 Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for coming to my program here in the afternoon session. At the end of the conference it's wonderful to see you all. My name is Adrienne Heracora and I am the director of the North Korea State University NLS program in Salt Lake City, Utah. We educate librarians across the region. And I'm also the library director for the Salt Lake City Public Library of the River Side Branch. So I do public library and academic library. I'm currently the Utah Library Association president and also co-chairing the MLA Leadership Institute. So it's been an exciting time in my career and what I'm going to talk to you today about is MBA learning and how business practices can inform the things we do in libraries and also help us partner with businesses in our community to serve them. First of all I was wondering, if anyone here has an MBA, you do wonderful. I'm glad to see that. Wonderful. Thanks for coming. This is something that I think librarians are starting to think about more and more. In 2003, Elizabeth Leonard, who was the reference librarian at Wake Forest University and worked with businesses, went to get her MBA. And she asked the question, why an MBA? Why would we want to do this? And she did studies, weighing the benefits of the MBA. And she felt like the one thing it provided increased subject knowledge and business, it also helped her person become a better leader and manager and when she did a survey others said the same thing. Also she felt like it was possible to get a promotion sometimes of the MBA learning and increased respect and credibility as well as sometimes salary. But also it takes librarians beyond the realm of just the library and sometimes into business industry and business librarianship or even becoming chief information officer for example in a business. I'm a public librarian. I serve businesses all the time. And in the library, I'm at the Dave Riverside branch of Public City Public Library now. I used to run what was called the Sugarhouse branch. And I work with what was called the Merchant's Association. And we embedded a librarian within the Merchant's Association. I'm sure you all know what embedded librarians are. We have someone at all of their association meetings and able to respond to their needs and help them with their resource knowledge. And we learned a lot from them too just being in that community. And in these economic times it definitely makes sense for libraries to develop about sending resources and partners in business development. I have a few slides today. If you're a slide person feel free to look at them. I'm not necessarily a slide person but since we're going to be talking about a lot of content sites I'd like to give them up on there. Another article from 2006 that was done in Bloomberg Business Week called the Library in the Next Step Things to an MBA. Explored how libraries have the basic knowledge that you can get in an MBA and we provide that to our community for free. There are an estimated 500,000 new small businesses launched in the United States annually. And of those 80% sales which is kind of a very specific. In the article the author explored what we offer as libraries at low or no cost to business leaders. And how does my benefit them. Things like how to get a business license, how to run a business plan, how to secure bank financing, how to trade patents with trademarks, conduct internet marketing, all industry trends or that demographic market. And a lot more. So libraries do all of this and some engage even deeper in their communities with workshops, seminars, assistance programs for businesses. In the article there was a program that was set in Manhattan in 2006 which was sponsored by Citibank. Citibank came to the library and said we'd really like to help small businesses in your area and we're willing to put some money up to make this happen by giving information out to the community and offering money as a competition for whoever can come to the library and learn about writing a business plan, writing about marketing. And so the story is that two friends came to this program and wanted to start a restaurant. They went through the whole program and they opened a restaurant called the Bota de la Mixto in Manhattan because they did such a good job in the program. And they got $10,000 for opening it in Star of Cash and they got $10,000 towards business related services. And that restaurant is still going strong today. So really they kind of got an empty experience through the library and when they opened on their brand opening night for a day they might have left the library. Most of what we're going to answer today is what about business learning for libraries? How can business learning benefit what we do? It's obvious that we're partners for businesses, but how can businesses help shape our thinking? The theme for the 2012 annual conference in Anaheim was transforming our libraries ourselves. We're all aware the information service provision is changing and librarians are not standing by the weight that we're looking for ways to stay strong and relevant in our field and to better serve our community. So let's think for a moment about the ways businesses change when they experience market forces or pressures. If you're a non-profit, it's going to be a little bit different than if you're a full-profit business. If you're for projects and your business flips, obviously you're going to have to make some quick adjustments or your bottom line is going to fail and you're going to go out of business. You have to generate revenue to survive. And I think if we think about this, if we compare business to the library, I'm going to ask all of you to help me fill in the blank. Successful businesses are just one word. What successful businesses are what? Profitable. Flexible, say again. Energetic. Energetic? Absolutely. Okay, let's try the libraries. Successful libraries are in the black. Yeah. As our businesses are flexible. Well, there is a great debate out there about businesses. Libraries are not businesses. And as we've already seen, businesses do fail at a high rate, so why would we even want to go there? There's a book written by Jim Codden called The Great. I don't know if any of you have read it. But in it, he did a lot of research to explore how businesses go from being big businesses, being great businesses, and out-compete their competitors using a number of measures that he found to be true for most businesses, including how do you define great, how do you develop level five leadership or be public level five leadership, who you give on the bus in your organization, some objective criteria for what a good settlement will be. You can start out by saying, well, what are the rules of this negotiation? What is our relationship that we're hoping to gain out of this? And let's brainstorm the event. How will we both know when we have a fair deal? And then before you start negotiating, you're going to want to put into place some preparation. And when business negotiators go in, they always have what they call prep docs, preparation documents. And when a negotiator walks into a room and they see the other party doesn't have prep docs in front of them, they know that they're probably going to get the best deal out of the situation. When you're developing prep docs, you're going to want to just basically put on paper for your own reference. What are your interests in this negotiation? What are mine? What are the other parties? And where do they overlap? Also, what are alternatives? What would constitute legitimacy and fairness in the deal? And how can I communicate with this party? What are the communication methods I might use to ruin this negotiation for me? Also, what are the relationships in this negotiation? Oftentimes, we are not working with a vendor just once. We might be working with them from home, and we don't want to just alienate that for a deal with a vendor or someone else. And also, you need to do your research and review ahead of time. You should research whatever deals people have gotten into on products, what reviews have been done, and you have that all in your mind going in. My brain is, you know, we can negotiate for services for our organizations, and that will translate into greater profit for our communities. And always, always remember, you want ethical short-term and long-term strategies that will help you move your mission and your vision forward. Okay, so another principle in business learning is competitive advantage. And competitive advantage is what makes you different, what makes you stand out from what else is available out there. In business, it answers the question, why should I buy from you? In a library, why should I use your library? And competitive advantage is paying value for your customers through processes, products, services, and you're hoping that it can't be duplicated by competitors. And we do have competitors with our brains, right? First thing you're going to look at is your RIN. It is your product, valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-positable. And hopefully, I've got them. Yeah, there they are. So valuable, we have to create value for our customers that they're willing to go out of their way for. Are they going to stop what they're doing in their day and come to the library, and why would they do that? Is it rare? Can other people match what we're doing, and can they give better delivery or service than what we can? Inimitable. Can what we do be easily imitated? It's certainly not easy to create the collections that our nation's libraries carry. We know that. And non-positable. We need to offer services, facilities, collections, staff that people can't get out for. You cannot replace librarians. You just can't. And then there are four building blocks to competitive advantage. You want efficiency, quality, customer responsiveness, and innovation. Efficiency. We need, as we talked about inputs and outputs earlier, you need to create the greatest output for your input. So what can you get for your projects that's going to make the biggest difference in your community? Quality. Are we providing the best information and databases and collections? Customer responsiveness. What do our patrons experience when they interact with our organization and its people? I like to tell my staff, please create waving fans. When they leave our building, we want them to talk about what they experienced in our library. And then innovation. Without it, our product loses appeal. If we're doing the same thing year after year, are they going to keep coming back? So we, right now in the city library, we're developing a new branch. I don't work here on that project for a number of years. And one of the first things we did was create an innovation and ideas community to inform the project. We had a Facebook page. And people could just do ideas, they could be crazy ideas, but at least it's trying to think of new ways to serve. And it's been a lot of fun to look at those innovations and think of how we can put those into a new building. We have a lot of competitive advantage at librarians. And we need to keep building on those aspects of what we do. And there are ways that we can do this. First of all, we need to develop a strategy formulation for our organization. And to do that, you're going to, of course, establish a mission. You need to also do an external analysis and internal analysis. And most libraries are lucky in that they have their mission in place, and they have a review process every so often to examine that and make sure that it's viewed well then and timely. And it's important for the people who work for us to know what that mission is and to have a good understanding of why it's there. You can do a lot of this with external analysis. And one of the external analysis looks at the factors outside our halls, outside our libraries, that are putting pressure on us, causing us to look at change, causing us to need to be relevant continually. Internal analysis involves looking at functions within our organization, such as operations departments and our general internal structure. And then you can take both of those and build your strategy for your organization. So let's look first at external company analysis. If you want, one thing that can be useful is to look at your upstream and downstream in your industry. So upstream would be those, you're kind of in the middle, you've got organizations upstream, like your funding sources, who provides the resources for you to do what you do. Also vendors, who are you working with upstream that are providing you resources that you then provide to those downstream, who are your consumers? Downstream from you, you might be wanting to look at your partners, who are you bringing into your organization, who can help to accomplish your mission. And finally, at the bottom is the consumer yourself. So you want to look at all the aspects that go into providing services for your consumers. And look at all the layers. One of the things that you all might be familiar with is SWAP analysis, SWOT, so strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. The OT part of SWAP opportunities and threats are the external things that you will factor in. And there are a number of tools you can use to do this that are quite useful. One of them is the SWAP analysis, which I put up on the slide here. A SWAP analysis is looking at the social, legal, economic, political, and technological aspects of what we do. So for social, that's a big thing for libraries. What are mobile devices doing for what we do? What about social networking? Those are things we can ignore. Economically, we felt the economic downturn. Legally, if you're a non-profit, where are you able to take in in terms of funds? How might that help you? How might that be a threat? Politically, what impacts do legislations have in your area in Utah, where we have a filtering law, actually that determines the amount of funding we can get in our organization. So we have to consider that when we develop new plans. And technological, obviously, technology has a huge, huge impact on what we do. What about this simplification? How are we dealing with that? Local devices. And what technologies do our teachers want and need? These are good ways to look at external forces. We also have a model called Quarters by Forces. And I don't think libraries have often thought about competition, but I know we're all starting to. What are the threats of competition? Are there others out there offering what we're offering, what we do as libraries? What about the bargaining power of customers? This is interesting because what impact do our patrons have on what they're willing to pay for our services? And are they willing to tell our legislators or governing bodies that they want to spend money on our services? You've heard quite often, no. threat of substitutes. Is Google a viable substitute for libraries? We all know, absolutely not. But is there a perception that there might be and how do we overcome that? Various of entry. What keeps other entities from taking the place of libraries? As librarians, we know that our facilities, our knowledgeable personnel, our unique programming, our comprehensive collections, they are absolutely impossible to duplicate. And how do we demonstrate that? Also, you want to do a competitive analysis, and this is crucial. Studying your consumer. Who are they? Why do they use your library? What values and features do they prefer? What do they think is neat about your library? And you could do this, you've probably all done some of this, focus groups, surveys. But when you're doing that, don't forget to look at who's not using your services and why. That's important. And then frankly, look frankly at what you've discovered and ask yourself questions that will help you build your strategy. Once you've all done all this, you'll have your opportunity to tune in to your threats and you can prioritize those. As you do your external analysis, remember it's important to keep really good reference so you can show what factors are influencing you. And also check with your colleagues and team members because they're a great source of information now. They'll have kind of a check the mouse effect to make sure you're on the right page. And then you can set your strategy forward. As part of setting a strategy for your organization, it's also important to look at your own internal analysis, which includes asking yourself a lot of questions about what's happening inside your organization. This is the SW of the SWAP, the strengths and weaknesses. So function, how well is our library working? Let's see if I've got that up. Did I put, I didn't put that up there, that all those big communities. Infrastructional leadership, how well is our strategy defined? And do we encourage ideas sharing as leaders in our organization? Operations, do we have quality control measures for what we do? Can we tell how we're doing? What about information management internally? How do we share information among departments, among people? Finance, are we meeting our financial goals and creating the most profits based on the income we have? Research and development, how long in our organization does it take to fully develop an idea and get it out there in a new way? And once you've done your internal analysis, you gather all this information. Sometimes it's useful to put it into kind of a matrix. You can list all of your resources, competencies, building blocks, functions, and then you rate them on a scale of how strong are you on that. You can fill in where you might want to do some development. You could also do a print, like we talked about all already internally, how valuable, where, innumerable, or not substitutable is this for our organization. And then you can start beginning to do trainings or whatever you need. So say your staff is really strong on your circulation functions and your internal databases, but they have questions about some programs and apps that maybe their teachers have questions about. Then you can start building programs to boost that in your organization. It takes time, but overall I think it's worthwhile and it does inform your strategic timing. So what does all of this get up? It sounds like a lot of work, doesn't it? But it also makes us responsive. So once you've done all of it, you know, your library is going to run like a machine, right? You've got your contract, your plans, your performance standard, everything's going to be negotiating and you'll know your competitive advantage and how to keep your library relevant and strong. You'll have your external factors, your internal factors. You'll know how to develop this into a feedback loop again all at once, right? You've got to be nice and sit back and enjoy the ride. Well, maybe. But how are our consumers going to know this is going on? How are they going to know we've done all this? What is our value to them and why should all of this make a difference? Well, that brings us to marketing. Libraries need advocacy. And as President of the Utah Library Association, my theme for the year is Aim for the Future on target with vision and advocacy. It's so important for what we do in libraries today. People need to know what we have to offer. And as I came up through the library world, we always had a community affairs department. That's what any interaction outside our walls was called. It was just, we're talking to people who are letting them know what we do. Now we're actually doing marketing, which I think is very interesting. And one of the things you can do to promote, you've got these amazing products. And one of the things you can do to promote them is to develop a positioning statement. And this is interesting because we all have these elements of what we do. So positioning statement, first of all, you're going to want to know your primary target customer or consumer. You're going to want to know the need or opportunity that you have to fulfill within your community. And then you're going to, of course, develop a product or service to meet that need. And it will have a product category. And you'll want to know what your key benefit is of that. And then what makes that different from what anybody can get out there in the rest of the community. And I'll give you a couple examples of how it works. So say you're trying to promote your preschool story time. It's like an ad-libs. We're just going to pop the event. So a positioning statement for preschool story time might be for preschoolers who need to enter kindergarten ready to leave. The library's preschool story time, do you see that there? Their need or opportunity is a free program that offers exposure to early literacy skills and provides a jumpstart to lifelong learning that can only begin inside the walls of the library. That is the positioning statement for preschool story time. Let's try one for the Utah Library Association because I've just been working on it. For the Utah Library Association members who want an excellent professional development opportunity, the annual spring conference is a once a year activity that offers access to Utah-based networking resources and advocacy information and provides the only source of face-to-face professional affiliation of this scale in the state. Couple of real quick positioning statements. It's fun to try this with your organization. It's fun to plug in your key terms and goals. And you can try it with any of the services you offer. So from your positioning statements, you're going to want to develop your marketing plan. And what is this called in business learning in the marketing mix? And I've got the four keys right here for developing marketing mix. They are product, price, place, and promotion. So you all have a product and your product should easily capture the attention of your consumers and satisfy their wants and their needs. And as you've seen today, you can develop the attributes through all these things, the negotiation, the competitive advantage, the internal external analysis, and of course your strategic planning. And the things you come up with might be all types of things. Depending on what organization you're in, they might be on storm times, they might be professional development opportunities, electronic collections, other services, you want to define that for yourself. But your product is what you have to offer, and you need to market to your consumers so they can learn about what you have. Otherwise, they won't be able to take advantage of them. And then price. We're not used to looking at this because we don't need direct sales. But what is the monetary value of a particular good or service? Today, we're seeing that libraries are advocating for their organizations by doing studies that demonstrate return on investment. The Utah State Library recently did a study that showed for every dollar that taxpayer money is invested in libraries, there's a $7.35 return on investment. And that shows, and puts in the mind of the consumer, our patrons, that they're getting value for the dollar. It's important, people want to know they're getting a good deal in libraries. Place. Place is the way our consumers obtain our products and services in businesses called distribution. And place is, how do people access what we do? Do we have neighborhood branches and public libraries? They've done a bookmobile, remote access databases, websites, mobile apps. The greater ease and options that we give people, in business it creates greater sales, in libraries it creates utilization. We want our place in the market to include great access for our patrons in the low-ways if you get out and they give you for them, the more business we'll have. And then, of course, promotion. And that's the use of communication tools and promotional activities that ensure the maximum information. And actually, in business, they have persuaded impact on customers. We hope to persuade them to use our library. They can remind them more on persuading. And basically, they tell about the importance of what we do. There are a lot of tools for marketing, public relations, for example, newspaper articles about programs you're doing, direct marketing. You can always do mailers. And of course, it all depends on input, right, in our budget. But you wouldn't think of sales and promotions in libraries, but has anybody offered 50% or 50 cents of fines to funds? You get patrons in? You get patrons through the door? In my organization, in the fall, right before the holidays, we always do a food for fines program where people can bring in a can of food and get a certain amount of their funds and we'd like to get people. That's actually sales and promotions. Personal sales. Personal sales is one-on-one contact. It's things like outreach activities. Are you going out and talking to people about what you're doing? Also, is your staff, your friend's group, your board members, are they talking about the importance of libraries at every opportunity? Those are personal sales. And of course, advertising. Some libraries put sign-on buses. We've put things in school newsletters. There's social media. Many of us are actually marketing on Facebook and Twitter, promoting our programs and collections and ideas. So developing marketing that advocates for library services has become more and more important, especially in this day and age, because we are experiencing greater pressures and our information industry is rapidly changing. And, you know, a lot of that has to do with economic downturn. Marketing is not something we had to do in the past, but we can, I think, learn from some of these business practices and benefit from them. So in this equation, today we've talked about business learning and how it ties into libraries. We've talked about providing librarians with learning to support business efforts in communities. We've talked about developing business resources as even substitutes for an FDA for small businesses and large companies. We've explored whether libraries should even consider business strategies and also talked about the parallels between the library world and the business world and how we create profits really interestingly. And, of course, we explored business concepts and negotiations, competitive advantage, internal, external analysis and marketing. The question is, can libraries take a page of the book of business to create strategies for students? Libraries and businesses can certainly benefit by forming one another, but I will say librarians are very good at what we do. We have a proud historic record of providing people with the information and resources they need to create great intellectual wealth foundation. Current technological, social and economic pressures are creating rapid change in the information industry. But librarians have long adapted to changes in information formats, packaging and delivery methods. So while the pace of change may have accelerated, we know how to respond and we know how to advocate for what we do. Business models are one way to look at things. However, librarians have been and always will be adaptable, resourceful and resilient practitioners of providing information services. We have the resources we need in our disposal to create innovations, innovative libraries of the future, and we know how to use them. So business practices are among them that librarians are in charge. I have a question. Question, question. I'm not sure if you're familiar with this, so that's part of the question. National Network Libraries. So we have like a little return on investment calculator. I hope that you'll be promoting. Sure. It's a great tool for public libraries and medical libraries. Yeah, return on investment calculator. I love that. Just see her at the end. She's got a comment. Thank you very much. Any other questions or thoughts? Mostly complete. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we do for a lot of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so then, you can go with him. I agree. So there's a couple of words that we want to use that we've got. So you've got a couple of layers, especially with negotiation. I think one of the things you're talking about is relationships within negotiation. And that's huge. That's one of the big things taught in at least the same game program that you can use in this one, about relationships in negotiation, and also ethical use of negotiation. And then also the bookkeeping and financial aspect of businesses, that migration units, it is becoming more important. That is our input. And we are responsible stewards of those funds for creating reality for our communities. Mara City, you can tell me that, yeah. My administration is like the team has a new plan to operate when I'm telling you to do it. So I'm going to go and go with Mike. And then, Mr. Peterson, you always just let us keep that in mind. Why don't we not exceed it again and keep the record out of it? I don't want all this action to come true. And to a shock, if I'm going to have something to do with it, I'm thinking of a cooler day. No. In one and a quarter of the day. In one and a quarter of like 15 minutes. But I think of my geotopic, you know what I mean? It's just that they're not always going to be able to interact with each other. And they don't know what to do. And it's something we do not learn in library school. We don't learn the nickels and diamonds and dollars. How do we manage those funds? And what is our accountability process? So for me, MBA learning has been invaluable. I think the more we can educate ourselves on business and financial practices, the more it will help us moving forward. Do you see the difference from which we better MBA or hand-to-hand? Well, I think that's personal choice. I've seen both. I think the MBA is very valuable. I haven't got one, so I don't know how to compare it. I like the financial end and the promotional end. But I think you do get some of this. Does anyone have an MBA? I do. Oh, OK. Can you help address the MBA side of it? Well, I chose MBA over MBA because I want to focus in on non-profit, government, and not necessarily the business and financial private aspect. But in the MBA program, they do compare notes. So I'm glad to show you. And as a financial community, in the MBA? There is fiscal responsibility. Fiscal responsibility. OK. Very good. I think both are great, too. Oh! I don't know. Maybe I'll use a Christmas touch about that. The slides? I can make the slides available. Those need to go to the MPLA website for instructions. I won't give that to them. Yeah, I might send it to them anyway. I know there was a deadline. I know. I think that deadline was to make sure they were up before the event. I think you can still send them slides. Thank you. Those lists. Yeah. Good. Oh, I'm glad I did it if it was useful. I almost didn't. Thank you. It's been great talking to all of you today. Thank you for coming. And feel free to let me know. I have cards. If anybody would like my card, I have those up here. I'm willing to talk to anyone afterwards. I think we're seeing each other. Thank you for having me. It's beautiful.