Oh Jane, How I <3 Thee
October 5th, 2007Michelle Boule - “We need to start thinking like businesses and get over our hang-ups about that.”
Yes! Yes! Yes!
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October 5th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
Successful businesses achieve product/market fit. This generally involves some kind of market segmentation: pursuing some customers at the expense of others. This thinking makes me nervous when applied to libraries, for the same reason that “running the police department like a business” makes me nervous. (With the exception of libraries embedded in for-profit organizations).
Responsive, respectful, effective, excellent service is *not* dependent on a profit motive–whether that profit is literal, figurative, or somewhere in between (as in making funding sources happy). Nor does a profit motive guarantee it, as any trip through corporate customer service hell will show.