The Smartest Little Company in America

Highsmith Inc. uses a knowledge-management tool of extraordinary power to give employees all the information they need. Its name is Lisa Guedea CarreÑo. She's the librarian

DATA SMOG

Once a week, Duncan Highsmith closets himself for two hours in a small room adjacent to his office and tries to wrap his brain around the world. Seated at a large wooden table, the president and CEO of Highsmith Inc. sifts through stacks of articles on subjects ranging from juvenile crime to semiotics to the anatomy of dragonflies. In this eclectic mix he is searching for nascent trends, provocative contradictions, and most important, connections that could eventually reshape his business. Joining Highsmith in these sessions--which he considers paramount to his company's future success-is a single trusted business associate.

She is his librarian.

Highsmith's pursuit--dubbed Life, the Universe, and Everything in an acknowledged crib from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy--springs from the CEO's conviction that you can't take a narrow approach to the future. "We tend to behave as though the future will be like the present, only bigger and faster," says Highsmith, whose $55-million business is the country's leading mailorder supplier of equipment such as book displays, audio-video tools, and educational software for schools and libraries. That misguided faith in stasis, Highsmith believes, gives company builders an excuse to ignore everything but the goings-on in their own organizations, poking their heads up only when some external event presents an imminent threat or promise. At the same time, it prevents them from anticipating that threat or promise far enough in advance to do anything meaningful about it.

The shortsightedness of being shortsighted was brought home to Highsmith in the early 1990s, when his company's sales growth slipped partly as the result of precipitous declines in school funding. It was something the CEO believed he would have foreseen if he'd tracked the talk of a tax revolt that had been incipient as far back as the 1970s. His reaction to the unwanted surprise was to lift his eyes from internally generated spreadsheets and sales reports and to begin following his own instincts in identifying information--regardless of its nature, origin, or obvious relevance--that he thinks "could become a compelling factor in the future of the business beyond a one- to three-year horizon." In 1996 he created Life, the Universe, and Everything as a way to impose some structure on that horizon gazing.

Of course, tracking the universe is too big a job for one person; it takes at least two, Highsmith figured. What he wanted was a partner who would be as adept at making sense of nonquantitative information as an accountant is at numbers, someone who'd have sufficient imagination to accept why he might be interested in a New York Times article about dragonflies (they have four wings that move independently of one another, an image that Highsmith says helped him think in new ways about business-unit autonomy) and who was familiar with every limb and digit of the company.

He found her in the corporate library. At the time, Lisa Guedea CarreÑo had been at Highsmith for five years, acting as the company's external-information sherpa and, increasingly, as a sounding board and informal consultant. She knew her way around information: where to find it, what to do with it, how to make it behave. And for a stickler who is reluctant to use a quotation in company material without including a photostat from its original source (no, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations isn't good enough), Guedea CarreÑo had demonstrated a surprising willingness to embrace serendipity. "Over the years I'd noticed that when Lisa would send me the answer to a question, occasionally she'd send something else--maybe tangential, but interesting--along with it," says Highsmith. "I would encourage that, and sometimes we would pursue the tangent further than the original question. It became clear to me that Lisa had the kinds of skills and insights that would make this project possible."

Not that it makes sense for Guedea CarreÑo to be the only one involved. Life, the Universe, and Everything is significant for the information it gathers, but Highsmith also intends it as a teaching tool that will ultimately prod everyone in the company to see and understand the kinds of big-picture connections CEOs generally make in isolation. Toward that end, he's beginning to broaden participation in the project, asking other staff members to pass along scraps of intriguing information and using his discussions with Guedea CarreÑo as the basis for presentations at executive meetings.

"I think it's starting to create a demand on the part of executives to spend time in the long-term development of the business rather than on routine operations," says Highsmith. "A big part of my job is to make myself unnecessary, and I hope this will help me do that."

Technology and librarians are the yin and yang of information management. Yet while technology directors increasingly see their names up in lights on the executive marquee, corporate librarians--where they exist at all--remain supporting players. Why? It may be that we blame technology for our information surfeit and, consequently, expect technology to fix it. Or that the Internet makes the very idea of a librarian seem quaint. In the Highsmith library, an elegant card catalog with some Japanese irises emblazoned across the front stands empty, its contents having long ago moved on-line. It has become an artifact, not a tool--which may be how the world has come to view librarians.