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It's taken me longer than expected to get this post up...busy day today with lots of interesting conversations going on. But these are the scattered notes (along with tweets from @itgirl and @alicesneary) from the Symposium speaker on Friday, Michael Brown:

Loretta Parham kicks of the OCLC Symposium. We all do PT *physical training*!

Michael Brown, CEO of CityYear
His first library—Belmont, Massachusetts. He remembers his early experiences with the public libraries.
Boston loves its libraries (source of pride for the community).
Widener Library, his introduction to philanthropy. (The appeal is around something to do with leaving a legacy and personal concerns.)

--We’re in the same business, CityYear and libraries: Citizenship and democracy. Libraries help underscore what it means to be human.
“Getting my library card was like citizenship; it was like American citizenship.” –Oprah Winfrey

Why did he start CityYear?
Born in 1960—the civil rights movement, the moon landing, Star Trek—feeling of intense engagement
He became Passion-Struck. He worked on Capitol Hill for Leon Panetta,
HR2500—Study the commission of volunteer national service: tapping the civic power of youth.
• Life changing benefits (access to college, fulfilling the American dream)
• Needed Services
• Civil Rights
• Rite of Passage
• Inspire to Action

Action Tank – “National Service or Bust”
--Most Americans get excited about the idea of national service, once you explain it
--This isn’t a voting issue

Every meeting had to be inspirational.
Core member handbook: every member of CityYear has to register to vote, pay taxes, and have a library card.
Entrepreneurship: Timberland supplied the boots: boots, brands and beliefs. Timberland outfits the corps. Timberland provides 40 paid hours of volunteer service for employees.
Had to have uniforms—Promoting the concept. This is about service and idealism.
We did calisthenics in front of Boston Public Library every morning.

We had to engage the public sector. Wrote to all Presidential candidates.
Clinton said it was his trip to CityYear that inspired the development of Americorps.

Time magazine wanted to do a cover story on national service. (You never know who is going to be your next champion.)

Edward M Kennedy Serve America Act. Idealism of Young People, showing they can make a difference.

Now they’re focusing on the High school dropout crisis. Every 26 seconds a child drops out of school. Goal is to reach 50% of the potential drop outs.

6 Major lessons learned along the way:

1. Mantra: COME VISIT! All commitments are experiential.
2. Find a sponsor for it: Get a sponsor for everything (Timberland for Boots)
3. Build partnerships on Reciprocity and Engagement—even when it doesn’t seem like there’s a fit. (CareForce One: CSX has a truck full of rakes, shovels, etc. and it goes to small communities where CSX drives through and helps them clean communities, graffiti, etc.)
4. Every institution has unique assets. (CityYear has young people’s energy)
5. Give a role for citizens in your institution. Serve-A-Thon (One-day where everyone else gets to do what CityYear does.) Create alumni—make peo

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Cathy De Rosa kicks off the OCLC Symposium on maintaining leadership and thinking about how to deliver great customer service.

People are thinking differently about their choices today--no longer trading up but trading off. Libraries have the opportunity to differentiate.

The future can't simply be "more of the same."

Joseph Michelli
How do we drive a change experience with sustainability? (If we increase our foot traffic, we have to increase the funding.)
When Fish Fly
The New Gold Standard
The Starbucks Experience

Example from the Pike Place Fish Market: if you approach it only as a transactional business, you will lose. The first act of love is to listen: Let's treat people who come up to the Fish Stand as being World Famous. (An experiential brand was born.)
They focused only on creating the experience that the customer was really something special. (They stopped worrying about selling fish.) The product is exactly the same as it was before...

It's not about being interesting, it's being interested in people. The relevance goes up. It's not about entertaining people, it's about being relevant.

Experiential Brand Statements:
Ritz-Carleton Hotels. "Create the home of a loving parent." Things magically pop-up and show up. Every employee from the first day is told that this is the brand experience. Everyone on staff is given $2,000 per day to increase people's experience. They put a process in to deliver this experience.

Starbucks. "Create a third place--the living room of the community."

What We Know from Consumer Behavior
*Even in difficult times 50% of consumers will pay more for a better experience. --2009 Harris Interactive
*50% of customers leave businesses because of bad experiences.--Accenture
*Companies ...successful in creating both functional and emotional bonding with customers are [much more successful].

Can we build experiences that reinforce the library as a transformative place?

We have to live the brand on the inside first. For employees--this is a place for you to personally transform and for you to help others. (Example of employee experience in a production only model--Finnish Tax man died in his office. No one knew for 2 days.)

Ritz-Carleton. Selection process for employees (not hiring--being selected, we're going to listen to you.) Day 21 check on employees. Day 365 birthday celebration of staff being with them. This is a designed touchpoint map.

What experiences can we drive to help make it clear: this place is where you go to have life-changing experiences.

Designing Different Experiences Based on Actual Customer value.
RBC Bank rates each of its 2 million customers. High value customers get special treatment. Customer attrition is down 50% in the last 5 years. Unprofitable customers down by 6%, too.

Questions to ponder:
Is your brand promise experiential? Does it reflect transformation? Infrastructure? Necessity? the future? ROI?

Have you created staff, user, politician, academic leadership, and community experience touchpoint maps?

Can your staff articulate an experience--or a transaction?

**It's all about Service.**
Service is a flawless product, Delivered exactly as a member wants, in an environment of caring.

Create an experience so people can't resist the urge to pull the lever for "Yes."

We're getting ready for the OCLC Symposium here in Chicago at the Hilton Grand Ballroom. The presentation is ready, movies queued and backups made. I'll be blogging/tweeting as much as I can, although there's no internet in the ballroom. (Hilton FAIL)

We are about 20 minutes from getting underway with the OCLC Symposium. The room is filling up nicely, and our speakers are getting ready. I forgot I had moved my photo download pointer to the new 500 Gig hard drive...so I will have to post photos up after that fact. Make your way over, if you're in Denver... Read the rest of this post

True Story about a Horrible Business meeting where "we already do that" killed all innovation ideas.

*Intelligence is wildly overrated as a virtue.* What holds us back is not that we’re not smart enough. “Yeah yeah yeah, we do that”—self-delusion is a big obstacle. If we talked about it, it’s happening?

Internet designed to be a network of networks: exchange and share information (interoperable). Exchange, sharing and interoperability.

Real big potential win for libraries: on an organizational level: which partners, colleagues and peers should we interoperate with? For us as an organization (not just as a creator of technologies.)

The most important product of the Mines… (Obligatory Profound Design Quote) is the Miner.
(Not the stuff they did out of the ground. It’s the people. It’s the system. It’s the human capital.)

The most Important product of the network is the networker. The kinds of networks we build…depend on what kinds of networkers we really want people to be.

What’s the most Important Product of the Library?

Mission statements, public documents that answer this question.
(Readers) and (Research)
“A Scholar is a Library’s Way of Creating Another library.”
What SHOULD the most important Product of the Library be?

What institutional innovations and adaptations best boost your chances of getting there? (And who owns the keys?)

“Competition” –like “innovation"�is a means to an End.
Frenemies/Froes? Are people a competitor or a co-marketer?
Spectre of competition—Institutions seek protection, instead of rising to the challenge.

“Competition” is about Perceived Value from Choice.
Newspaper circulation has stayed flat since 1950. Average reader age: 56.
Newspapers don’t know how to compete. Reluctance to creatively compete.
Rupert Murdock always buys the 2nd best—he competes. It’s the perceived value.

Libraries as physical spaces that house books and artifacts= no competition. We’re great.
Libraries as information=huge space to compete in.
Libraries are creatures of subsidy rather than market forces.

How do your uses and user communities brand you as a competitor?
“Serving the community” “Serving the underserved”
Permit Competition
Or
Permit Subsidy
?

4 particular things as suggested actions
1. Learning from our Lead users. (What is the segment of users that we learn the most from? Not just segments—but segments we learn from.)
2. With Whom Do we want to collaborate to Create value? Why?
(Collaborative—who creates value…what are our organizational protocols?)
3. Nurturing our Best Internal Arguments/Disagreements (be transparent—make your user know what’s going on. Don’t seal off the complexity
4. Establishing “Liberatory” (a mash-up of library and laboratory) that best attract talent and inspire hypotheses.

What does the institution itself stand for? Provoke new thinking and new value.
Success comes not from taking the path of least resistance but the path of maximum advantage.

Alice's note: Once again, hotels are not willing to provide widespread wifi access without paying through the nose in the 4 digit range. So Beth Gallaway and a few other library bloggers sat on the sides and took notes to post later.
These are them...

Full house! Lots of people here. In fact, the hotel staff started bringing in more chairs…


Andrew Pace kicks off the Symposium
Creativity Exercise:
What is your Greatest Resource?
What is your Greatest Challenge?
What if…(dangerous ideas)
*We stopped cataloging?
*We participated fully with the FBI? (Sienfeld’s Library Cop)
*We mased up Connexion x WoW=WorldCat of Warcraft…

Michael Schrage (keynote)

The Content of the Audience is more important than the Content of the Talk.
The economics of innovation:
How do organizations use models and prototypes and manage risks and innovation?
Emphasis: Managing the challenge of institution innovation. (immovable bureacracies?)
Is it harder for a good library to be innovative than an entrepreneur?

Definition: Innovation is the Conversion of “Novelty” into “Value”
Whose novelty? Whose value?

Innovation is a means to an end. (Not an end unto itself.)
Is innovation a spice? Or the whole meal? Forces the organization to address what it really does.

*Innovation isn’t what innovators offer, it’s what customers, clients and users ADOPT.

Mobile phone: How many of us know how to use more than 20% of the features of our phones? (This isn’t being innovative for phone companies to create new, little used features…it’s being wasteful.)

We need a different paradigm: Move away from “creation of choice” and toward “Value from Use”
Make the center of gravity= Value for Use. Measure THAT.

Ask your users: “What’s the most Innovative thing you think we do?”

It's Activity Corner here on Tappity Tappity!

Here's a fun thing to do. Seriously. It's addicting like Orange Tic-Tacs and giant bricks of crack cocaine. (Or so I've heard...)

Instructions:

1. The first article title on this page is the name of your band.

2. The last four words of the very last quotation is the title of your album.

3. The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4. Use your graphics program of choice to throw them together, and post the result:

Here's a couple of mine:

Seriously. How could you not buy a couple of sweet CDs that looked like these? I know what I'm doing in my (ahem) off-time.