of natural selection

I've been slacking off, in the blogging department, lately. Big money worries here and everywhere. It's so tough to face cuts, how ever small they are. Then, when they are large and potentially larger, as we face here at MPOW , it down right ruins everything. Well, nearly. It sure ruins the ambiance, though. It seems like it always ends up creating a paranoid climate of sorts. "Don't even look at my services!" and then the terrible sequel: "Why don't you look over there?". Of course, we have been evaluating processes for a long time, on a continuous basis, what should we keep doing, stop doing, start doing, right? We know SWOT and all that...
So how do you squeeze blood for a turnip? What is left for us to sacrifice?

I was asked recently how does innovation survive in this kind of climate? Seems some feel we cant be expanding our horizons, adding new services and working on new projects if we also have to cut/delete/discontinue some others.
It dawned on me that this may not be the best question. What I want to know is, how do we survive in this kind of climate without innovation? The only way we can manage the crisis instead of the crisis managing us it to be REALLY INNOVATIVE. It's so corny to state but only the one that adapt will survive. Some of the choices should be really (listen to me?!) easy. Instead of (Believe me, I hear it often..) trying to impose limits the popular service, let's look at what does not support our most popular services 1st. We don't want to take our best, most appealing to the community offerings, and render them cumbersome and inconvenient, so we can continue to dedicate time and effort to sustain options that not many users even wish for.

John Blyberg smartly reminded us in a recent post:

I’m afraid to say that delayed gratification is not something we can sell.

Let's not work so hard at self preservation and think more globally about satisfying the needs of current customers. We need to go forward with new and exciting things that will meet their expectations, not ask them to measure up to ours. After all if they were perfect, they might not need a library.

I don't want to spend my time preserving the great library we had last year, I want to work at creating the great one we'll have next year.

SERENDIPITY
I have been muling this over in my pea brain fro a good while now, then finally commited to spread it on the screen... Look what Steven Abram published today.




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