Living in More Than One World

My four days at the 100th annual conference of the Special Libraries Association/SLA, in Washington, D.C are over. As I mentioned in earlier posts, I met many new people, reconnected with old friends and colleagues – including a number I had worked with during my 21 years at USA TODAY – and saw many of my former students, including two from the first class I taught, in 1996.  Nearly 6,000 information professionals from around the world attended, a 16% increase over last year’s conference; quite an accomplishment in this economy. The information sessions I attended were very good, and the INFO-EXPO hall had many interesting vendors. It was a great way to learn not only about new products and services, but to find out about information products and services from a wide variety of large and small organizations through quick demos and talking with people working at the booths. A conference of this size would not be possible without vendors’ financial participation.  Check out more about the conference – either if you didn’t attend, or if you attended but want to find out what you missed, since there were so many things going on simultaneously – at these blogs: SLA blog, Infotoday blog (from the editors of Information Today) and Stephen’s Lighthouse, the regular blog of information world luminary Stephen Abram. There are handouts from the conference on the SLA site, which I found through Gary Price’s ever-helpful Resource Shelf.  Next year’s SLA Annual Conference will be held June 13-16, 2010 in New Orleans. I’ll resume blogging in a few days, so I can concentrate on a two-day Berrett-Koehler Authors Cooperative marketing workshop, starting Thursday and hosted by ASTD, the American Society of Training & Development, in Alexandria, Va.

Current, former or prospective students – and students of life in general — can learn a lot from A cheaper, smarter road to college, and career, a triple book review by novelist Caroline Leavitt, who writes about self-help for The Boston Globe. The piece focuses on three intriguing-sounding books that aim to help people travel down unconventional roads to learning and self-development: The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education (by Maya Frost, founder of Education Design Institute), You Majored in What?: Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career (by Katharine Brooks, director of career services for the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, and Psychology Today blogger) and How to Love (by psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, also a Psychology Today blogger).  Since so many people are looking for new ways of thinking about life,  these titles seem timely and provocative. Leavitt favorably compares How to Love to Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Frost’s book is partially based on the decidedly unconventional higher education experience of her four daughters, which involved traveling far beyond their comfort zone to go to college. I was particularly drawn to Leavitt’s description of the “wise wandering” approach in Brooks’ book, “a system of positive psychology, chaos theory, and visual mapping techniques to help students – and anyone – figure out what skills they have, what personal values matter most to them, and how to channel it all into a career they’ll love.”

My second and final day at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. was a big success. I met more training and development professionals, and a number of people working for vendors/exhibitors who are attempting to sell products and services to this community.  I am including links to a handful of the companies and organizations of booths I visited. Since most people reading this will not have been at the conference, checking out their websites is the next best thing. WildWorks, a Dallas-based facilitation company, is featuring a new product, Drucker Unpacked, that gives organizations the capability to conduct self-facilitated workshops around Peter Drucker’s principles. They have ten kits based around various topics of Drucker’s management concepts. As of this writing, the package is not yet featured on their site. There are also a number of interesting publishers represented at the conference, including Wiley, HRD Press (Human Resource Development Press) and Simple Truths, which specializes in short inspirational and leadership books and DVDs. And as I mentioned Monday and Tuesday, my own publisher, Berrett-Koehler has a booth. Other organizations/sites worth checking out include GS Graduate School, American Management Association and Soundview Executive Book Summaries. If you couldn’t attend this year, the ASTD 2010 International Conference & Exposition will be held in Chicago, May 16-19, 2010.

Another brief post today, as I’ll return to the Expo hall of the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. Monday was fun and informative. Besides visiting the booth of my publisher, Berrett-Koehler, I talked to a number of people from a variety of organizations, and learned a lot more about the world of training and development. A big highlight of the day was getting to meet the legendary Ken Blanchard – who publishes some of his books through B-K –at the booth of the Ken Blanchard Companies. Blanchard is known for co-authoring many books, especially the multi-million selling The One Minute Manager. His presentation at the booth (meaning anyone in the hall could see it without charge or registration) was based on his new book Who Killed Change? Afterwards, he signed copies of a number of his books that were on sale through his company for a long line of people, many of whom had their picture taken with him.  I’m looking forward to learning more on day 2!

A very brief post today, as I will be spending most of the day at the Expo hall of the ASTD International Conference & Exposition, in Washington, D.C. I’ll be there to learn more about the training and development field, especially because I believe people in this profession will be interested in my forthcoming book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life. The self-development and lifelong learning values in the book seem to fit nicely with the work they do. I’ll also be checking in at the booth of my publisher, Berrett-Koehler. A number of B-K authors will be speaking at the event and signing books at the B-K booth, and I hope to meet some of them. I plan to write about my impressions of the Expo – I am not registered for any of the seminars or other activities – later in the week. If you see me there, please introduce yourself!

I’ve just discovered Harriet Swain’s delightful weekly series, How to Be a Student, on guardian.co.uk. It’s been running for a year and a half, and it’s all online. Although these concise columns are aimed at British university undergrads, they have broader relevance to anyone involved in ongoing learning (even if it’s informal) or teaching, no matter where you live.  I found it especially interesting as next week I begin a new teaching semester at The Catholic University of America School of Library and Information Science. Each column is titled The Art of…; May 26’s is The art of asking questions. Swain touches on not just studying skills in these columns, but also life skills that have relevance beyond the classroom. While this type of counsel could come off as didactic in the wrong hands, she adopts just the right tone, providing sensible and realistic advice in a witty and friendly voice.  In The art of asking questions, she says university is less about finding answers than learning to ask the right questions. She suggests continual practice related to what you want to learn: start with broad self-questions beginning with what you’re trying to achieve and work toward more specifics, such as why a particular book has been assigned, what point the author is trying to make, etc. From this follows asking questions in class and emailing questions to the professor. “Asking questions can help you to hone and clarify your ideas,” Swain writes, “but it’s a good idea to understand the difference between asking a question and randomly thinking aloud.”

I’ve read many references over the years to the BBC’s Reith Lectures, which have been given yearly (except in 1992) since 1948, to “advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest,” in honor of the BBC’s first director-general. But I didn’t realize how much material was available on past lectures – and the upcoming series – until finding producer Jennifer Clarke’s BBC Radio 4 May 25 blog post ‘Multiplatforming’ the Reith Lectures. Clarke explains that this year’s lectures, “A New Citizenship,” by Harvard government professor Michael Sandel, in addition to the traditional live lectures and broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service, will also have an array of social media and BBC radio, podcast and website activity. Sandel will be continuing a tradition that started with the philosopher Bertrand Russell (“Authority And The Individual”) and that has included many other distinguished lecturers, including the historian Arnold Toynbee (“The World and The West,” 1952), economist John Kenneth Galbraith (“The New Industrial State,” 1966), historian and former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin (“America and The World Experience,” 1975), the poet-playwright Wole Soyinka (“Climate of Fear,” 2004) and the conductor Daniel Barenboim (“In the Beginning Was Sound,” 2006). Sandel’s lectures will be broadcast beginning June 9 on BBC Radio 4, and June 13 on the BBC World Service. You can also listen to the 2008 lectures, “Chinese Vistas,” by Yale professor Jonathan Spence, and selected earlier lectures linked from that page. For the great majority of us who can’t be there in person, this sounds like a great self-education opportunity for the summer and beyond.

In an earlier post, I wrote about Ry Cooder and Nick Lowe’s upcoming European tour, and about the standard of musical excellence maintained over many years by both musicians, as well as their ability to work outside of their comfort zones. I had interviewed and written extensively about Lowe in my music writing days, though I never interviewed or met Cooder. Now comes word from Cooder’s record label, Nonesuch, that he has a collection of fiction, Los Angeles Stories, that will be made available only on the tour. This follows a novella that came with his recent album I, Flathead. Cooder is an embodiment of living in more than one world; as a musician working in many genres, record producer (including the eight million-selling Cuban music album Buena Vista Social Club and the subsequent documentary), soundtrack composer, musicologist and now author. The Nonesuch page links to Ry, Flathead; an extensive, unabridged interview of Cooder by Tony Scherman, in stopsmilingonline.com, the wide-ranging website of Stop Smiling magazine. It’s a fascinating conversation about Cooder’s life and work; especially how Buena Vista Social Club changed his life. One area I found particularly interesting was the crucial role of research in his work as a writer and musician. And be sure to read his comments at the end of the interview about the importance of learning and continually advancing your abilities.

I’m about to begin a teaching semester, and many of us will be either teaching, taking classes, pursuing degrees or involved in self-learning ventures this summer. In that spirit, you should benefit from Tad Waddington’s short and to-the-point May 22 Smarts blog on Psychology Today, Smarts: Four things worth learning about learning. Waddington, author of the book Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, demonstrates how with additional focused effort and thinking about what we are trying to learn, we’ll gain greater understanding and recall. This is especially true today when we are bombarded by so much material online, in print and on TV and radio. If you add that to the material you are teaching or learning, it can create serious information overload.  He suggests such strategies as reading and re-reading a passage for understanding, but then writing out or saying aloud its meaning.  Also: doing something backward as well as forward (it seems like this one can be fairly tricky), retesting to see if you really understand what you’re trying to learn or accomplish (see how he references Peter Drucker on this one) and trying to understand the theory or principle behind a fact, not just the fact itself. He intriguingly calls the latter behavior “a self-imposed learning disability.” That concept gives us something to think about as we transition to the summer months: how do we hold ourselves back by the way we think and learn?

The Boston.com Managing Your Money: Personal finance advice feature has a brief, intriguing May 20 entry by a local accountant, Jamie Downey, The Best Financial Advice I Ever Received. Downey expands on advice he heard from the author/sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer; to invest your time, rather than spend it. Downey examines his own life in a variety of categories, to demonstrate how he invests his time in various activities. His advice and personal example goes beyond finances to give an interesting blueprint for the intelligent, productive use of time. (Most of this time, by the way, is outside of the workplace. It would be interesting to see a similar list for time at work.) He identifies some areas of his life that he tries to use more productively, such as selective television viewing, and using travel and commuting hours productively. He then provides brief examples of  how he invests time in the following areas: reading, exercising, building relationships, time with family and thinking. He says that reading is the activity he increased the most, as the result of Gitomer’s advice. He devotes at least an hour a day to it, usually in the early morning, with coffee. You can probably add other categories to those included here for personal investment of time. But this is thought-provoking and seems reasonable and doable. Just as Gitomer inspired Downey, the latter has now inspired his readers to improve not only their finances, but the quality of each day of life.