Her familiarity with her coworkers extends to the workings of the entire company--an understanding that arises from her close collaboration with Highsmith and other executives and from her regular attendance at (and participation in) upper-management meetings. "She works with finance and human resources, so she knows the financial ratios and what kind of turnover we have--she's got a global understanding of the company," says Kiley.
That global understanding comes in handy when the librarians take on large, formal research projects for individual managers. The projects demand real bloodhound work, followed by an almost academic synthesis and, occasionally, personal recommendations for courses of action. Guedea CarreÑo generally kicks off the process with an in-depth interview--sometimes as long as 45 minutes--in which she and the project's initiator "negotiate" its scope and time frame and clarify its goals. "People frame their requests in terms that they think you want to hear or in terms that they think are the proper terms," says Guedea CarreÑo. "All it does is obscure what they're really after." For example, a project on "succession planning" for vice-president of human resources Bill Herman turned out to be about hiring people who can grow into key positions, not about who would be Highsmith's next CEO.
Not all projects need such elaborate preparation. A few years ago, Kiley asked Guedea CarreÑo and assistant corporate librarian Genevieve Mecherly to look into nursing homes as a potential new market for some of Highsmith's more than 37,000 products. With very little discussion, the librarians went forth and brought back information about market size, major players, public and private ownership, geographic distribution, products purchased, vendors used, and demographics of the customer population--"the whole nine yards," marvels Kiley. "Lisa just thinks like a marketer," he says, explaining why he didn't have to spell out all his questions up front. And the material came with a bonus: the librarians' insights into what it all meant. (The demographics looked promising, they concluded.) "It's not just providing a torrent of materials, it's also her interpretation of it," says Kiley of Guedea CarreÑo. "I take her opinions into account a lot."
The librarians' highest-level research reports are what Guedea CarreÑo describes as "packages of tailored, digested, annotated, and possibly analyzed information that is compiled and reworked from any number of sources." For one such project--a report for Herman on evaluating and selecting employment tests--Guedea CarreÑo and Mecherly boiled down more than 20 sources into four pages of concrete steps, including questions to ask (How many people was the test tested on before it was finalized?) and things to avoid (tests that have not been cross-validated). For Herman, such service represents the difference between wandering into a supermarket with unmarked aisles and having a fully assembled meal delivered to his door, complete with a list of ingredients and a menu of additional courses should he want more. "If I didn't have a library to go to, I wouldn't even know where to start," he says.
Much of Guedea CarreÑo's job requires her to find answers. Life, the Universe, and Everything demands that she raise questions. It was not a role she ever expected to play. "Duncan and I were having these parallel thoughts, although we didn't know it at the time," says Guedea CarreÑo, describing the birth of the project. "He was thinking, 'You know, there are bigger things going on out there, not just in our industry but in the world, that are going to have an effect on us. How can we think more strategically when our horizon is just a couple of years?' And I was coming across things on eurolinguistic programming, on memes in society, on how the Internet is changing distribution channels--things that I felt uncomfortable sending to anybody in the company because I knew they had business that was much more immediate and pressing. But I thought, 'Someone should be aware of this."
The someone she selected was Highsmith, whose motto--"It doesn't have to be right. It has to be provocative"--is a kind of mantra in some parts of the company. "I was thinking, 'He's going to think I'm a loony," says Guedea CarreÑo. Instead, Highsmith broached the idea for Life, the Universe, and Everything. "It scared the dickens out of me," Guedea CarreÑo recalls.
Today Guedea CarreÑo spends about 20% of her time scanning newspapers, magazines, on-line databases, and Web sites for Life, the Universe, and Everything, and her antennae are always up for interesting tidbits gleaned from television, radio, advertising, or casual conversation. She finds it hard to explain exactly why she deems any individual piece of information important. But she has a few guiding principles: she pays close attention, for example, to juxtapositions of different areas of study--Mozart and brain development, or wisdom as capital--because they may reveal illuminating patterns or relationships that may in turn form the basis for new products or services. "This is probably a by-product of working with Duncan," she says. "He has an eye for where the edges of one concept start to overlap and intersect with seemingly unrelated concepts."
After scanning comes synthesis. Every week, Guedea CarreÑo and Highsmith sit down for two hours and sort through their respective piles of "scraps," sharing impressions and rooting out hidden connections and the tenuous beginnings of trends. They then write statements about the significance of the most promising items, and Guedea CarreÑo enters them--together with brief abstracts and excerpts of the actual articles--in a database created for the project.
That database is divided into eight broad categories and 77 subcategories developed by Highsmith and Guedea CarreÑo over the past three years. Many of the subject headings are just what you'd expect from a school- and library-supply company: Early Learning, Adult Education, Public Libraries, Information Architecture and Design. Others-- Anthropology, Global Environment, Humor, Metaphors--reflect a more eclectic sensibility. But potential connections to the business are always present, if not always obvious. For example, Highsmith and Guedea CarreÑo track junk science because the CEO wants to understand how--through repetition and media attention--theories with no scientific basis become accepted fact. That understanding, in turn, could make the company more skeptical as new, if less than fully baked, approaches to education and reading instruction emerge. And that, in turn, could affect how the company deals with the demand for material supporting those approaches. "Understanding the dialogue in your marketplace--whether it's good science or not--can help create strategic choices for a business," explains Highsmith. "A business might decide to give people what they want, or it might decide it could gain a competitive advantage by offering alternatives to current trends or fads and educating its customers about them. In any case, if you don't understand what's going on, you don't have as many choices."
