During the summer months of June, July, and August vacation time is the next big to do item.  It is during vacation time that  information professionals may reflect on family, next steps of their professional career, and/or curl up with a nice book/ipad/e-reader.  Whether for personal or professional growth, books from a series or a particular author can provide another realm of reality which allow us to escape for a brief moments in time.

This month’s theme is books and authors.  So here are three simple questions to kick start a discussion:

1. What are you reading today? 
2. What format are you reading from, e.g. book, ipad, or e-reader?
3. Would you recommend it to others?

Schumpeter references the April Harvard Business Review in this piece on the value of failure — as long as lessons are learned. Our success culture is discussed, with authors Tom Peters, Stephen Covey, and Malcolm Gladwell highlighted. Acknowledging failure, though, is an important step in business success. Executives at Ford Motor Company are used as an example of improvement following ownership of real issues.

http://www.economist.com/node/18557776?fsrc=nlw|mgt|04-20-11|management_thinking

For this book review I’m going to try something a little different. I’ll be posting a brief review and then providing a few discussion questions that won’t necessarily require you to have read the book itself. The idea is to stimulate a little more commenting and discussion in the comments. We’ll see how that works.

The book I’m writing about today is called Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor, and Lead (http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/276865965). I was first turned onto this book by a few of the employees at my company who read it and suggested the library purchase a copy. Since we bought a copy it has been one of the books with the highest circulation numbers we have. So I figured I should give it a read despite my usual disdain for popular management books. I’ve got to say that I’m glad I picked it up.

The A3 Management Process is one of the main tools that Toyota uses to solve problems and facilitate lean management. A3 is simply the type of paper they would usually use to write their reports on, but the ideas behind the A3s go far beyond that. What they are intended to do is really get to the root sources of problems and to avoid jumping ahead to the first solution that comes to mind. The process can be broken down into about four or five main steps. The first step is what the book describes as “going to the gemba.” Gemba is a Japanese word meaning something like “real place.” Going to the gemba is the idea of becoming very familiar with the people involved in any particular issue and the work they do. Getting their input and understanding their view of what the problem is and how it might be resolved is integral the A3 process. Without going to the source and understanding all of the factors it is almost impossible to come up with an adequate solution. The second step in the A3 process is finding the root cause of a problem. This is sort of an extension of going to the gemba, but relates specifically to the problem at hand. This portion of the book introduces the idea of the “Five Whys” which is the notion that you need to continue to ask why something is happening until you get to the most basic cause of the problem. It may take more or less than five whys, but if you can continue to ask why about something more basic then you have not yet reached the root cause.

The next couple of steps deal more directly with providing solutions, or as the book prefers to call them “countermeasures.”  Solutions sound too final and those involved with A3 processes recognize that every countermeasure will provide its own set of problems to be worked on. In order to provide the best countermeasure(s) you need to use set-based decision-making. You must provide a range of possible countermeasures and work through them all with those people at the gemba to see what advantages and disadvantages exist with each of them. The A3 process also relies on Pull-Based Authority rather than assuming that those who are on the highest level of the command chain will make all of the decisions and that those at the lower levels will simply go along with those decisions. The idea is to talk through countermeasures until there is agreement and then get those who need to act to commit to seeing the process through. The A3 process promotes this by having those who take responsibility initial what they will do and when they will have it done.

The final step is to measure what the results of the countermeasure have been and determine if it is working. Even if it is mostly working that does not mean that additional problems have not arisen and may need to be dealt with. If, on the other hand, the countermeasure was not successful, then it is time to return to the beginning and see what else should be tried.

That is a brief summary of the contents of this book. What is most interesting about the way the book is designed is that it is set up to show managers and other people how to take others through the A3 process and encourage them to analyze problems and solutions in this way. The book is set up so that each chapter lets you look at the A3 process from the perspective of both a manager and his/her employee and see how the employee is encouraged to understand and use the process, while the manager gives the employee the room to make a few mistakes along the road to becoming a better A3 thinker.

All in all, Managing to Learn does a good job of explaining an interesting and useful management process while also showing how to put it into practice in the real world. The A3 process is shown to be a fairly scientific way in which to get at the root causes of problems and find viable solutions for them. I would say the book is definitely worth picking up.

Questions

1. Is the A3 process fundamentally at odds with the more recent internet/Web 2.0 idea of simply trying many things and seeing whether they work or not? Does it make more sense to do a detailed analysis and put forth a specific plan, or is it preferable to put a small amount of effort into many solutions and see which provides the best results?

2. The book examples of taking people through the A3 process all end in the near consensus of the employees involved and consensus is certainly a laudable goal. Do high levels of employee agreement seem realistic? Why or why not?

3. The A3 process places a high amount of importance on the thorough examination of problems and their solutions. This is somewhat at odds with the natural human impulse to find a quick answer and run with it, but could also lead to unnecessary stalling or foot dragging. Have you encountered either of these problems and/or do you have suggestions for avoiding them?

Alex Grigg

Those of us posting to the Reading Blog have been rather busy, as happens to most of us, so we’ve gone a little longer between posts than we originally intended. I’m just writing to draw everyone's attention to the fact that we have added a new title to the titles list. I will be doing a review and initiating a discussion of Managing to Learn within a week or two. That book has been heavily used by employees at my company because it gives a good overview of the A3 Management style and thought processes that have been so successfully used by Toyota and a growing number of other companies. Best of all for those of us who don't have a lot of extra reading time on our hands, it’s a relatively short book (138 pgs).

Pick up Managing to Learn now if you’d like to join in on the upcoming discussion!

In my post today I’m writing my review of Tribes by Seth Godin.  I’m going to start out with the things that I thought were most helpful and interesting about the book and then after that first paragraph I’m going to tell you why I wouldn’t bother picking it up if you haven’t already.  I know a lot of people liked the book so I expect some disagreement.  Feel free to use the comments section if you’d like to voice your own opinions, good or bad.

The main point of Godin’s book is that everyone is capable of being the leader of a tribe and that technology today makes it much easier to be one.  Being a leader also lets you make big, important, useful changes to the way things are done.  Tribes are basically just groups of people focused on a good idea, or a good new way of doing things.  Godin argues quite successfully that leaders aren’t just “the management,” instead leaders are the people who get a bunch of other people excited about an idea.  Those tribe members can come from anywhere, not just the people you happen to be above in the chain of command at your organization.  Godin gives dozens of examples of people who have been very successful at forming these kinds of tribes and who have accomplished some amazing things.  All of this is great.  It’s a little motivational speakerish, but it’s good to see that anyone should be capable of creating a movement and that those who create these movements can be very successful.  It is a good way of looking at the world.  Knowing you can make a difference, having a good idea, and speaking up and getting some people to agree with you is all it really takes.

One of my problems with the book, though, is that Godin doesn’t say much more than that.  He says what I said in that single paragraph over and over for 151 pages and gives some flashy examples.  They’re not even 151 long, weighty pages.  You can literally finish this book in an hour or two, depending on how fast you read.  Not that a good message in an easily digested package is a bad thing, but this message is overly simplistic and reads more like a pep talk rather than actual business advice.  Don’t get me wrong.  I understand the point Godin makes several times in the book, that he is not offering a step by step plan for success.  I have no problem with that.  One of the great faults I find with many business management books is that they provide step by step plans based on what happened to work once or twice in a couple of companies.  The problem here is that all Godin has done is removed the step by step plan from those types of books.  He is essentially showing us a few dozen successful tribes and then saying go be like them.  Godin doesn’t show us any tribes that were not successful in achieving their aims, nor does he give us much evidence to back up the vague things he does tell us.  In fact, he throws out some statements that are clearly untrue, or at least would require some explanation to be interpreted as true.  For example on pg. 36 he says “the best-selling books are always the surprise hits that come out of nowhere.”  Perhaps Godin had blocked out the increasing amount of frenzy during the subsequent releases of each Harry Potter book, but I have not.  Each one of the books in that seven book series sold more than the previous volume and there certainly was not much surprise at this fact.  You could perhaps argue that the success of the series as a whole was unexpected, but that’s not really saying the same thing.  In any case, that was just one statement that he may have exaggerated beyond reason and I could forgive him that.  My problem is more that the entire book is filled with statements like that and it is hard to know which ones are actually true.

One of the other annoying things about Tribes is that Godin acts as though everyone can be a leader all of the time.  He writes that “Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done,” but leadership “is about creating change that you believe in.” (13-14)  He goes on to say “Managers make widgets.  Leaders make change.” (14)  That may be true and I suppose his point is really that we need to allow the widget makers the chance to voice opinions and lead, but I’ve worked in factories that made widgets.  Those factories are not necessarily against change, but when your job is making widgets there aren’t all that many opportunities to propose earth shattering change.  I get the feeling while reading this book that it has been a long time since Godin had a job that was on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, if he ever had one at all.  Some of his other remarks about how management often works in big corporations seem equally off base.  He tends to makes it sound as though most of us are working in cubical farms under the lash of managers that accept no attempts by their underlings at change or improvement.  Even in the most poorly managed organizations that I’ve worked for I’ve never found that to be the case.  Managers tend to be just as willing to accept positive change as any normal person is.  This does partly support his main point that anybody can lead and form a tribe so it may be simply that his metaphorical “managers” are not meant to be taken literally.  Godin’s “managers” are completely separated from the leaders even though reality doesn’t really work that way.

My final complaint about the book is a small one.  If you’re already tired of hearing me whine about it, you won’t miss anything by skipping this last bit.  Feel free to move along to the comments if you wish.

Godin is far too optimistic about what kinds of things will start successful tribes.  He seems to be under the impression that only good ideas for positive change will be able to sprout new and fantastic tribes.  This is clearly not the case.  In fact, I would argue that the ideas that are most likely to start new tribes are the ones that simply fit the emotional needs of a group of people.  This is why conspiracy theories are always so popular and spread so fast.  Whenever a group of people really wants to believe something they have a hard time letting mere facts stand in their way.  The people who deny those facts often group together to form their own ill conceived tribes.  Think of the 9/11 truth movement, the Moon landing hoax supporters, or the holocaust deniers.  Those sorts of groups are gathering members to their tribes more and more easily.  Tribes can certainly also be the more positive groups that Godin uses as examples, but don’t forget that just because you’ve started a successful tribe and gained a group of supporters that it doesn’t necessarily mean you are right or that your change is good.

Alex Grigg

www.businessballs.com

When we set up the Reading Club we wanted it to be all inclusive, covering more than just hardcopy books, so I’m happy to write about businessballs.com. I use it as a sort of online reference work which I dip into as and when I need it – most recently when we went through our annual round of staff appraisals.

businessballs.com is a website set up by Alan Chapman and covers organisational and personal development. The businessballs name was something Alan originally created for the juggling balls which he used in his training and development. The site’s stated philosophy is to be ethical, practical, innovative, compassionate and enjoyable.

It provides masses of “free materials, articles, and ideas for ethical personal and organizational development, compassionate leadership, self-help and self-fulfilment”. It’s been going for about ten years now and is used by about a million people a month – so I’m clearly not the only person who finds it useful!

It’s very wide-ranging, covering topics from human resources to lifestyle and environment and from leadership and management to writing and communication. There are straightforward articles on topics such as business process modelling, McClelland’s motivational needs theory, and neuro-linguistic programming, and there’s a great collection of tools, templates, team-building exercises, surveys, motivational posters and much, much more. Everything is completely free without any need to log in or register and all materials are free for you to use in your own training, displays, etc providing you include the copyright and disclaimer details provided.

There’s some solid, serious material, such as contract negotiation or quality management, but there’s also some fun stuff including explanations of cockney rhyming slang and advice on speed dating. I guess that last one come under self-fulfilment.

As I said, I’ve just used it as an aid when dealing with appraisal. businessballs.com has a useful article on this which I gave to a staff member who had never before been through the appraisal process. It showed her that appraisal is a two-way tool for the benefit for both the employee and the employer. And it gave her some background on the theories behind it all (e.g. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and SMART task setting). There are lots of checklists for the appraiser and the appraisee which we both used to make life easier all round. Also relevant here was the training, learning and development advice which talks about developing people, not just their skills and knowledge, and focusing on learning, not just training. My organization has its own performance appraisal forms but anyone who doesn’t have these can download a perfectly adequate one from the businessballs.com website.

At first glance it’s not the most beautiful website in the world and it does have a UK bias, especially noticeable when citing employment law, but the general content has something useful for everyone. Have a look and see what it can help you with. As a group we could certainly find lots to keep us occupied in the Recommended Reading section.

Wendy Foster

Wendy.foster@carmarthen.wales.nhs.uk

Reinventing Knowledge: The Medieval Controversy of Alphabetical Order

(This was first published July 5, 2009 on IsisInBlog. It is the last post in this series for Reinventing Knowledge. We’ll start a new title in August and return to Reinventing Knowledge in September.)

In their Reinventing Knowledge chapter on monasteries and convents, Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton mention findability techniques developed following the invention of the page, including alphabetical order (p. 91). David Weinberger, in Everything Is Miscellaneous, also discusses the development of alphabetical order in the Middle Ages. He points out that it took a long time to catch on because, in his opinion, it was “conceptually confusing.” To prove his point about confusion, he quotes alphabetizing instructions from 1286, which apart from the funny spelling, are actually quite clear (pp. 26-27). Weinberger is correct, however, that alphabetical order took centuries to be accepted, but he is wrong about the reason. It was not too confusing, it was too easy.

According to Mary and Richard Rouse in their article “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page,”* the alphabet is an artificial method of ordering as opposed to a rational method. This distinction can be seen in glosses, reference works that explained details of the Bible without biblical interpretation. These glosses eventually evolved into glossaries. Information in early glosses appeared in the same order that it appeared in the Bible or other religious books. This is called a rational order. Even indexes were arranged in the same order as the book being indexed. To find something, you had to already know what page it was on. Rouse & Rouse indicate these early finding devices were meant to reflect the concept that the “universe is a harmonious whole” (p. 202). So the primary concern of arrangement was to promote philosophy not to find information.

That changed when authors of religious books needed streamlined access to information. As preachers, they started alphabetizing material called distinction collections to help them prepare weekly, or in 1200 perhaps daily, sermons. Alphabetical order is an artificial method because it has no purpose other than to arrange information. It does not reflect how the book is organized. It does not reflect a philosophical theory. It just puts material into a simple, easy to understand structure. The preachers apologized for using alphabetical order, but they went ahead and developed the method because they needed to find information fast.

The controversy over alphabetical order continues today. An information architecture discussion list recently had a lively exchange about popularity ranking vs. the alphabet. One person preferred popularity because it was felt that alphabetical order is essentially random. The respondent here was confusing an artificial arrangement with a complete lack of order. More interesting, however, is the assumption that a rational order with unknown values, such as popularity, is preferable to an artificial order with known values, such as the alphabet. We pretty much all know the alphabet, but if you look at a list of items arranged by popularity, you can only guess at individual placement.

Function determines the form of an arrangement. Popularity and the alphabet serve different functions. There are many situations where popularity is the most valuable organizing choice. But if you just want to display information for fast location, those preachers in the Middle Ages developed a very easy method.

* The Rouse and Rouse article is available as a chapter in their book Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (1991) and in the conference proceedings Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century

Posted by
Katherine Bertolucci
Isis Information Services
Phoenix, AZ

Reinventing Knowledge: Early Information Architecture in the Page of a Book

(This post was first published June 13, 2009 on IsisInBlog. Some readers have had problems purchasing Reinventing Knowledge. As of this writing, Amazon is selling used copies of the hardback. Barnes & Noble has new and used copies of the hardback. The paperback will be for sale in September. We will continue this month posting the essays that have already appeared on IsisInBlog. Then we’ll start a new title in August. We’ll return to Reinventing Knowledge in September so everyone has a chance to purchase the book.)

After the page was invented as a findability fix for scrolls, medieval scribes started working on its information architecture. To learn more about the history of the page, I followed a citation in Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton, to the article by Mary and Richard Rouse “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers, and New Attitudes to the Page.” *

Pages in a book allowed readers to open to a specific passage, rather than having to scan while unrolling a scroll. Pages also allowed the simple finding device of a table of contents. Rouse and Rouse indicate that “virtually every twelfth- to fourteenth-century aid to study that has a prologue” (p. 197) includes material about ease of use with such phrases as “statim invenire” which means to find instantly. That’s three centuries of bragging about findability.

Once they discovered findability, monks and nuns who spent their entire existence praying and copying texts, began looking at the page itself as an opportunity for improvement. Some of their innovations included clearly delineated paragraphs and early quotation marks know as puncti, two dots (..) above the first word of the quote and a colon (:) above the last word. They wrote chapter headings in different colors and included running headlines, now known as headers and footers. They placed citations to the side of pertinent text, later moved to the bottom of the page and called footnotes.

These are standards we use today in print publishing. As Web pages developed in recent decades, new standards evolved. For example, most Web pages include navigation methods, frequently a line of buttons at the top or the side of the page. Copyright statements are often at the bottom of the page in small letters. While there are books about design standards, there are no laws that say a Webpage must be arranged in this way, but most of them are. As in the Middle Ages, these standardized protocols became established through practitioners’ development and use.

There is one significant difference. In the Middle Ages, information architects were confined to small groups working in monasteries and convents. Later, book production fell to publishers, still a small group. Today, anyone can design and publish a Webpage, thus the group that collectively agrees on standards is much larger. Many of its members are volunteers. There are no rules and anyone can veer from standardization. We are less surprised to see a Web page without navigation buttons than a published book without a title page.

Voluntary standardization is the collectivism promoted by many who see the Web as a unique reinvention of knowledge. But it seems to be a matter of scale. The monks and nuns invented information architecture and spent several centuries working out the details of the page. When the Internet community began building Web pages, they spent several years working out the details of our current standard practices.

* The Rouse and Rouse article is available as a chapter in their book Authentic Witnesses: Approaches to Medieval Texts and Manuscripts (1991), which I used, and in the conference proceedings Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds., 1982)

Katherine Bertolucci
Isis Information Services
Phoenix, AZ
katherine@isisinform.com

by Katherine Bertolucci

Welcome to The Reading Club. There’s more information about the Club in the official Welcome post from July 8 and also in the About page. Take a look at the Titles List page to see what we’re planning to read in the next few months. Please add some titles of your own.

You are also encouraged, starting now, to post your own thoughts about titles you are reading. Just contact our blog owner, Alex Grigg at agrigg@lexmark.com. He’ll help set you up to post.

I am honored to offer the second Reading Club post and the first post about reading. Organizing The Reading Club was a lot of fun and I want to thank all of our members: Patricia Cia, Laura Claggett, Wendy Foster, Alex Grigg, Dee Magnoni, and Karen Reczek. We’re delighted to be part of LMD’s contribution to SLA’s 100th Centennial.

This post originally appeared in my own IsisInBlogon May 28 as part of a series on Reinventing Knowledge. I’ll be posting other entries in the series from IsisInBlog for the next few weeks and then start publishing further posts on The Reading Club and IsisInBlog simultaneously.

Reinventing Knowledge in Times of Change

Currently reading Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton. I am interested in claims of knowledge reinvention during times of upheaval. In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger promotes our time of the World Wide Web as reinventing knowledge. Joseph Priestley, who discovered oxygen and photosynthesis, also promoted his time of the American and French Revolutions as reinventing knowledge.

Eras of massive change, such as Priestley’s and our own, encourage us to believe that our time on earth is the most important in all of history, so important that even knowledge is transformed. In their book, McNeeley and Wolverton look at actual changes in knowledge, primarily through the institutions that promoted them.

First up is the library at Alexandria. The change here is from the spoken word to the written word. That’s a huge change in knowledge. Writing and books existed before the library’s founding in 300 BCE, but only as an adjunct to the spoken word. Because authors dictated their words to scribes, writing was a service, not a scholarly activity. The speaker, not the writer, was honored. That changed when the Alexandrian library began collecting scrolls and providing scholars with convivial living arrangements.

During the transition from speech to text, there was much argument about the value of written ideas as opposed to spoken ideas. Socrates preferred the spoken word which he felt was more truthful. You could gauge the veracity of ideas by the reputation of the speaker. In contrast, the written word was separate from the author and there was no way, at least in Ancient Greece, of judging the reputation of the writer.

According to McNeeley and Wolverton, the oral versus written argument continued through the 18^th Century. It continues today with two forms of research – reading about ideas and talking about ideas with colleagues. If you want the latest information, do you reach for a database or a telephone? Do you feel more comfortable with a distant author or someone whose reputation you already know?

Social interaction on the Web may be another continuation of the argument. Are social sites the digital equivalence of oral rhetoric? Web connectivity encourages the free exchange of ideas, like a spoken discussion with a much bigger conversational group. The medium is written, but speed encourages spontaneous interaction. Many sites have reputation systems to help users gauge the veracity of other users. One might suggest the quality of discourse on today’s social sites is far below that of the ancient Greeks, but remember they didn’t write everything down.

Katherine Bertolucci, Isis Information Services, Phoenix, AZ, katherine@isisinform.com