Disciple Colin's new talent management technique

Note: This is a forwarded email*. This post is categorized under fun, and is taken from the Guru's blog @ www.personneltoday.com 'HR offered new approach to talent management.'

Put 400 bricks in a room; then shut all your new employees in the room.

Leave them alone and come back after six hours; then analyse the situation.

• If they are counting the bricks, put them in the accounting department.
• If they are recounting them, put them in auditing.
• If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in engineering.
• If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in planning.
• If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in operations.
• If they are sleeping, put them in security.
• If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in information technology (IT).
• If they are sitting idle, put them in human resources.
• If they say they have tried different combinations, they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in sales.
• If they have already left for the day, put them in marketing.
• If they are staring out of the window, put them in strategic planning.
• If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in senior management.
• Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard, put them in government.

*On the Net you will find a slightly different here, and here with no clue about the author of this stuff.

On the same shelf: To-forward or not-to-forward

Emerson's Conceptual Librarian, Professor of Books -- Library Education Revisited

The idea of a “Professor of Books” originated from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote in his essay on books in 1856: “Meantime the colleges, while they furnish us with libraries, furnish no Professor of Books, and I think no chair is so much wanted.” Quoted from a book that has over fifty quotes by Emerson: A Dictionary of Library and Information Science Quotations. Edited by Mohamed Taher & L S Ramaiah. ISBN: 8185689423 (New Delhi , Aditya, 1994) p. 126

Emerson's legacy in practice: "Upon becoming the President of Rollins College, Holt saw the cultural possibilities in Emerson’s suggestion, and believed it suited his hope of making Rollins an ideal small liberal college. He made Grover his first faculty appointee as America’s first “Professor of Books.” Some years later Grover recalled “the thrill which I experienced when I came upon Emerson’s suggestion which was to change my life work and make my new vocation also an avocation. My imagination immediately took wings and I began to mull over the possibilities dormant in Emerson’s idea.” Edwin O. Grover (1870-1965): Professor of Books and Citizen of the Community.

A new book that finds a model for library education is here: The Politics of Professionalism: A Retro-Progressive Proposal for Librarianship ~ Juris Dilevko

Extract from the book: "Instead, building on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “professor of books” model, Dilevko suggests that anyone wishing to work in an academic, research, or public library must independently pass a series of essay-type subject-specific examinations in about ten to fifteen fields or areas of the arts, social sciences, and sciences. In addition, he or she must be able to read and speak at least one non-English language fluently, as well as attend courses about various aspects of the operation of libraries at regional summer institutes."

Interesting is another dig. John Mark Tucker's essay Emerson's Library Legacy: Concepts of Bibliographic Instruction (1984): "Ralph Waldo Emerson's criticism that libraries lack the profession of "professor of books" represents the central problem of bibliographic instruction: an inadequately formed theoretical or conceptual framework. A history of the ideas, notions, terms, and phrases about bibliographic instruction illustrates this."

Bottomline: The notion of 'A professor of books' (not just caretaker or possessor of books), is not new with Emerson. Libraries in the middle ages were managed by a scholar of repute, who had subject-specific knowledge. Period. These caretakers of libraries (the equivalent of modern librarians) were not trained in library schools, but they knew their art and craft of managing the books, providing service to their users, as per the best practices of the time. Examples of such scholarly librarians (with a transition from old-fashioned librarians to the modern librarian), are many. For instance, Ibn al-Nadim (died 995 C.E), and among others the caretakers at the Alexandrian Library, Bodlean Library, Cambridge and Oxford University libraries (details are here: Encyclopedia of Library History ~ Wayne Wiegand ), and much about them here: Some Old-Time Old-World Librarians. Scholar librarians are in the modern era replaced by bibliographers or subject librarians.

Questions for Further Study includes:
"Finally, what difference does the scholarship of librarians make to library users? Are scholarly librarians, and libraries that support and encourage scholarship, more innovative? Is there a measurable relationship between the degree of scholarship undertaken at certain libraries and the quality of library service delivered?" [source: The Scholarship of Canadian Research University Librarians, David Fox, Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Vol 2, No 2 (2007)]

1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly

Thanks to lead by Sylvie to reach Seth Godin for this citation: First, organize 1,000 by Kevin Kelly.

Extract from Seth's blog:
This is Kevin Kelly's best riff of the year, and that's saying an enormous amount. Go read it!

Some people will read this and immediately understand. Others will read it and start waffling over the meaning of "true." My expansion: you need to alter what you do and how you do it so that 1,000 true fans is sufficient to make you very happy.

The following visuals by Kelly, tells it all, and tell it in short:

"A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans." 1,000 True Fans

The genius of the True Fan model is that the fans are able to move an artist away from the edges of the long tail to a degree larger than their numbers indicate. They can do this in three ways: by purchasing more per person, by spending directly so the creator keeps more per sale, and by enabling new models of support.

New models of support include micro-patronage. Another model is pre-financing the startup costs. Digital technology enables this fan support to take many shapes. Fundable is a web-based enterprise which allows anyone to raise a fixed amount of money for a project, while reassuring the backers the project will happen. Fundable withholds the money until the full amount is collected. They return the money if the minimum is not reached. 1,000 True Fans

Who's Who at the Library from the 500 Most Influential Muslims

Source: the 500 most influential muslims

[alternative source: The 500 most influential Muslims in the world]

COLOMBIA
Al colombi, Dawood Abdl Ghafur
Al Colombi is one of the most well respected Muslim scholars in Colombia. He is the most active
and influential da’wa activist in Colombia, being present at the conversions of over 1000 people.
He is the founder of a mosque in the city of Pereira and of the Centro Cultural Islamico Colombian’s
da’wa project. He hosts conferences and awareness lectures for Muslims and non-Muslims,
and he is acknowledged for his talent for conveying the principles of Islam to non-Muslims. He is
also the author of several articles in Spanish and has created the only library of Islamic books in
Colombia.

MOROCCO
Benbin, Prof. Dr. Ahmad Shawqi
Benbin is the director of the Hasaniyya Library, Morocco. He is an eminent professor, and is globally
recognized for his research in the study of Islamic manuscripts. He has published many books
and specialized studies.

BELGIUM
Al Yahya, Dr. Abdul-Aziz Mohammad Abdullah
Al Yahya is the director of the Islamic Cultural Center in Brussels, Belgium. In 1969, the Islamic
Cultural Center in Brussels was founded as an institution housing a mosque, a library, and
information service as well as offices. It was funded by the Muslim World League and Saudi
Arabia, and hosted the European Council of Mosques for several years. It mainly functioned as
an intermediary between the Muslim community and the Belgian state, negotiating the needs and
interests of Muslims.