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!

Welcome to The Reading Club, sponsored by SLA’s Leadership & Management Division (LMD) as a global initiative to celebrate SLA’s Centennial – 100 years of developing innovative information leadership. We encourage everyone in the SLA community and beyond to join us.

The Reading Club promotes knowledge-sharing and the exchange of creative ideas, insights and trends. We support continuous learning to develop leadership skills and to help achieve professional success. We’re looking for new ideas and new resources and we’re looking to have some fun.

We’ll be posting on selected titles, but we encourage everyone to post on whatever they are reading. Full details are on our Titles List.

Our initial titles are:

• Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet by Ian McNeely and Lisa Wolverton
• Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace by Gordon MacKenzie.

We’re also looking at the BusinessBalls Website and two titles featured at the recent 100th SLA Conference:

• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin (also SLA 2008 keynote speaker)
• “The Hidden Traps in Decision Making,” Harvard Business Review (classic reprint) by Hammond, Raiffa & Keeney.

We encourage the formation of other Reading Clubs within our blog framework. An SLA Division or Chapter, or even a business group, could select a title and have their own members join and comment.

Everyone is welcome to comment on postings. You can also contribute postings about your own reading or about the blog’s featured titles, but you have to register for that. Please contact our blog owner, Alex Grigg, at agrigg@lexmark.com.

You don’t have to join SLA or LMD to participate in The Reading Club, or to form a Reading Club within our framework, but if you like what you see, head over to www.sla.org.  If you are already a member of SLA, read our Invitation to join the Leadership & Management Division.

Thank you to Dee, Katherine, Laura, Wendy, and Karen who initiated this venture and to Alex who helped make it a reality.

Looking forward to catching up on my long-overdue “must reads” and joining in the discussions!

Patricia Cia,
Centennial Commission Director, Leadership & Management Division

Starting With …

Mid-July: McNeely, Ian & Lisa Wolverton. Reinventing Knowledge: From Alexandria to the Internet. W.W. Norton & Co.,
2008. 9780393337716* (hdc, pbk pending)

End of July: Businessballs.com -
“Businessballs is a free ethical learning and development resource for
people and organizations, run by Alan Chapman, in Leicester, England” -
about.

End of August: Godin, Seth. Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. Porfolio, 2008. 9781591842330 (hdc)

Mid-November: Shook, John. Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor and Lead. Lean Enterprise Institute, 2008. 9781934109205

To Be Determined: MacKenzie, Gordon. Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace. Viking, 1998 9780670879830 (hdc)

To Be Determined: Raiffa, Howard, John S. Hammond, and Ralph L. Keeney. “The Hidden Traps in
Decision Making.” HBR Classic. Harvard Business Review. 84, no. 1 (January 2006).

I would like to add…

Is there something on your must-read list that you or your group would like to share? Please use the comment section below to suggest any additional items for discussion.

The Reading Club celebrates SLA’s Centennial in affiliation with SLA’s  Leadership and Management Division.

We read and comment on a wide variety of material, including professional works about creativity, leadership and information and perhaps some less professional material just for fun.  The group selects titles to read together.  We also welcome comments and postings about anything people are reading.

Everyone is welcome to comment on postings.  You can also contribute postings about your own reading or about the blog’s featured titles, but you have to register for that.  Please contact our blog owner, Alex Grigg, at agrigg@lexmark.com.

We use Typepad’s categories to list titles
that we are reading now or have already read.  If you have contacted
Alex and are able to post to The Reading Club, you may want to include
the title you are discussing as a category.  This will allow you to
group posts about your title, a good idea if you use The
Reading Club blog framework to form your own Reading Club.  To add your
title as a category, please contact Katherine Bertolucci at katherine@isisinform.com  

Inaugural Members of the Reading Club 

• Katherine Bertolucci
• Patricia Cia
• Laura Claggett
• Wendy Foster
• Alex Grigg
• Dee Magnoni
• Karen Reczek