The Problem with Librarians

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You may noticed I have using the blog to work through some ideas about libraries, what libraries are for and what libraries need to do next. This whole series of post is not born from existential dread. Some of my colleagues across the profession are freaking out about the pace of change and the emerging service models that may be necessary to serve our patron-base well. I don’t feel that concern. I hope my recent posts don’t contribute a defensive tone to the conversation.

Libraries do not need to be defended. They do, however, need to be explained. This is the work librarians need to be doing. Librarians need to stop justifying the continued existence of our services and start finding ways to articulate what those services are about in ways that people actually understand.

Librarians are the problem. Many of us became librarians because we love to search. We had professional training that taught us how to search. We build every system and service around the idea of search and then, incredibly, when talking to our patrons we evangelize about the joys of search and forget that they are there for discovery.

I serve in a community college library. For the most part, my patrons are faculty and students. Most of my faculty don’t do research. It isn’t part of their professional program and it isn’t required for promotion. My faculty are there to teach. Most of my students have never done scholarly research, don’t know how to do scholarly research and will likely never have to do scholarly research in any professional capacity. Most courses don’t even require a research paper or project.

How strange then that, when I celebrate the value of their college library, I wax rhapsodic about the joys of research. I extoll the moral virtues of time spent prizing through the wealth of human knowledge using a panoply of tools and devices to find the absolute best sources for their particular need.

This is madness. Their needs, for the most part, are not particular. They don’t need to devote hours to exquisitely refined search strings and terms. They need to discover. They need to get curious. They need to explore.

Librarians worship the search process. We want to help our students focus and refine their search strategies. This may be madness too. Most of my students come to me with no clear sense of what their research project is about or why they are being asked to do the research. Asking them to find focus is a non-starter. We should spend more of our time helping them find connection to the work they are doing in class.

Students cannot meaningfully focus their research before they have connected to the purpose of that research. This is true of everyone. All professional or amateur researchers come to their search with a deep sense of connection. They are compelled by an urge to know or understand some specific thing.

Librarians are deeply connected to the experience of search. It is our professional joy. We need to stop forcing that joy onto others. They will never love it as much as we do. They shouldn’t need to. What we believe to be the joy of search is actually the joy of making connections. We should share that joy instead.

We live in a post-search world. Just a few years ago, a curious person needed to dig deep and develop complex search rituals to have their curiosity rewarded. That is no longer entirely true. Information now comes to us more than we go to it. Through news media, blog feeds, podcasts and automated search strings, we can bombard ourselves with highly-personalized streams of relevant, interesting information.

The trick is knowing what to do with that information. Students have a very hard time with this. They have a hard time connecting the literary analysis of “Young Goodman Brown” with their own lives. When asked to write about a major social issue, they struggle to decode the latest geopolitical buzzword while ignoring the question they actually care about, which is something like “why aren’t there more small businesses in my hometown”.

Librarians have the skill, knowledge and tools to help these students connect with their own learning but we must stop doing a few things first.

  • Stop worshiping search. Enjoy the process. Share that joy with others but don’t expect them to enjoy search as much as you do. Search is your fetish. People don’t need to share it.
  • Stop talking so much about research. It doesn’t mean what you think it means and it usually sounds like a painful obstacle to climb before discovery.
  • Stop organizing libraries and webpages around the tools of discovery. Normal people don’t know what to do with it. Organize those pages around the process of discovery. Make the tools available where they are needed. Don’t expect people to reach into a deep, dark toolbox and spend hours thinking up ways they can use each.
  • Stop using the word “database” so much. There has got to be a better word. If you figure out what that word is, let me know.
  • Promote curiosity. Our collections are fascinating. Make connections from those collections to real life.
  • Be specific. Don’t say that the library is a place to learn. Everybody gets that, but nobody really knows what that even means. Say instead, “the library is a place to learn about math or science or politics or health or…”
  • Don’t just say the library is a place to learn about x. Show them. Make connections visible.

Librarians needs to stop thinking and talking about libraries as primarily being places for information. The world is awash information. Our patrons are seeking relevance. That’s what libraries are really about. It is time to start talking about them that way.

What libraries are for. (take 3)

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Last night, I posted my attempt to sort through a few ideas about the role college libraries play for students and faculty. I went to bed bothered and woke up bothered. That post was well-intended but missed the actual points. I went too far in some areas and not far enough in others. I created the wrong impression that most information is easily available online. This may or may not be true. What I did not say is that, increasingly, the best information (timely, reputable, accurate, quality-reviewed) is not available for free online. More and more often, the information and cultural content we expect to be free is locked up behind pay walls. You have to pay to access. Sometimes, you have to pay to discover. This is a problem libraries help solve.

Consider this post as third draft of an evolving essay on what libraries are about. The first two iterations are here and here.

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I serve as library director for a community college in Tennessee. The work is fun, challenging and, at present, a bit bewildering. Models of library service are quickly changing. The internet has matured and now underpins pretty much everything we do. The internet provides the plumbing for how we work, learn, communicate, socialize and entertain ourselves. Our daily lives are exponentially richer with information.

Information is a loaded term. What we call “information” is usually a mental short cut used to discuss a bunch of processes, experiences and feelings for which there is no good language. Information isn’t a thing. Information is a lot of things. Think books, articles, essays, stories, documentaries, data, code and conversation. It makes the head swim. All of these things and much more get packed together as information. This is where problems set in.

Librarians have been trained to believe that our primary job is to provide information. This is only true in a minimal sort of way. Librarians who still believe their primary function is to provide information are freaking out right now. Providing information is what Google does. Google does that much faster and much easier. Google still doesn’t always provide some kinds of information as well as library collections but that is often beside the point because faster and easier almost always trump better.

People are lazy. Don’t get upset. I’m not just talking about you. I include myself here. If I can find something quickly and easily that meets my need “well enough”, I don’t dig deeper. I stop with Wikipedia or the first 5 links on Google. Librarians who still believe we are competing with Google are at loose ends. The war is over. We lost. Come back home.

It turns out, we were never actually really at war. Librarians have adopted the tools of the information revolution and are using them in incredible ways. It is time to stop despairing and hand wringing. Librarians have never before had access to such powerful, efficient and effective tools. We can pick up these tools and use them to begin a library renaissance, but first we need to understand what it is we need libraries to do. Here a few suggestions:

  1. We need for the information that is available today to also be available tomorrow.
  2. We need to lower the cost barriers of information getting and sharing.
  3. We need to curate collections that create context so that resources are available in ways that speak to each other and contribute to a broader, more accurate understanding. This is done partly through our decisions about what we collect. Maybe more importantly, this is done through decisions about what we don’t collect.
  4. People seek relevance. Information now comes to us. We don’t often expect to have to go to information. The ease of getting “informed” tricks our minds into believing that all information is created equal. The problem is that information comes to us randomly and may or may not contribute anything useful. Lots of signals create lots of noise. Libraries can reduce the noise by selecting a few signals to spark good ideas.

This last point gets to what I want to say. I work with college students. Most of them have grown up in the world where the internet has always been available. Sometimes I get depressed because they don’t seem curious. This is baffling. We live in an unprecedented age of knowledge creation and sharing. As a species, we are using incredible information technologies to learn faster, share that learning and increase the human body of knowledge at an exponential pace. Why aren’t my students more curious?

I see two reasons. First, many are survivors of a drill-and-kill educational system that trained them to suppress their natural curiosity. Curiosity slows things down. Curiosity is the enemy of the highly structured lesson plan. They come to college stunted by a kind of intellectual PTSD. They are master gatherers of information but they choose the information they gather selectively according to one major critieria: “is this going to be on the test?” If yes, they capture the information in notes, review and regurgitate. If not, they omit and move on.

This isn’t really their fault. Like all traumatic stress survivors, they need counseling, perspective and time.

There is a second problem, and it effects all of us. We treat our information streams like an all you can eat buffet. I’ll take a little of this and little of that and make a crazy meal of sorts that may or may not nourish me properly. Our minds are stressed by the speed at which we are required to assimilate new information. We have trouble making time to find meaningful associations. We are ridiculously well-informed but often feel like our minds are out of our control. We stop putting things together. We stop having new ideas. We are overwhelmed. We are bored and restless and seek endless entertainment to distract ourselves from our ennui.

Libraries should promote and reward curiosity. This may be the most important contribution my library can offer my college. How do we do this? I’m still working through that. I need your ideas.

We need to think of the library less as a research paper tool shed and more as an intellectual supplement, something that amplifies the teaching and learning that occurs in the classroom.

We have the tools. We can develop the expertise. It is definitely time to stop moaning about the lack of curiosity and engagement inside our students’ minds. The college library is not an antiquated artifact of pre-internet society. The college library, the real college library, might just now be getting born. A kind of mind laboratory where new ideas are made, tested, and improved. A safe haven that rewards curiosity and encourages deeper exploration.  A relevance factory where information is just raw material, not an end product, and where ideas get connected with experience. That is how relevance gets made. That is how learning happens.

Libraries are Relevance Machines

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Note (11am on 23feb2013): I was frustrated with some of the ideas in this post and took another pass on this. See it here.

***

I had a fascinating conversation with my teacher friends today about what libraries are for. More specifically, we talked about what they need their library to do for them.

I have written about this before, but today’s conversation placed things in a new light for me. Not so long ago, libraries were places for information. Libraries collected the best information, kept it organized and ready for use when needed. This was the information warehouse model. Libraries collected the best books and housed them in buildings organized by myriad, fetishized principles that made information discovery a pretty efficient endeavor, once a person understood how the systems worked.

The Internet changed all that. We no longer expect to have go someplace to discover information. Information comes to us. Lots of information, in fact. Floods of information. So much information that our world is a noisy, busy, sometimes terrifying place. For the most part, we don’t have to dig too hard to find basic facts, get data or discover opinions.

We have a new problem. Since most information seems so easy to get, it is difficult to compare multiple pieces of information and assign meaning or value to it. Put another way, now that information is so easy to get, all information appears equal. It is far more challenging to discern which information is likely to be most useful or relevant to a particular need. It is more difficult to take that information and create useful knowledge.

Here’s the part where I tell you that I work and teach in a community college library and that this gives me permission to overgeneralize about “kids these days”. Here goes. College students are still smart, but they aren’t curious. Many don’t naturally invest themselves in their own learning. They expect learning to be something that is given to them by a teacher, probably through a series of lectures with accompanying Powerpoint lecture notes. They do not ask questions. They prepare themselves for the project, paper or exam without ever really wondering why they are doing this. Many of these students grew up believing that curiosity was bad because it interfered with the transfer of content required to get them ready for the next standardized assessment.

They don’t see connections, and they are not alone. Many of us are drowning in the information we encounter as random, unrelated factoids or tidbits. Watch a newscast sometime, and then ask yourself, “What am I supposed to understand from this about the world?”

We need to encourage students to be curious. We need to connect them to their own learning. It seems to me that the library is a place that can reward curiosity and foster connection. We can do this by showcasing connections between abstract concepts and everyday life. We can do this by curating collections of books, articles and video to tell a story. We can do this by focusing less on the mechanics of information discovery tools and focusing more on helping people identify and solve problems that matter to them.

Libraries should continue to collect resources, objects and artifacts that best address information needs. Libraries should continue to preserve the integrity of the scholarly and cultural conversations for the benefit of generations to come. We should do these things and do them well. But we should be always mindful that we do these things as a way to gather the tools to meet our true obligation. Our real work is rewarding curiosity and helping people create their own connections.

Poems Belong Everywhere

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I love poems, but I don’t always particularly enjoy poetry.

I like the way a really good poem slices through the baggage of words and gets to the truth of things. I like the way a really good poem makes familiar objects seem unfamiliar. I like way a really good poem can surprise you, catch you off guard and force you to acknowledge beliefs you did not realize you held.

I love poems, but I have a terrible time with Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats and the crew. There was a time when I assumed that Eliot, Stevens and cummings spoke with ideas and a voice more rarified and brilliant than my own. I bashed my mind against their verse, trying to unlock their elevated ideas. It never happened, so eventually I stopped.

Then I started reading Kerouac and Ginsberg, Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and I began to understand poems again. Poems are a kind of meditation. Poems are moments of complete attention where the object and the subject disappear. Poems are acts of gratitude. Poems are declarations not of how things should be but declarations of how things really are. Poems are prayers.

Poems are useful. They have a purpose in every day life. The problem is, too often, poetry gets in the way of poems. Poetry makes poems into an abstraction, an idea of a thing rather than the thing itself. We teach ourselves to fear poetry in high school and then feel ashamed about that fear for the rest of our lives.

I particularly like the way Billy Collins puts it, “It is a good thing to get poetry off the shelf and more into public life.” His 2012 TED Talk shares some ideas on how this might work. I was particularly amazed by the animated poem mashup he undertook to bring 5 of his terrific poems to a new kind of life.

Take a look:

What do you think about the idea of poems in public life? Where does the world need poems? How can we get them there?

39 Years: The State of Things

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Tomorrow I will be 39. I’m not sure how this happened. I still feel like a kid, despite all evidence to the contrary.

In medieval times, I would be a village elder. 39 was ancient.  39 deserved reverence. 39 bespoke hard-won wisdom. Back then, it was probably worth listening to the words of a guy who hadn’t gotten eaten by a bear, fallen from a tree or been bashed in the head during battle. At least, that is my scholarly opinion of the matter after reading 4 books into the Game of Thrones.

Age is a funny thing. Age perception is funnier. In my head, I think of myself as being 23. That was 16 years ago. I remember being 16. It felt like it took me a long time to become 16. The 16 years from 23 to 39 happened quickly.

I like my life. I have a strong, happy marriage to the girl I first met when I was 15 years old. We’ve been through a lot together. We still laugh.

I’m a dad. This suites me very well. My daughter is kind, creative, funny and smart. At five years old, she already challenges me. She will help me a keep a keen, crisp edge.

I have a job I enjoy very much, doing work that matters to people. I feel passionate about what I do and am grateful to work in a place where people take me seriously and let me have ideas and let me try those ideas. Sometimes those ideas work  out. Sometimes they don’t.

I still walk around with the feeling that something really amazing is about to happen. I’ve had this feeling since I was 15. It still carries me forward today.

I don’t carry many specific memories around with me. I have memories but when pushed to recall a specific thing that happened, I usually get fuzzy on details. This actually bothers me quite a bit at times. I can’t picture a specific childhood home or recall details of a favorite family vacation or call to mind details of a really great conversation I had with my best friends. These things are all in my head. I glimpse them from time to time, but I generally cannot call them to mind. Memories come to me. I cannot go to them.

I’m not sure what this weakness of memory means, and I don’t really intend to dwell on it here. I just want to say that some people’s lives are enriched by their past. Others have found the habit of mindful presence in the present moment. I am future-oriented, for good and for bad.

I am 39 years old and, still, I believe that something incredible is about to happen. I believe it because it is true. Everyday there is some astounding, astonishing new thing. Sometimes it is a small thing. Sometimes it is a big thing. If I am ready, it is there for me everyday.

This is how I have lived for 39 years, swinging from vine to vine. I am grateful for the days, months and years behind me. I am grateful for today and this moment. I am grateful for tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next.

An Open Letter to the Muse

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You won’t have noticed this, but I have been sitting at this desk off and on all day, wanting to write something. Nothing profound. Nothing special. Just the pleasant flow of words through fingers and keys then onto the screen. I’m not sure what I had wanted to say. Even now, writing this, I’m not sure what I want this to say.

I am wondering why you can’t stay put. Or, if you really must wander, why you can’t be someplace I can reach you when I am ready. You could leave a number that I could call when necessary.

Where do you go when you aren’t here with me? Is there someone else, some other writing person who is smiling even now, getting words on his screen? Is he getting my words? Is that what’s happening?

I don’t want to sound small or jealous. That isn’t me. It just isn’t right for you to sneak off that way and leave me alone and a little bit afraid that I may not write again.

We have a good thing, don’t we? I mean, I know I get busy and a little distracted. Maybe sometimes a few days goes by before I sit down in our place to feel the words. Maybe sometimes I rush things a little or simply go through the motions to get the time in, not really present, not really participating.

I can do better. Sure. I know I can. But so can you. Where are you? Where did you go? Why are you always running away when I have time to write and then hanging close when I have no time at all?

You are a fickle creature. I deserve better.

I’m sorry. That last thing was wrong. You are right to go. I don’t deserve you. I’m just glad to have you in my life.

Where are you? When are you coming home?

A Few Things About My Grandmother

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My grandmother celebrates 87 years today. She lives alone, drives her car and is learning to check Facebook on her Android tablet. The walls of her house are filled from floor to ceiling with framed family photographs. Her shelves are stacked with pictures, four frames deep. She is lovely, generous and kind. Many of the things I know that are worth knowing I have learned from my grandmother.

I never knew my grandfather. My mother’s father died one month before I was born. My grandmother has filled the years that followed by loving her family enough for both of them.

My grandmother finished her formal education at 8th grade. There was nothing beyond that available to her. She enjoyed school so much she took 8th grade twice.

My grandmother is a news and politics junky. Back in the Reagan/Bush/Clinton days she was a keen follower of public policy, celebrating the success of both parties. When politics turns nasty, she loses her taste for it and cultivates an expertise in the national weather.

When her sight was better, my grandmother was a voracious reader, preferring political and celebrity biography. She has never developed an appreciation for fiction.

When I was 10 years old, I often spent the night with my grandmother. She had cable. That’s how I found out about MTV.

When spending the night, we often had dinner together at Krystal. She never had much money and she enjoyed buying those dozen tiny, little hamburgers. It was always a low-cost feast.

When I was a kid, she was always giving me the last dollar out of her wallet. I took those dollars, never realizing she was giving her last one.

She used to carry Certs with her everywhere. She offered me one every time there was a lull in conversation or we were waiting for something to happen.

My grandmother is the kind of person with whom it is easy to share good news. She was one of the first people my wife and I told when we got engaged and again when expecting our daughter.

She doesn’t have much and has never asked for much. She surrounds herself with the love of her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She gives more generously than her means and never speaks unkindly of anyone. She forgives quickly and celebrates every little success. She always expects the best of everyone and is seldom disappointed.

She worries too much and hates to be a burden on anyone. She lives simply and maintains a stubborn sense of self-reliance.

I am grateful to her in ways I cannot find words to describe. And so I will leave this to say, my grandmother is a phenomenally kind, generous, loving person. She has suffered loss and then seen years of increase. She holds the world together with worry and attention. I hope you are reading this and thinking of someone in your life like this. If you are, you understand what it means to be loved and appreciated beyond all limits and reason. You understand the spirit of generosity.

 

 

Information (sharing) is power: Notes from Vint Cerf

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I am a few years late to the podcast party, but I am here now and completely hooked. I drive an hour and 15 minutes every day and have found a well-chosen podcast to be a funner, more informative, more entertaining companion than music or the news. I follow quite a few in rotation but my heavy favorites are The Nerdist, Radiolab and, as of today, DecodeDC.

DecodeDC is a new project by NPR’s Andrea Seabrook. It is smart, focused and fun.

Sometime this week you will have a free 24 minutes and 34 seconds. In that free time, you need to listen to Seabrook’s interview with Vint Cerf  (Cerfing the Net) about intellectual property law, the copy-machine nature of the web and the coming Internet of Things. Cerf is the main founder of the World Wide Web, which is, as he says, the crucial human tool of the 21st century. The Web underlies everything. We are accustomed to hearing people say that “information is power.”  Cerf says this is wrong. Instead, information sharing is power.

The Internet has become so essential so quickly because it is a catalyst that allows people to share ideas efficiently. The problems and challenges we face are immense. The solutions require everyone’s best ideas and honest conversations. The internet makes this conversation possible.

Cerf tackles the adage “Information wants to be free”. This is true, he says, in the sense that information wants to be freely accessible. It doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be able to charge for access to valuable information and cultural products. Just that the information should not be hidden, undiscoverable behind pay walls. Current intellectual property law favors corporations and the descendants on culture creators at the expense of the people who would use that culture to create new art, solve problems and move everyone forward. We are losing access to our own tools of cultural creation.

Cerf also talks about the need to talk more about new business models to support cultural creation rather than focus on new restrictions designed to perpetuate old, non-functional models. He offers the notion of subscribing to a film producer or a television screenwriter as a way to support and reward work. The idea is that through subscription-based models, patrons would continually support an artist’s next work of art rather than their last work.

Lots of challenging, interesting ideas here. And a brief riff on Angry Birds.

The interview is short, fun and accessible. If you are at all interested in how the internet works and why the internet matters, this 24 minutes will make you smile.

The first line

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Two takes from a prompt: “What is your metaphor for the fear of writing that first line?”

*****

Take one:

The first line contains the entire story. It is everything. Once the first line is written, everything else is inevitable. The entire story unlocks itself in your head. And you are stuck with it. You have to do the work. You have to set it down on the page or it will grow inside of you and press against the inside of your skull and make you sick with inspiration. Sick and angry and agitated, dangerously altered and off-kilter. Once the first line happens, the rest of the story leaps up inside you, fully formed if only partly seen.

Once the first line escapes your head, you have only two choices: swallow it down or vomit it out.

Take two:

They are lying in bed, unclothed, not speaking. Sunlight spills in through the curtains, filling the bedroom with a holy light. They are waiting. The sound of their tandem breathing excites him. He is eager to veil her face with kisses. He does not move. Not yet, he tells himself. Say something clever.

She shifts slightly under the covers while he is thinking. The rustle of her bare legs beneath the sheets piques exquisitely.

Not yet, he tells himself. Too soon. This is not yet enough, he tells himself. She is only just shifting to make herself more comfortable. He wants to help her writhe.

The sound of their breathing, an anticipatory rhythm gradually cooling until it becomes a thing between, a thing that separates them.

And now he stares up at the ceiling, mind reaching for words. Say something brilliant. Say something devastating. There is nothing.

And now he begins to panic. This perfect moment is tilting away from him. Two bodies, familiar and eager, caught in an uncomfortable space, trapped by thoughts and ideas. He is captured inside his mind and he can only look out at her through the narrow turrets of his eyes and see her there waiting, wondering what is taking so long. A moment ago she had been perched on the precipice of pleasure, a women ready to dive down headlong. Now, she was a woman waiting for a bus. A woman of great restraint, assiduously not checking her watch. A woman with places to be.

Say something, his mind screams. Say one simple thing to set this into motion. The words all scramble away from him, darting and scattering like a school of tiny fish.

She rolls over onto her side. They lock eyes. He is no longer staring at the ceiling. His mind no longer reaching for words.

“I’m right here whenever you are ready,” she tells him and he realizes in that moment there is nothing that needs to be said. He reaches out for her. His fingers find her skin. There are no words that need to be found. There is nothing he should do to improve this moment.

He is there. She is there. This is the first line. Their bodies know exactly what to do.

No News is Bad News

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People often say, “No news is good news.” I have said it myself many times. It’s a  lie. This is a thing we tell ourselves when we aren’t sure where we stand or how a  project is really going. This is the credo for the path of least resistance. This is the motto for the path of greatest avoidance.

I run an academic library at a mid-size community college. If you think libraries are drowsy, dull places where routine is revered and nothing ever changes, you are flat wrong. Everything is changing. My library is wrestling with eBooks, eJournals, iPads and other mobile technologies. We are building chat-based reference services and piloting embedded course librarians to more effectively teach our students good information habits. We are reshaping our print collections and working with other departments to develop online learning objects to be used in the classroom. One of my favorite projects at the moment is piloting the delivery of  real-time telepresence research assistance at a satellite campus via the use of a Tandberg hi-definition video conferencing unit. My library is a busy, interesting, and challenging place.

I want these projects to succeed. I want them to solve somebody’s problem. I want them to address a need.

Anytime a team starts a new project, the effort receives the benefit of the team’s full attention. Everyone is paying attention and watching to get to the project off the ground. Quickly after launch, the immediacy wanes and the project becomes a normal part of life. Once the initial vigilance fades, we begin to shortcut our assumptions about how the project is going. We lose touch with reality.

In those first few months of life, we are continually searching for flaws in the project so we can fix them and improve. Eventually, the search for flaws becomes an assumption of strength. In the absence of negative feedback, we convince ourselves that things are going well. If things were going poorly, someone would tell us. Ergo, no news is good news.

The truth is opposite. No news is bad news.

If things are going well and people are being well-served by your product or service, they will tell you. If things are going poorly and people believe or expect something better from your product or service, they will tell you. In either case, clients, customers or patrons are engaged with your service and are willing to invest their feedback into making your product stronger. If no one tells you anything good or bad, then no one is really engaged by your product or service and you are operating in a void. You aren’t meeting a need and no one cares enough to tell you.

Complaints are a sign of health. When people complain and point out flaws, it is a sign that they have a greater expectation of your product or service. Since nothing is ever perfect, some manageable volume of actionable complaints is a sign that people value what you are offering. Act on all reasonable complaints and you can only grow stronger.

When people praise your product and point out strengths, celebrate and work to preserve and increase the specific value they have recognized.

Listen. Be patient. Don’t be defensive. Feedback, both positive and negative, is a sign of engagement. In either case, be grateful.

Silence is the enemy. Silence is deadly. Silence means nobody cares.

No news is always bad news.