Letters

Readers react to articles from the January 1999 issue of Inc., including Leigh Buchanan's "The Smartest Little Company in America" and David Shenk's "Why You Feel the Way You Do."

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We had to practice some knowledge management ourselves when readers responded in droves to our January stories on information anxiety. Most talked about were the profile of a company and its librarian and David Shenk's Data Smog.

Librarians at the gate

" The Smartest Little Company in America," Leigh Buchanan's story about the pursuit of knowledge at Highsmith Inc., drew cheers from the ISBN elite.

What's amazing to me is that you get it. You really do understand how valuable and how indispensable a good librarian is to the company she works for. To a great extent, she enables the success of the organization by, as chief librarian Lisa Guedea Carreño put it, helping "people integrate information into their jobs... [so that] they can keep doing their jobs."

The concept is one I have tried to get acknowledged by management throughout my career, and it has been a difficult nut to crack. It's not that there aren't good librarians out there. The problem is that there's a dearth of CEOs with vision. The fact that Guedea Carreño reports directly to CEO Duncan Highsmith shows the importance of her work and demonstrates her value to the company.

Librarians are not used to marketing themselves the way they now must in order to survive. So when a company gets into trouble, the first place for layoffs is the one putting up the least resistance--the library. Can you imagine an MIS department being closed down? Here's how nonentrepreneurial our profession is: in the 11 years I've been in business for myself as a library consultant, I have not had competition on a single bid for a project.

Judith Tapiero
President
The Organized Library
Princeton, N.J.

Lisa Guedea Carreño sets a marvelous example for corporate information professionals. More important, CEO Duncan Highsmith has raised the bar for executives everywhere. His awareness that information professionals are a company's best weapons in the knowledge-management battle should send a wake-up call to corporate America. As the avenues for information access increase, so does the need for individuals versed in identifying and qualifying that information. Someday, technology will cease to be a competitive advantage. At that time, market dominance will go to the company that makes the most of the information that technology merely delivers.

David R. Bender
Executive Director
Special Libraries Association
Washington, D.C.

A number of readers, including this one, couldn't believe how little money was budgeted for Highsmith's library collection.

I'm somewhat incredulous that three librarians and an entire library collection cost only $185,000 annually. I fear that is not a correct figure or, if it is, that I'll be leaving my knowledge-management career soon.

Charlene Cunniffe
Electronic Research/Training Specialist
Boult, Cummings, Conners & Berry
Nashville

Leigh Buchanan replies: According to Lisa Guedea Carreño, the number is low for several reasons. First, it costs less to acquire information about the social sciences--the areas that Highsmith investigates--than about other fields such as law or biotechnology. Second, all the library's hardware and general office software comes out of the information-services budget, not the library's. Third, books and subscriptions are often paid for by the departments that order them. And finally, because Highsmith is situated in a rural area (Fort Atkinson, Wis.), salaries, while competitive, may be lower than those in an urban setting. For a fuller explanation of Highsmith's library budget, see www.inc.com/issue/april99.

Drowning in data

David Shenk's article on the information glut, " Why You Feel the Way You Do," hit the mark with the harried.

If grown-ups are swamped in the information sea, imagine how children feel. Perhaps a new responsibility of parents is to model and teach information management. Yikes! How can we do this when we are learning it on the fly ourselves--if we are learning it at all? The article makes me think that "playroom makeovers" (to reduce the sensory overload that is produced by a glut of toys and games) is something my company should offer.

Eve Sullivan
Founder
Parents Forum
Cambridge, Mass.

On Fridays I go to work but do not turn my E-mail on at all. The result: a lot less anxiety. The point about not making timely decisions because we are waiting for that one more bit of easy-to-obtain information is very real. We are trying to remember too many things. Just ask a bookseller about sales of books on life simplification.

Eugene A. Degenhardt
Value Engineer
U.S. Army Corps Of Engineers
St. Louis

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