Living in More Than One World

It’s not surprising that the new book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, by Jonah Berger, is itself catching on and getting lots of attention. Berger, who is in his early 30s, is the James G. Campbell Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He studies and teaches about how and why products and ideas go viral and get other forms of attention, both online and offline. These days it’s not only companies and other organizations that have to continually get the word out in effective ways about their offerings. Individuals have to do it too, and the marketplace is crowded, confusing and noisy.

Berger’s media attention has been impressive, especially for a new author. The book was reviewed in The New York Times and Boston Globe. He did a Q&A, “‘Contagious’ explains secret behind infectious ideas,” with my former colleague Sharon Jayson, in USA TODAY. Fast Company ran a profile by Lydia Dishman, “Why Ideas And Products Become Contagious: The Jonah Berger Formula,” and has also been running excerpts online. This Sunday, March 10th, he’ll be doing a book signing in Austin at the SXSW® Interactive Festival.

In 2011, after reading and being impressed by one of his scholarly articles, I interviewed Berger for a brief article on word of mouth marketing for the journal I edit, Leader to Leader. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover recently that he had published his book, which he told Jayson in USA TODAY is “about understanding why people talk and share. You could think about it as understanding conversations — the science of what we talk about.”

During a recent visit to New York City, I stumbled in to Edward Tufte’s gallery, ET Modern, only moments before he was to give a free talk at 2:00 PM. I had been meaning to visit the gallery, near the spectacular High Line in Chelsea, and fortuitously walked in oblivious to the fact that he would not only be there, but would be giving a periodic “report” on progress for his artistic work. Tufte, whom I also wrote about in 2009, remains a whirlwind of activity at 70. He is variously an artist, author, entrepreneur, teacher, scientist and philosopher. His gallery includes only his artworks, and also sells copies of his large, beautifully-produced self-published books on how best to convey graphical and statistical information, the most recent being 2006’s Beautiful Evidence. In 2010, President Obama appointed him as a member of the  Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. He consults, works as an artist/sculptor and teaches one-day courses around the country, “Presenting Data and Information.” All this comes after 33 years of teaching at Yale and Princeton. The main part of his talk was illustrated with projections of photos of his large-scale, open-space sculptures. He then answered questions about a variety of topics, including how he works and manages his time. He figures that he has perhaps ten more years of productive work. He also stayed to talk informally with people afterward. Although he is famous, he makes himself accessible. There is a demand for his work, and a continued interest in what he is doing and thinking, with considerable media coverage.

He is a role model for today’s knowledge workers, by building on a considerable body of work developed over many years; teaching and learning; being highly entrepreneurial (he self-published before it was the cool thing to do) and remaining relevant, with a name synonymous with quality. Whether or not he would consider it in these terms, he has a stellar personal brand. Drawing lessons from his work, and how he accomplishes that work, can be crucial for those faced with the necessity of producing a consistent high-quality output, making our thoughts understood and creating and sustaining a market for our work.

It’s been three weeks since I’ve been in Claremont, California; where I spent several days at the Drucker School and elsewhere at Claremont Graduate University and The Claremont Colleges. Now the new, Fall 2012 issue of The Flame, CGU’s excellent quarterly magazine, is available in print and online. I’ve been reading this regularly since my first visit to Claremont in 2002, when I began researching my book Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life.
The article  “A Hunger for Change” profiles Badiul Alam Majumdar, Vice President and Country Director, The Hunger Project-Bangladesh. More than 20 years ago, he gave up a tenured teaching position at Washington State University to return to Bangladesh, the country of his birth, to make a different type of difference in the world. He was one of Drucker’s earliest students at Claremont in the early 1970s.
What is the relationship of football and other sports to positive psychology and flow? That is what retired NFL player Damian Vaughn is trying to determine, as related in the article “Football, Flow, and Finding Your Way After Tearing an Achilles Tendon.” Vaughn now consults with athletes and business people on finding flow and peak performance, and is studying at CGU’s School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences (SBOS). He’s also working on two pilot studies at CGU’s Quality of Life Research Center with the founder of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whom I wrote about for USA TODAY in 2003.
There is also an enlightening Q&A, “The Mormon Moment, In Context” (three pages in the magazine, but extended online) with Patrick Q. Mason, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and Associate Professor of North American Religion at CGU’s School of Religion (SOR). Besides providing additional context on Mormonism and Mitt Romney, Mason also discusses his own life as a scholar and author, including the important role The Autobiography of Malcolm X has played in that life. “One of the reasons I like Malcolm,” Mason says, “personally and spiritually, is because he was a spiritual pilgrim. His life is a remarkable one of assimilating truth and searching for truth.”

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.

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.”