Living in More Than One World

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.

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.

When Peter Drucker began visiting Japan in the 1950s, I imagine he had to prepare and arrange his schedule by exchanging letters and possibly some expensive phone calls. In preparation for my recent Drucker-related (first) visit to Japan to speak at the Drucker Workshop 7th Annual Conference, I had the benefit of staying in no-cost touch ahead of time with the great people I’d be working with, whom I wrote about in my first post in this series. There were many details to be ironed out, unfolding over several months; mainly via email and Facebook. All were patient about answering my endless questions with targeted information and recommendations.
The same is true for two of my friends at the Drucker-Ito School in California, Jeremy Hunter and Emi Makino, both of whom have deep knowledge about and experience in Japan. Besides many emails, I discussed the upcoming trip in person with Jeremy last November and Emi this January.
Having strong connections with so many talented and generous people was a big reason my visit was so memorable. I finally got to meet in person William Reed, whom I’ve been corresponding with since he wrote a great post about my book in 2011. (He was born and raised in the United States, but has lived for years in Japan.) Will has developed a living in more than one world-type multi-pronged career built around writing, consulting, calligraphy and martial arts.
In the next installment of this series, I’ll write about some of the reading material (in print and online) before and during the visit that helped enrich my experience.

Earlier this week I wrote the first in a series of posts about my recent visit to Japan in support of the Japanese edition of my Peter Drucker-related book. As I mentioned, I worked closely with Chikao (Chuck) Ueno, Tomomasa Yagisawa and Joseph Lee, among others. All three were generous and kind to me and my wife, Deborah, during our week in Tokyo. We had personalized introductions to the city that would be hard to get otherwise.
And I was happy to meet the translator of my book, Yasushi Isaka. Chuck introduced him to the American edition when it was published in 2009. He immediately offered to translate it, which happened when Diamond (Drucker’s publisher) bought the translation rights in 2010.  We worked closely via email, but did not meet in person until I spoke at the Drucker Workshop 7th Annual Conference on May 26th, which he helped organize.
That day I also had the privilege of meeting one of the other speakers, Atsuo Ueda. Mr. Ueda was the supervisor for the translation of my book, a real honor for me, given that he was Drucker’s longtime translator and Japanese editor. After his presentation, I met and spoke with him briefly and had we had our picture taken together. Yasushi interviewed Mr. Ueda extensively for a series on Drucker in 2001. You can also find some highly interesting material from Mr. Ueda on the website of the Drucker Archives.
After my presentation (Bruce Rosenstein In Conversation with Joseph Lee), we went to the reception, which was held in another building. I met many interesting people and signed books (both the American and Japanese editions). Another highlight was meeting Natsumi Iwasaki, author of the multi-million selling book (so far only published in Japan), with the title loosely translated of What If a Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s ‘Management’? Natsumi has a varied career, and last year joined the Board of Advisors of the Drucker Institute.
My week in Tokyo was quite eventful: stay tuned for the next installment in this series!

On January 26th I had the honor of speaking at a Drucker Business Forum event in Pasadena, California: Living in More Than One World: Bruce Rosenstein in Conversation With Shannon Barnes. Shannon, a senior advisor for the EDGE group, was a great conversation partner/moderator, and his multidimensional life story was a perfect complement to the idea of living in more than one world.
The forums (free, but registration required) are produced by the Drucker School. They are a valuable combination of education and networking, especially during the continental breakfast before the program. The forums are for Drucker alumni, and other members of the Los Angeles-area business and professional community.
Some are held in Los Angeles, but others, including this one, are in Pasadena, co-presented by the flagship Southern California Public Radio (SCPR) station, 89.3 KPCC, at an impressive venue that is part of their building complex, The Crawford Family Forum. The latter’s website describes it as a “welcoming, non-partisan, knowledge-building space where Southern Californians of all backgrounds can engage in the face-to-face exchange of knowledge and ideas that is becoming increasingly rare in the digital era.”
The idea of living in more than one world, developing and nurturing multiple and diverse areas of your life (inside and outside the workplace), resonated with the audience. It was apparent from their questions during the Q&A, and in discussions afterwards at the book signing. Some had been even been students of Peter Drucker.
Participating was especially gratifying, given some of the high-profile previous speakers, such as Howard Schultz, Gretchen Morgenson and Nobel economics laureate Michael Spence. Future speakers include Rick Wartzman, the executive director of the Drucker Institute, on February 23.
After the event ended, I told Mark Crowley, KPCC’s vice president and general manager (and a Drucker School alum) about my background in college radio and with the Voice of America, and asked him for a tour, which was fascinating. Check out the station’s website for digital offerings, or to listen live. And if you live in Southern California, make it a point to attend a Drucker Business Forum this year. You never know where it may lead.

Last year, I spent the early days of November in Claremont, Ca., doing a presentation at the Drucker School and being on a panel of authors at  Drucker Day 2010, the culmination of a year’s celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Peter Drucker.
This year I was also in Claremont at the beginning of November, but for slightly different reasons: two days of intensive research in the Drucker Archives at the Drucker Institute, followed by Drucker Day 2011, the annual Drucker School event gathering together alumni, current students, faculty, staff and others.
Although there is a tremendous amount of free material that the archives maintain online, in cooperation with the Honnold/Mudd Library (the Claremont Colleges Library), there is still a lot of material that you can only access by being there. It’s truly a magical place.
The morning speaker for Drucker Day was Vivek Ranadivé, chairman and CEO of TIBCO; a pioneer of real-time computing technology and the author (with my former USA TODAY colleague Kevin Maney) of The Two-Second Advantage: How We Succeed by Anticipating the Future–Just Enough. Ranadivé was a captivating presenter,  weaving together business ideas with his compelling personal story, which began in India. He also recounted his adventures coaching his daughter’s basketball team. At first, he knew little about basketball, but the team’s eventual success was chronicled by Malcolm Gladwell in the 2009 New Yorker article How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules. Ranadivé is now co-owner and Vice Chairman of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
The afternoon session was a dialogue on job creation in California, with Michael Rossi, the newly appointed Senior Advisor for Jobs and Business Development in the Office of the Governor, being interviewed by Matthew DeBord of KPCC radio. Rossi has his own compelling personal story, growing up in a modest household, and rising to the heights of the banking world. His affection for his alma mater, University of California, Berkeley, was touching. He is adamant that no matter how important college is to job creation, even more crucial is the need for improvement in K-12 education.
Drucker Day was not only educational for me, but also a networking paradise, as I saw old friends and met new ones. It has been nearly six years since Drucker’s death, but his spirit permeated the entire day.

It’s been nearly two weeks since I attended the one-day annual conference of American Independent Writers. And it has been more than a week since I’ve returned from presenting at the 2011 SLA Annual Conference in Philadelphia. The ALA Annual Conference is beginning in New Orleans, but I won’t be there this year. I attended last year and in 2009, when I did the first book signing for Living in More Than One World. Professional conferences are great experiences, on many levels. They are a valuable way to learn a lot about a particular discipline in a relatively short period of time. In that spirit, last year I gave a thought exercise to my students at the Catholic University School of Library and Information Science. If you could attend any conference, anywhere, that was outside your professional discipline, but in an area of interest, what would you choose? The trick here is not to get sidetracked by location. Just because a conference happens to be in a city you’d like to visit isn’t a reason for choosing it. Rather, what professional discipline outside of your field would you like to learn more about, enough that you would spend three or four days immersed in it? I think this is a worthy thought process for any knowledge worker. It allows you to consider subjects you are curious about, and gives you the opportunity for checking online to see how those disciplines present their conferences. A quick source of ideas, for academic conferences, is Conference Alerts. Ideally, you are picking a field that is a stretch in terms of your current knowledge and experience. It’s true that this is all speculative, and in reality you are not going to be transported there. But just reading through the conference information online gives you worthwhile information about topics and people important to that subject. And who knows, maybe next year you’ll take a leap of faith and attend the conference on your own?

The SLA 2011 Annual Conference in Philadelphia has been over for two days. Now, for all of us who attended and participated, the hard work starts. The theme was “Future Ready,” and if you made the most of your time, you are better placed to face the future than you were a week ago.  My contribution was Creating Your Future the Peter Drucker Way, a Wednesday morning “Spotlight Session.” There was a sense of coming full circle: a number of people raised their hand when I asked how many had attended Drucker’s keynote at the SLA Annual Conference in Los Angeles in 2002. Although I had to miss this year’s closing keynote speaker, James Kane, I found Sunday’s opening keynote by Thomas Friedman to be highly interesting and relevant for information professionals. I drew a combination of information and inspiration from Friedman and many of the other presenters, including Larry Prusak, Guy St. Clair, James Matarazzo/Toby Pearlstein and Joe Murphy/Scott Brown, whose “60 Apps in 60 Minutes” was a supercharged look at apps that can inform and enrich our personal and professional lives. There was not time to do everything (for instance, I missed the presentation by the always-interesting Stephen Abram) or to talk to everyone. But I still became friends with many interesting people and renewed friendships with others. For the second straight year, people could “virtually” participate. And I  assign the students in The Special Library/Information Center, the class I teach at The Catholic University School of Library Information Science, to monitor the conference online, after the fact, and to interview two people who attended, for one of their major papers. Whether you participate in person or online, or during or after the conference itself, the big takeaways for me are that the future can be bright for information professionals who find the proper mix of the technological and the personal, and who can apply the human touch (including Prusak’s admonition about using good judgment) while taking advantage of relevant tools. All of this is hard work that demands creativity and perseverance. SLA members and other knowledge workers have the important, ongoing task of creating the future, beginning with the actions we take today.