Kurt Paulus on ALPSP International Conference: Making change happen

2012 ALPSP Awards winners

This is the fourth and final post in a series of reflections on the 2012 ALPSP International Conference by Kurt Paulus, former Operations Director at the Institute of Physics, and long time supporter of ALPSP. Our thanks go to Kurt for capturing the sessions. If this whets your appetite, book for the 2013 conference now.

Making change happen

References to what publishers might do to ride the crest of the wave of change have been scattered throughout the conference, so there is no lack of ideas. Indeed, as Stephen Pinfield noted in the final panel discussion, there is more experimentation now than ever before with technologies, services and business models, as publishers are overcoming their fears of the uncertainties  change brings with it. Anita de Waard put it this way:

• Experiment all over the place.
• Support scientists working at the forefront of information handling and networking.
• Join fora where scientists, publishers and librarians cooperate.
• Form partnerships and alliances where you cannot manage on your own.

But don’t expect your cherished organizational structures to survive the change process. All publishing roles will have to adapt. Close interaction with your customers and users may be hindered by the still prevalent functional set-up of many organizations. Skills – technological, analytical, social – will need to be reinforced. IT professionals will have to become more business aware and outward facing, and the concept of the IT department may disappear. All this requires complete reorientation of organizations.

“Work on your business as well as in your business.” Arend Welmers

Lost? Help is at hand from company doctor Arend Welmers of Quantum90 who gave the second keynote presentation with some simple messages:

• A common disease in organizations is functional thinking. Your role in your organization is not your job title.
• The job you may not be doing is helping your company to progress and make more money. You are hired to make the company successful.
• All organizations, whether for profit or not, are competing in a marketplace.
• ‘Employee engagement’ is just consultants’ eyewash. Employees must learn to behave as if they own their company and are individually responsible for making it succeed.

Arend’s recipe is called ‘Open book management’, where everyone is involved in running the company and has access to all information about company information, especially financial, presented in such a way that they know which levers they have to pull to improve performance and so that they can see the results. And if they are successful, why not let them share in the success by moving towards shared ownership?
Arend is a challenging and enthusiastic speaker, so much so that he was able to devote less time than he would have liked to his case study, the Springfield Remanufacturing Corporation, where the crux of his message is. In discussion it emerged that he had been working with the American Institute of Physics for a couple of years, and that might have been a better case study for this conference. The testimonial from Fred Dylla, CEO of American Institute of Physics, was complimentary!

Endnote

The winners of the ALPSP awards are given on the ALPSP website, but it is worth noting that the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing 2012 went not to an individual but to an organization, CrossRef, with the following citation (abbreviated):

“The Council of ALPSP was delighted to make this award to CrossRef, the independent not-for-profit organization set up and run by publishers to facilitate the linking between scholarly publications using the Digital Object Identifier. Launched in 2000, this system grew rapidly to hold 3 million DOIs in just a year and now holds metadata for 55.5 million conference proceeding articles, book chapters and journal articles right back to the first articles published in Philosophical Transactions in 1665. With over 4,000 participating publishers, CrossRef’s reach is international and it is very well regarded not just amongst publishers, but also the literary community and researchers.”

This happily reinforces one of the conference messages, that unity is strength and collaboration helps overcome weaknesses.

Kurt Paulus, 2012
Booking for the 2013 conference is open.

ALPSP Conference Day 2: Changing the game - Arend Welmers

Arend Welmers challenges way organisations are run

Day two of last week’s ALPSP conference saw a new departure for the programme with a session focusing on how to radically improve the way your organization operates. Speaker Arend Welmers specializes in helping organizations execute their strategy.

He provided an outline of the Open Book Management and Quantum90 approach to use the power of people to rapidly transform organization performance.  Here are the highlights from his talk – essential for anyone considering organizational change or transformation.

Most people when asked what their role is in an organization will probably describe it in a way that is something to do with their role or linked to your job description. This is what is called functional thinking and is a disease in most organizations. So marketing = campaigns; finance = count money; technical = build wonderful technical platforms. In fact, this is only partly right.

There’s a second job most people are also – or should be – doing: a role in helping the organization to make more money, to grow and be more profitable.

Whether you are not for profit or for profit or mission driven, you are competing in a market place. There are people out there trying to come up with better ways of doing what you do. You are responsible for the fees your organization generates. You can’t just participate; you need to compete in your market. And don’t be under any illusions: there is a market for the area you are working in.

Everyone in an organization has two roles: functional expertise and the competitive inclination of the whole team. This is about participation in the business of business to make the company more successful.

Most organizations start with somebody who has a great idea. They bring people together and provide the drive to work on a passion. This excitement, the energy, focus and purpose is what helps the company start to perform.

As an organization starts to be successful, the founders that have the passion need to recruit specialists to help them develop. But they are not about the company; they are focused and passionate on what they do i.e. setting up a great appraisal system. They take a functional approach.

How often do founders sit down with new recruits to tell them why you should join and help them make money or make the organization successful? It doesn't happen. You need to get everyone in organization thinking along these lines from whenever they start. If not, the growth curve will flatten out.

Many businesses are on the point of going downhill. What happens at the bottom? There are drives for employee engagement: and while the intention is right, the results tend to be poor. Nobody will take accountability where they don’t own what they are acting on.

Do you want all employees acting, thinking and feeling like they own the business? Isn't that the sort of company you’d invest in? Why don’t all businesses run like that?

Often, people come into an organization and want to do a good job, but can’t help change or influence because they are not allowed to: management don’t know how to tap into the innate need to win. Open Book Management is an approach that creates a high involvement culture in the business.

How do we create an organization that performs in this way?

1) Identify weaknesses or opportunities of running the organization to get everybody participating. This is a great way to get those who know a function or job well to be able to work out the challenge and figure out how to fix it. People get really creative if you give them the opportunity.

Tip: Set a seven day challenge. Generate huge excitement that will generate change. Quantum90 challenge is also a model to consider.

2) Build a high involvement culture in the business. This takes a little longer. It starts with sharing much more information in your business with everyone. Share information on how the business is performing and make sure the team understand what it means.

3) Consolidate this work by giving the team the skills, knowledge and information to empower them so they make better decisions. This in turn makes it easy to manage them and make change.

If you then have the courage to entertain notion of spreading the wealth that you create among the people who generate that wealth you can move from participation to engagement to a terrific outcome. It only seems fair that the outcome should be shared.

Further thinking on this approach is available here.

ALPSP 5th International Conference

It’s finally here! The fifth ALPSP International Conference and we’re off to The Belfry, the “Spiritual Home of the Ryder Cup”, set in 500 acres of stunning countryside.  I’m hoping that delegates won’t be side-tracked by such a spectacular setting as we’ve got an excellent line up of sessions and social events.

2012 is ALPSP’s 40^th year and we look forward to celebrating.  Our opening Keynote on Tuesday afternoon is Mary Waltham, who will take a very honest view of the last 40 years of scholarly and professional publishing and ask ‘how did we do?’  It may not be as good as we might think.  Arend Welmers is our second keynote on Wednesday morning.  If we got a poor grade from Mary, then perhaps Arend may be able to direct us along the right path.

Our plenary sessions start with an entertaining look at the global issues affecting scholarly and professional publishing.  Then we address the thorny issues of just how scholarly communication is going to cope with reducing attentions spans and whether any of us will survive having to give it all away.  Our final plenary on Thursday has a slightly more positive slant: “It’s the end of the world as we know it…and I feel fine!”

In amongst all that, there are six parallel sessions to choose from.  Before lunch on Wednesday, we’ll be getting the low-down on proposed changes to copyright legislation and their potential effects, finding out what text mining actually is and how it may impact you, or gaining insights to app development.  After lunch there’s the tricky choice between making content discoverable, dealing with unethical behaviours or finding out about the latest product initiatives. 

Unable to make it?  We have a dedicated band of tweeters to keep you up to date (#alpsp12), and we’re also hoping to have regular blog updates.  In addition, we’re videoing all the sessions, so you can catch up with what you missed after the conference.

I would like to say a huge thank you to all of our sponsors:

Gold             Oxford University Press

Silver              QScience.com

                   SAGE

Copyright Clearance Center

Atypon

Thomson Reuters

Bronze           Publishing Technology

                   SWETS

                   DataSalon

                   Cambridge University Press

Nature Publishing Group

                   Turpin Distribution

                   Wiley-Blackwell

                   RSC Publishing

Reception Sponsors            Publishing Technology (Opening Reception)

                                      Highwire (Dinner Reception)

         

I look forward to seeing those of you making your way to the conference.  I hope you enjoy it and leave feeling reinvigorated and ready to tackle the next 40 years!

Audrey McCulloch

Chief Executive