Librarian Business

Gotta be honest...

Right now I really don't care how many of part E need to be produced before part C can be assembled to be attached to part A. I have two personnel evaluations to finish and I would rather be focusing on those at the moment. But I have an exam this week in operations management and I need to do well on it. My mind keeps wandering around to things I'd like to be knitting and books I'd like to read.

I guess it's the mid-semester slump. I think I get it every semester but it fades once it trades places with end-of-semester push. 

A friend on FB said she was thinking about getting another degree. Is she nuts? I think I'm nuts for getting myself into this. Be careful what you ask for. True: I've wanted an MBA for a very long time - about 20 years, actually - and now is the time to do it. It's relevant to my job. It makes sense. But I'm weary. I don't get enough sleep and my sweetie isn't getting the attention she deserves. Man, am I going to owe her big time when this is finished. 

The hard part is that I really am interested in almost everything I'm learning in this program. It's just that the pull between school, home and job is harder than it was when I was working on my MLS. Maybe because I didn't have a very good job then. Maybe because the work was a lot easier. Maybe because I was a lot younger then and had more energy. Whatever the reason, it was different the last time around and I'm feeling it tonight.

Enough whining. Back to the books!

The Father of Modern Management

So it's late on Sunday night when I finish reading Inside Drucker's Brain, by Jeffrey A. Krames. I'm tired but determined to finish it. I get to the Epilogue and finally learn about Drucker's life from his childhood on up to the present. Half-way through, it hits me: he might never have had the opportunity to make the contribution to the world of management that he did. 

I knew he was Jewish and I knew he was from Vienna, Austria. But I hadn't put two and two together until I read that he and his fellow Jewish faculty members of the University of Frankfurt were told they were being fired and that if they tried to come back to work, they would be sent to a concentration camp. Drucker then made the decision to leave there. It was 1939. He escaped to England and found his way to the United States. 

The stories of those who escaped always hit me like a ton of bricks and I end up thinking about all of the people who did not escape. Sunday night I wondered how the business world would be different today without his voice.

I probably began reading Peter Drucker's books when I was working in the business news section of The Arizona Daily Star in the late 1980s and early 90s. He is considered to be the father of modern management and he may have been one of the first people to use the term "organization" to refer to a company. Describing the impact he has had on the world of business in the last 60 years is nearly impossible. One of his first books on the topic, The Future of Industrial Man, was published in 1942 and he never stopped thinking and writing until his final work, The Effective Executive In Action, was published in 2005.

I recommend Krames' book. I enjoyed the way he interspersed Drucker's theories with the experience of having spent time with him before he died in 2007. 

I found a copy of A Class with Drucker: The lost lessons of the world's greatest management teacher,by William A. Cohen, in a bookstore this weekend and The Definitive Drucker, by  Elizabeth Edersheim. is sitting on the shelf at my library. I'll check it out tomorrow. 

Pieces Fitting Together

I attended my first Maryland Library Association (MLA) Library Managers Division meeting this afternoon. I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would. I've been interested in becoming involved with MLA for awhile, now, but hadn't taken the time to really explore it. When I became a branch manager two months ago, pieces started fitting together and I started thinking more about how to become involved. I received a notice about today's meeting from the general MLA e-mail list I subscribe to and decided to put it on my calendar.

I thought it would be a much larger group than it was and that I'd feel pretty overwhelmed by it. Or something. I'm not sure I knew WHAT to expect. But it was a smallish group and our discussion was really quite useful. I'm going to become involved. It feels like a place where I can make a place for myself and actually do some good things. And it's really nice to be able to sit around a table with people from other library systems in the state to talk about things like dealing with behavior problems (patrons, not staff) and what the economy has done to our budgets and to our programming. We made a list of topics for future meetings that sounds great!

Thursday I'm taking a couple of hours off in order to go to a presentation at school being given by a couple of entrepreneurs who are doing cool things. And this week in my marketing class, I'm getting feedback from other students in the class on the marketing plan I and the rest of my group (four of us) wrote for an organization (with made-up facts, I learned by looking at the organization's REAL website). Accounting exam by the end of the week. Books to read for a Great Books conference at the end of March.

Mostly it feels a little overwhelming, but this week it feels exciting. Sometimes I question whether or not getting an MBA was a worthwhile thing as a librarian. Today I believe it absolutely is. I'm never bored and I stay up late a lot of nights, but I already think this is making me a better library manager - and I'm not even finished with the foundational classes yet!

Go to your local library

The demise of the public library has been greatly exaggerated. They are all the more important in these economic times. This week The Wall Street Journal has had two articles about libraries that I found interesting.

The first was on Thursday in my favorite bottom of page 1 column. I can just about count on reading something there that's interesting and, quite often, a little quirky. The article was about the use of libraries by job-seekers and others who have more time than usual on their hands. One aspect of my job that I love is teaching people how to use a computer. I have taught many people how to go online to fill out job applications and to use the information available to them beyond their own little world.

The second library-related piece ran in yesterday's edition. It was an essay by Ann Patchett about the recent report from the National Endowment for the Arts. According to the report, the number of people reading fiction is going up for the first time in 25 years.

Both pieces are worth reading.

Too many books!

Happy New Year!

One of my (few) resolutions for the new year is to do more blogging. In the process of coming to this resolution, I realized that I don't really want to blog about my life because, to be honest, my life isn't really that interesting. I work. I go to school. I come home and spend time with my sweetie doing interesting things such as reading books and knitting and studying. Maybe I will talk about those things here, but I want more from this little place on the Interwebs.

Mostly, I want a place to work out my thoughts about my life as a public librarian as that relates to all that I am learning in my MBA program. When I made the decision to go back to school, I did it, in part, because I was already spending a lot of time reading the things that I am now required to read for my program.

I'm also a newly-minted branch manager. There's a lot swimming around in my head these days. I can share some of it with a few people, but mostly, when I tell someone I'm reading the latest book on management theory or how to be more efficient with my time, their eyes glaze over. Creating a blog about these things will give me a place to talk about it.

There is so much out there: books, blogs, podcasts (I'm particularly fond of The Cranky Middle Manager and Management Craft), journals. If I find out about something cool, I'll write about it. If I read an interesting book, I'll write about it. You get the drill. If you have any suggestions for me and other readers, please share them!

I'm intending for 2009 to be a year of much learning and joy. The economy is in the dumpster, which is hurting more people than I can even imagine. I know it's easy for me to say that, in the midst of it all, life must go on as normally as possible.

Here we go! Weeeee!