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“With the best interests of the library community in mind, we decided to view a relationship with OCLC as a potential collaboration partner, unclouded by legal issues,”

Companies are investing major resources in training employees to“think big,” “get inspired,” and nimbly embrace change. Some have made significant progress in the last several years, but most innovation initiatives fall flat. Why? Because too many change initiatives simply add another layer of processes to the to-do lists of already overwhelmed and tired employees. Rather than piling on more, you must begin by getting rid of things rather than continually building on what doesn’t work. In effect, you must “kill” your company.

Therein lies the dilemma, because even as we shunt aside innovation in favor of more immediately gratifying business initiatives, most of us know that innovation—the ability to develop novel and useful ideas with a business purpose—is what will really drive growth and carry our organizations into the future. It’s, therefore, imperative that we better balance how much time we spend working internally on ways to make the status quo more efficient with time we spend examining what’s changing externally so we can start questioning the status quo altogether. We need to accept some risk, because innovation requires taking risks. We need to find ways to develop and support a culture that makes room for innovative insight. A company mired in complicated processes and short-term results is simply not in a position to encourage innovation, no matter how many new programs its leaders talk about or implement, or how often they demand innovation from their employees. It just won’t work. To create the company of tomorrow, you must break down the bad habits, silos, and inhibitors that exist today. That’s why you have to kill the company first. It’s probably the most innovative thing a leader can do.

The challenge for most companies isn’t how to get people to be more innovative; it’s how to stop paying lip service to innovation and create a structure and culture in which it actually can flourish and deliver results.

So why is the FCC putting so much money toward a Digital Literacy Corps without enough involvement from the library community? Because we don’t have the tradition of being engaged in a philosophical praxis of librarianship. Having a habit of thinking deeply and critically about what it is that we do and why we do it, on a large scale, would enable and empower us to create good language and hopefully, in turn, to influence on a large scale the perception and understanding of librarians’ value to and impact on society.