The following “Lead: It’s the New Fast-Follow” post [http://blog.webjunctionworks.org/index.php/2008/11/02/lead-its-the-new-fast-follow/] by Chrystie on Online Collaboration is thought-provoking:
“I’m stuck today by Seth Godin’s blog last week about leadership as a marketing strategy.
What works is leading. Leading a (relatively) small group of people. Taking them somewhere they’d like to go. Connecting them to one another…Go down the list of online success stories. The big winners are organizations that give tribes of people a platform to connect. Go down the list of fashion businesses or business to business organizations. Same thing. Charities, too. Churches, certainly…People want to connect. They want you to do the connecting.
Is your library positioned to lead your community in this desire to connect? Is this something we can do better than other community-based organizations?
Librarians sometimes lament our lack of resources and our lack of ability to be on the leading edge of the information industry. That’s fine. If we turn the information industry upside down and think about it from an intimate, local perspective, does that make it easier to imagine us leading this charge? And what would that do to our brand?”
