Librarianship, and Farming vs Mining

The opening sentence for Will Shipley’s post “Success, and Farming vs Mining” couldn’t be any better:

Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What are you going to do, mine or farm?

The point of Shipley’s post is to use the metaphor of Farming (slow, steady, cared-for growth managed over time) against Mining (fast, sudden economic change without concern for long term outcomes) to explain businesses. There’s are software/web startups that fall into both camps, and interesting discussions to be had about which is “best”, but that’s not what I want to talk about.

What I want to do is torture the metaphor a bit more for yet another purpose. I like the model as a way to understand web startups, but I love it for understanding change management in libraries, and I really love it as a metaphor for understanding myself.

Libraries seem to me to clearly be Farms. Carefully managed, curated, fertilized and watered over years…and this extends, somewhat, to the general management methodology in libraries, and it absolutely extends to our larger organizations like the ALA.

What I’ve realized in thinking about this for a bit is that I’m not a farmer. I’m a miner. You can look at what I’ve done in my short career as a librarian inside of LITA and ALA with BIGWIG, LITABlog, my presentations, my writing…just about everything I’ve done, frankly, was a form of mining. My strength, if I have one, is having an insight, prototyping it, briefly explaining why it’s a better methodology than prior methods, and then moving to the next thing. That’s mining. I’ve never been interested in the long-term management of things, doing process evaluation, etc. I just see it, do it, show it to people. If it’s good enough, I hope that people will recognize it and someone else will use it, apply processes to it, etc. But not me.

This extends to a lot of things in my professional life…and over the last 6 months or so I’ve had lots and lots of conversations with people about this very topic, but not in these terms. I’m lucky to have some Farmers (I’m looking at you, @shifted and @kgs) that helped give me insights into that style, and have worked with me to temper my “let’s just cut the top off this mountain and see what’s in there” reflexes.

If you didn’t read the entire Shipley article, two of the last paragraphs in his post really speak to me:

The people who really change the world are farmers. Steve Jobs works constantly on his products, every waking minute of every day. He lives and sleeps and breathes them. He’s obsessive and crazy and kind of scary — but he’s trying to build something. He didn’t just say, “Here’s my idea: smart phone! BAM! Go make it happen. Ima jump in the sauna.” That simply doesn’t work. God is in the details. In the implementation.

The most amazing thing about getting to go to TED was discovering that all the people I admire are farmers. The doctors and DNA-researchers and dancers and chocolate-makers and oceanographers and cosmologists and investors all have one thing in common: they are total nerds. They work on the thing they love literally all the time. You can’t talk to them without talking about their passion.

Someday I hope to be a Farmer. Playing the long-game, and working steadily over time to ensure things get done. But I’ve come to realize that it’s against my nature, and that to do so takes a lot of effort, and a lot of thinking, and frankly a lot of repressing my instincts. So while I am aspirationally into agriculture, what I need and want is to find ways that Mining is useful in my professional life. But like Shipley, the people that I admire are Farmers. And I want to find ways that I can stop strip-mining my ideas, and start planting them a bit more carefully.