What's gonna happen?

It's been busy in the Reading Room and with less staff to call on for various reasons- which gets me thinking about the way we do things.
A while back Helene Blowers posted a comment about innovation on her Blog and I've been thinking about that for a while. The article in question suggests their are 12 ingredients to innovation. Check it out: how many ingredients do you think the library has in place? And how many don't we have in place? Not having 1 ingredient impacts achieving the other ingredients in my opinion. Reading the article in full makes me think we have a State Librarian in place who has these things in sight- I make this judgement without having interaction with said boss but by her statements and approach.
So- The way we do things? Innovation? In regards to what I do? Stack Retrieval right?
Doing what I do for such a long time now I'm at a loss for the way we do some things- in particular our inabilty to adapt to busy periods and the unnecessary pressure we put ourselves under at such times. The client focus is their but we don't seem to cope under pressure.
Example? One day this past week we had an unusual amount of staff away but we continued to provide a service as if we were fully staffed- we have things in place to help but they need to be looked at and sometimes they are overlooked. To (attempt to) solve this problem we call people from all over the library to help out which takes these staff members away from their own work and this may include librarians doing a LA's work.
Stack Delivery is being looked at in terms of considering electronic printing request slips and batching slips- I think batching will provide a longer delivery time and require more staff to deliver.
A general service model review is also in place which will be quite interesting too.

Another Blog i get feeds from has posted about a company called Zappos and praises there service approach- in particular check this post. Talk about innovation! And culture by the truckload. You really have to check out what Zappos does because judging by the post you wouldn't think they are simply an online retailer. Your job becomes your life but if you love what you do then what's the harm? Just to touch on some points if you can't be bothered checking the post: they have Xmas twice a year, work on culture and get rid of those who don't fit the culture, a full time 'coach', staff can't be overtrained and the more training courses you attend is reflected in your pay packet, tell your staff their opinion counts and mean it, create a welcoming culture, everyone is a VIP, keep on looking out for the next new/great idea, reward greatness. I know we are the public service but we can learn from others and if nothing else it's interesting to know how other businesses grow culture and innovation.

Don't tell anyone but I heard The Library/Reading Room got the budget go ahead to implement Vocera. I believe the positives of Vocera outweigh the negatives. Which brings up another point I've had on my mind: in the Stack Delivery Review process we haven't weighed up the pros and cons of the options being reviewed. It seems voices of dissent (?) or whatever you want to call it are ????? The notion that a good idea will stand up to criticism and in fact will be better for it is lost. I guess there are reasons for not doing things this way but....

I checked out this video that's about craft brewing in the US- they are appealing to people to support craft beers because they have something for everyone and the Brewers are community based and focussed, that Craft Brewing values are American values: check it

I Am A Craft Brewer from I Am A Craft Brewer on Vimeo.

It got me thinking about the libraries strengths: staff and diversity of the collection came to mind.