I haven’t yet gotten around to writing the blog entry about why Clayton Christensen’s work is important, but this citation was too good to let go by. How can we apply this? How about: “People don’t want an article citation for their research topic — they want an article on their research topic.” So why do we inflict confusing, jargon-filled and content-thin interfaces on our uses? So we can drive them to a bibliographic instruction session? I think we’ll drive them away.
Title: Marketing malpractice - The cause and the cure
Author(s): Christensen CM, Cook S, Hall T
Source: HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW 83 (12): 74-+ DEC 2005
Abstract:
Ted Levitt used to tell his Harvard Business School students, “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill - they want a quarter-inch hole.” But 35 years later, marketers re still thinking in terms of products and ever-finer demographic segments.The structure of a market, as seen from customers ‘point of view, is very simple. When people need to get a job done, they hire a product or service to do it for them. The marketer’s task is to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers’ lives for which they might hire products company could make.
2 Comments
I like this. It reminds me of Roy Tennant’s admonition that only librarian’s like to search; everyone else likes to find.
Another interesting analog can be found at http://bloglines.com/preview?siteid=1143&itemid=1578, in which the author muses thusly:
“Imagine you are building a steak-house. One thing you need are steak-knives. However, patrons could attack each other with them. So you build your steak-house to keep all diners separated from one another by cages. No one can get hurt.
How often do we build just such systems? Allowing users to tag bib records? They might put in the seven forbidden words. User reviews linked to bib records. What if they write slander and the library gets sued? How often do we picture the very worst that could happen and then destroy our systems due to that remote possibility? Yet, Wikipedia, Amazon, et al. seem to survive. Maybe we could also.”
I think it always comes back to the obvious, which is that we are servant librarians, whose primary responsibility is to make it easier (if not easy) to get our patrons/customers/users to the information they need.
Thanks for the comments, Fred — I agree with your assessment and that of David on Catalogablog. Still, it is hard not to build the cages thinking that we are acting in the patron’s best interest…I think I fall into that trap at times.
Thanks, too, for reminding me that I had not yet written about why Clayton Christensen’s work is important to figuring out the present and the future of libraries. (The reminder to myself was in the first line of this post from last year — and I still haven’t gotten to it yet!)
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