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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.

“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,”

Any company that commits to the terms of the Defensive Patent License would have to pledge all of the patents it owns to this league of do-gooders. Any other member of the league would gain a free license to any other member’s patents, and no one in the league would be allowed to launch offensive patent lawsuits against other members of the league. Doing so would be grounds for the member to have its license revoked.

Regardless of the likelihood of success, it’s an intriguing idea. Even if it has no impact on the IBMs and Microsofts of the world, it might make trouble for patent trolls. If a patent has been de-weaponized, there’s no reason for a troll to buy it, Schultz said. “The trolls won’t go after the DPL people because they already have an irrevocable license, forever, for free,” he said. “We think this will decrease the weapon supply of trolls.”

My project work at the Lab has time and again shown the crucial importance not simply of cataloged records, but of cataloged records created to a high standard.

On the bibliographic side, every new Library of Congress subject heading a cataloger adds to a record creates a rich set of connective possibilities downstream for people like me.

But also: the expertise which catalogers bring to the task of comprehensive bibliographic description has proven crucial to me as a reference resource in my work of designing software to harvest and process bibliographic information