The Smartest Little Company in America

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"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.

But the kudzulike spread of information--information that's readily accessible yet often inaccurate, confusing, and more than slightly irrelevant --has actually increased the need for librarians. "Every manager with a budget is a target of innumerable vendors spreading an appealing (if deceiving) gospel: that every man and woman is a knowledge worker, and that all one needs to access the knowledge of the world is a computer and modem," wrote James Matarazzo, dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, in a 1995 study titled "The Value of Corporate Libraries." "No profession knows as well as the librarian's the shallowness of this position: it leaves the whole issue of information expertise and quality out of the equation."

Some smart organizations are beginning to draw the distinction between accessibility and value, handing control over much of their external information flow to librarians who act as filters, consultants, analysts, early-warning systems, and royal data tasters. Not surprisingly, most of these influential librarians are found in large companies. At software publisher Adobe Systems, based in San Jose, Calif., librarian Linda Veenker and her four-person staff work out on the floor, where they can be closer to the employees they serve. "The library is one of those rare functions at Adobe that everyone has the same positive feeling about," says Bruce Chizen, Adobe's executive vice-president for worldwide products and marketing.

Adobe is a $912-million business, but companies with shallower pockets sometimes turn to the talented amateurs who are already in their ranks. Matarazzo calls those people "shadow librarians." At the Sawtooth Group, a $150-million advertising, branding, and public-relations firm in Woodbridge, N.J., the shadow is Tom Magnus, a partner and vice-president who is the director of account planning. When employees have a question--How many men make decisions in supermarkets? How are consumers' tastes in spices changing?--they bring it to Magnus, who scans the Web, browses in bookstores and libraries, and even rings up authors in pursuit of answers. "I'm the only person in my function who knows all the clients and the agency departments and the company's strategic direction," he says. "So when I do my search, I have all that floating in my head."

Indeed, small-company librarians may provide even more value than their large-company counterparts. After all, they know most people's needs because they know most people. At Highsmith, because contact between the library staff and employees is frequent, the librarians--Guedea CarreÑo has a staff of two--don't waste time researching, say, Internet marketing for a technology staffer who they know gives a hoot only about electronic transactions. It's far more effective than the arrangement at Guedea CarreÑo's previous employer, a large law firm where "a secretary would relay a request from an associate who got the request from the partner working on the case," says Guedea CarreÑo. "By the time I got it, it was impossible to know how much was lost in translation. It was like that old game of telephone, where 'The truth is elusive' eventually became 'The tooth ate Lucy."

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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