by Beth Cronk, Litchfield head librarian
I would like to thank the Litchfield businesses who supported our summer reading program this year with prize donations for the kids. McDonald’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut (so sorry for leaving you out of the newspaper column!!) donated many gift certificates for food items at their restaurants. The kids love getting them as prizes for reading logs that they complete. Thank you for supporting literacy in our community!
I would also like to extend an invitation to the businesses in Litchfield. Our library is available to serve you. We work regularly with teachers, clergy, parents, students, seniors, and other members of the community. But we don’t often work with our local business people. I’d love to do more to serve this group.
If there is something I can do to help you meet your business’ information needs, I hope you’ll come in to talk to me, give me a call at (320)693-2483, or send me an email at elizabethc@litchfield.lib.mn.us. While you may not think you’d have a use for the books we have on hand, we can find all kinds of information for you. I used to work in the corporate library of a financial services company. While it has been some years since then, it was in the age of the internet and electronic databases. I used to work on competitive intelligence, stock quotes, information to be used in marketing materials, and a variety of industry information. At the public library, we don’t have access to the fee-based business & legal databases that a corporate library has, but there are many sources out there that are free or paid for by the state of Minnesota. I’d be happy to meet with you to set up an alert service on the topics your business needs to track. Through the Electronic Library for Minnesota, we could set up an ongoing search of newspapers or business journals that would automatically send you articles on your competitors, your industry, or other specific topics in the news that could help you keep on top of your business environment.
Our library does have some recent books that may be of interest to managers, entrepreneurs, and other business people, too. Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders: The Three Essential Principles You Need to Become an Extraordinary Leader, by Rajeev Peshawaria, discusses the characteristics that make the best managers and executives. Peshawaria has worked in leadership development at American Express, Morgan Stanley, and Coca-Cola. The book has gotten excellent reviews from vice presidents at PepsiCo and GE Aviation, as well as book reviewers, for the way that it presents case studies of leadership in a variety of companies and how inspiring it is to managers at every level.
Another new book on management is Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst, by Robert I. Sutton. This book draws upon psychological and management research to find out what a manager can do to motivate and manage his or her employees and create a better workplace and a more successful organization. Sutton is a professor at Stanford.
The 24-Hour Customer: New Rules for Winning in a Time-Starved, Always-Connected Economy is a book on marketing in our new electronic reality. The author, Adrian C. Ott, is the CEO of a Silicon Valley consultant business. She shares new ways of capturing the time and attention of customers who are connected to their screens and multi-tasking all the time, using case studies from iPhone, Amazon, and Johnson & Johnson, among other companies who are doing well with Web 2.0 and 24/7 commerce.
Some other new business titles you may want to check out include The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge; Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down; and Tell to Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story.
If there are business titles you’d suggest for our library, let me know and I’ll be glad to consider them. Our library is here to serve the entire community, and I’d love to know how we can better meet your business’ needs for information.
