"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less"

I was going to post on something entirely different but.....the title quote, apparently from General Eric Shinseki, Retired Chief of Staff, US Army, shows up all over the web but I came across it in a Tom Peters interview who has used it as an epigraph in his book Re-imagine! Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age and I am putting it here in response to George's post this morning.

Sheesh! Perhaps the dismal attitudes George remarks on are a factor of inexperience and idealism, and jaded, older librarians such as George and myself have seen looming irrelevance personified in libraries by poor customer service, disinterest and lack of skills in budgeting, marketing and other basics of managing large organizations, and in librarians who seem to have forgotten that libraries are for people to use and as service organizations, libraries must accept and adapt to what those people want in the way of information/knowledge/content delivery.

One of the reactions from an audience member in a presentation Cathy De Rosa gave on the scan was to this needlessly adversarial "Google versus libraries" notion. This nice librarian said: "Patrons may not want to use our services, but they have to. We might not like going to the dentist, but we have to go just the same." I don't know about you all, but I find this pretty horrifying--that we collectively are so sure of the rightness and goodness of how we currently do business we will accept a place in the lives of our communities on the level of treating gum disease or having a root canal.

I really could go on for a long, long time on this because, in my personal non-OCLC sanctioned opinion, the inability or unwillingness to understand and accept the fundamental changes in user information seeking/finding/obtaining behaviour is at the core of the challenges facing our profession. I'll hold back and end with a quote from the Tom Peters interview. "But the bottom line is clear: We cannot turn back the clock. New enemies in new guises are here to stay. New technology is here to stay. New competitors are here to stay. My hope is that we can get beyond "coping" and learn to thrive amidst the volatility of the wild and wooly, horrible and wonderful years to come." Right on, Tom!