, it’s important to engage in exercise, and such mind-body techniques as yoga or the Alexander Technique.
4.    Connect to the World Beyond the Classroom. You can approach your own subjects with a fresher mind by occasional reading outside your discipline. Also, try to set a goal of attending one lecture or presentation by a visiting speaker on campus (or another campus in your area) in subjects different from your own.
5.    Understand Your Present Reality. You’ll have more mental space to teach and study if you understand what constitutes your “total life.”
I hope you find this streamlined set of tips to be useful on your teaching and learning journeys, this semester and beyond.

A major highlight of my just-completed course, The Special Library/Information Center, at the Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science, was The 17th Special Libraries Symposium, held on August 25th.
Eleven panelists donated their time to meet with my students: Joanne Berger- FDA Biosciences Library; Linda Broussard- SLA/Special Libraries Association; Cameron Gowan- Jones Day; James King- The National Institutes of Health; Rick Kowalski- Consumer Electronics Association; Thomas Mann- Library of Congress; Jennifer McMahan- U.S. Department of Justice; Susan O’Brian- The American Prospect; Angela Titone- Consumer Electronics Association; Joan Weeks- Library of Congress/CUA SLIS and Amanda Wilson- U.S. Department of Transportation. Our special guest on the panel was Derek Attig, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was this summer’s 2012 Google Policy Fellow at the American Library Association’s Washington, D.C. office.
Among the key takeaways on to how to begin and progress through a career journey in special libraries and related fields:
1. Get involved in SLA or a related professional association, where you can develop leadership skills, take on unfamiliar responsibilities, build friendships and your personal network, and stretch professionally.
2. Learn about contracts and how they are negotiated. Sit in on contract negotiations, and if necessary, learn about these areas away from the library.
3. Sign up for free webinars, including ones in different fields, to learn content and discover how they are produced.
4. Investigate the potential of becoming an electronic resource librarian, and become familiar with how mobile apps can serve organizations.
5. You may have to create your own job, or look for jobs not in libraries, but that call on library-like skills. Don’t limit yourself.
6. Keep developing your writing and presentation skills.
I’m grateful that the panelists made the time on a hot summer evening to help prepare a new generation of information professionals for success in this brave new world.

In my previous posts about the 2012 SLA/Special Libraries Association annual conference, I wrote about serendipity and networking, as well as my impromptu conversations with top executives from companies exhibiting at the INFO-EXPO. I also noted that my time in Chicago was somewhat limited, but I feel that I made the most of it. I really enjoyed Guy Kawasaki’s keynote, and finally had the opportunity to meet him briefly in person afterwards. Coincidentally, in my capacity as managing editor of Leader to Leader, I recently edited an article he wrote, Ten Steps to Enchanting Your Employees, for our Summer 2012 issue. And in 2004, I interviewed him on the phone for my USA TODAY review of his book The Art of the Start.
On July 16 I attended two sessions focused on the changing skills and roles of information professionals: Guy St. Clair’s The New Knowledge Services-Next Steps for Career Professionals; and the panel Reinventing Library Skills, moderated by Mary Talley, which included SLA’s incoming President-Elect Deb Hunt. The general vibe I got from both was that while librarians and related information pros should build on their existing skills, talents and experience to create and take advantage of new opportunities; the old days of linear career paths, and larger libraries (yet too often with marginal impact) were in most cases over and never coming back. During the Q&A in Guy St. Clair’s talk, I mentioned that such approaches could lead to a “clean slate effect,” for both individual professionals and organizations.
Both of the competitive intelligence sessions I attended, The Intelligence Café and Cross-Cultural Competitive Intelligence, were invigorating. I got the impression that CI could be a growth area for information professionals who were prepared to think and act in new ways. That’s sound advice for anyone in the profession; whether they are new professionals just out of school, in mid-career or longtime professionals looking for new challenges and opportunities. What differences can we make, individually and collectively, between now, and the 2013 annual conference, next June in San Diego?

On the SLA/Special Libraries Association annual conference website, Sara Batts and Liz Blankson-Hemans provide helpful hints on how conference attendees can best approach and talk to exhibitors. Without exhibitors paying to be part of this and related conferences, these events would be considerably scaled-down affairs.
One of the biggest revelations for me during my reduced schedule at the recent conference in Chicago was the opportunity to meet, learn from and network with top executives from vendors/exhibitors at the INFO-EXPO hall. Even though I am not in a position to buy any of their products or services, I had great impromptu conversations with a number of high-level people from a variety of companies, including Chris Hote, CEO-USA of Digimind, Jack W. Plunkett, CEO & Publisher of Plunkett Research, Ltd., Elisa Manzotti, Publisher of Future Science Group; and three executives from Aurora WDC: Founder & Chairman Arik Johnson, Director of Program Development Michel Bernaiche and Chief Learning Officer Dr. Craig Fleisher. The latter was also moderator of a terrific panel, Cross-Cultural Competitive Intelligence, and Aurora WDC sponsored several CI-related events at the conference. Chris Hote was a speaker at another highly-interesting session on CI, The Intelligence Café.
I imagine that there were other high-ranking people at some of the many other booths in the hall. And there were lots of opportunities to learn about new products and services, eat and drink, watch demonstrations and participate in raffles in the hall’s free-wheeling, welcoming atmosphere. A number of companies had free samples of their publications daily, such as The Financial Times, Dow Jones (Wall Street Journal) and Information Today.
It’s true that all of these companies and executives participate because they want to market their products and services. But they are also generous with their time, resources and talents-and deserve our gratitude.

This year’s SLA/Special Libraries Association annual conference in Chicago  is now complete. Although attendance appeared to be down from last year, it was still a great experience: a nonstop opportunity for networking and learning. It was also a special occasion for me, as I was honored to receive the Rose L. Vormelker Award “…for exceptional service to the information profession through the education and mentoring of students and working professionals.”
The conference took place in the middle of the semester for the course I teach as an adjunct professor at the Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science, The Special Library/Information Center. There are two classes (3 hours, 20 minutes each) per week for six weeks; Gretchen Sauvey of the United States Institute of Peace pinch-hit to teach the class for me on Monday, but I left the conference a day early, on Tuesday afternoon, to return to Washington for Wednesday’s class.
There was a nice symmetry to the fact that my co-honoree was Denise Callihan of PPG Industries, in Pittsburgh. We’ve been friends since we met at the 2006 conference in Baltimore, through one of my favorite networking strategies at conferences: intentionally sitting at a lunch table with people I’ve never met before.
SLA conferences are great for serendipity. While standing in the Social Media Lounge, sponsored by ProQuest/Dialog, I watched a brief video about the 2012 Roger K. Summit Scholarship being awarded to Elliott Hauser. It was a conversation between Summit, a legend in the world of information as the founder of Dialog, and Hauser, a Ph.D. student studying information science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Suddenly Summit himself, whom I had not met before, appeared at my side and started talking to me about the video. That’s the kind of unique experience that is all the more satisfying because it can’t be planned.
Along with Summit, I met many other highly interesting people this year at SLA. I will post again soon about my impressions of the conference sessions and the INFO-EXPO.

Many notable people will be delivering commencement addresses on campuses across the country this month. But it is worth looking back to May 31, 1964, when Peter Drucker delivered the commencement addresses at the University of Scranton, in Scranton, Pa.  I was born and raised there, and in 2010 I wrote about my return to the city in May of that year, to give a presentation about my book based on Drucker’s work.
The June 1, 1964 edition of The Scranton Times published a transcript of Drucker’s talk, though it is not online. (However, the Drucker Archives has an online photo of his honorary doctorate degree.) While congratulating the all-male graduates – the school began admitting women in 1972 – he reminded them of the responsibility to put their knowledge to work for the benefit of as many people as possible. He said their years of education represented sacrifices from parents and money from taxpayers; and that it wasn’t long before when most people left school at 14 to go to work.  Hopes for a society “free from prejudice” and other injustices depended on these and similar graduates;  “the first generation of the “knowledge revolution” who will have to prove whether we have invested our faith, our resources and our hopes wisely or foolishly.”
Familiar themes from his books of that period were sounded; the change from producing things to knowledge work; the relatively new demand for educated people and how teaching hadn’t changed much in hundreds of years. “But what education and knowledge mean to society, that has changed drastically, and within the lifetime of the older generation still living.”
Drucker said that power and influence should not be used for selfish ends. They and others like them around the country faced “a very much brighter future than young people have ever faced before.” That, however, also brought a considerable challenge: “I hope you will remember that in turn it is your responsibility to put our knowledge and your education to work where they produce the most – for you, for your families, for your society, for your country and for mankind.”