The Smartest Little Company in America

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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."

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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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