Having 'just' graduated from the MBA program, I know of a lot of new age management techniques and theories (that made consultants money hands over fist!) that just fell flat on their face and caused industry many growing pains when they tried to implement them, but suffered the results of both implementation (remember, most people resist change!) and the results of the failure of the theory (because after all it was just a fad).

When I go to the library, I tend to just stick to three sections (1) Technology - where I can go and get how-to books on 'new' technologies such as AJAX, (2) Animé - Where I can go get my dose of Sci-Fi excitement (X/1999) and drop-to-your-knees comedy (Sgt. Frog), and (3) Movies - If you are patient, the public library gets all the new movies, just request it and when it is available you will get to see it. I know it's a bit of a Soviet way of thinking, but if I really, really, really want to see a movie, I will just get it on on-demand, but by-en-large I can wait - but I diverge!

Recently my wife was looking in the business section of the library, because she wanted to have a look at what people have been writing about small businesses, so I ventured into the business section of the library with her. I noticed a whole heck of a lot of new age management books (with titles similar to the comic strip above). Some methodologies are OK, and can work, some are just total crap, but as the comic strip says 'it's crazy enough, it might just work!" When people try to implement an improvement strategy, based on one of these books, they
focus too much on the actual strategy and methodology itself and not on what they actually want to accomplish! Which is why things fail.

This reminds me of our library's BUM meetings (an unfortunate acronym, I know!). This was a prelude to the strategic planning meetings that we would later have. The point of the meeting, like all Strategic Planning Meetings, was supposed to be where do we see the library in 10 years and what is our action plan? OK. What did it devolve to? Instead of discussing goals, objectives and action plans for the future, we started talking about HEADLINES - yes! Headlines we would like to see in the newspaper about the library! The New age management BS-o-meter went off when I heard the plan of what we were doing. It could have stayed on point, it could have worked, but it didn't. People spent too much time stressing about the headlines to actually think of the basics of any Strategic Plan such as a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis!!!

Now this incident was many, many months ago, perhaps even last semester. There are no more BUM meetings (thank God!), but they have been replaced by actual strategic planning committees which now, thankfully, involve all library staff (after all, any good manager knows that good ideas float to the top, but if you don't involve the line workers, you don't have the opportunity to have them float up). To my knowledge, we have not had any strategic planning meetings, sub-meetings, pre-meetings, or even water-cooler talk! I wonder if people are still stick on the Headlines - extra extra, read all about it!