by Nettie Seaberry, New York Chapter, Leadership & Management, Solo Librarians Divisions

Several years ago, I had an idea that would have put my organization at the forefront of providing a service that our constituents would have wholeheartedly embraced. The research was done, interested parties queried, price structures developed and legal counsel consulted, but no matter how many times I sent emails or called staff meetings to discuss the concept, I couldn’t seem to move the needle. It was apparent that the timing just wasn’t right. Retirement and leadership changes were cause for this revenue generating idea to be placed on the back burner. It slowly simmered but I never let the flame die.

Fast forward, new leadership, new ideas for moving the organization into the future were beginning to unfold. The organization’s past has been recognized as the cornerstone in the industry, but new leadership wants to chart a new direction. The time was right to reposition the idea. I used this shift to reintroduce the project and it was enthusiastically embraced. The green light has been given and it will be launched in 2011. As we work through a strategic plan for the organization under the management, I have several ideas on tap that I envision will bring more value to the information center and benefit the organization.

If you have the good fortune of staying the course within your organization you’ll have the opportunity to show your value time and time again, but you have to put yourself out there. You can’t sit in a corner, you can’t hide your talents and creativity, you have to make your moves when the time is right, stay focused and position yourself and your services to show that you’re ready, willing and able to be future ready.

Nettie Seaberry is the Director of the Minority Business Information Center at the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) in New York City. As a solo librarian she is responsible for development, implementation and administration of the Information Center, which includes establishing policies, collection development and management, research, staff supervision, information technology management, Webmaster and Volunteer Coordinator for NMSDC’s annual conferences. She currently serves as a Director on the Board of SLA.

Ann Koopman, Philadelphia Chapter, Multiple Divisions

It’s over thirty years since I entered library school, armed with a fresh BA in the liberal arts, and hoping to go into rare books and archives.  We students thought we were hot stuff, running to the computer center with our shoeboxes full of punch cards that contained PL1 code, or learning to search online services using a phone-cradle modem – skills every “modern” librarian would need!

But we weren’t so much learning specific skills as how to think about professional issues, and how to open our minds to receive and act on new ideas.   For me, that’s the core of being future ready, in any decade and any place.

What are some of the characteristics that allow a person to be flexible, to flow with change and even thrive on it?   What should we all be cultivating in order to shape our own futures?

• Curiosity & willingness to experiment with new ideas and technologies.
  SLA is an especially good source for exposure to new trends and for opportunities to learn new skills.
• Sharing, teamwork, and collaboration.
  Social animals thrive on community and inclusion; we all need the support of our colleagues, both as mentors and mentees.   We also need to integrate ourselves powerfully with our clients, demonstrating our value to the team.   It’s through engagement that we earn validation.
• Solid foundations and respect for the past.
  Knowing who we are and what we believe in provides the confidence needed to build new models.
• Proactivity.
  I love the “pick yourself” post (Dale Stanley, http://futureready365.sla.org/04/06/pick-yourself/).  When we take responsibility for our own continuous learning and for acquiring the new skills needed to cope with a changing professional environment, we position ourselves to embrace and even make new opportunities.  Step up to volunteer yourself for assignments or association tasks that expand your horizons.
• A sense of humor and pleasure in accomplishment.
  If you’re not having fun, what’s the point?  Joseph Campbell’s “follow your bliss” has proven to be a pretty good mantra over the years.

Of course, participation in SLA is one key to professional growth, from CE courses to networking, to leadership development.  It’s where you can find your voice to shape the conversation about issues that are important to you.

Over the years I’ve owned a paper conservation business, worked as a science & engineering librarian, become a medical librarian, morphed into a web content editor, and who knows what the future holds?  It will surely be fascinating.

Ann Koopman is the JEFFLINE Editor for the Academic & Instructional Support & Resources (AISR)  at Thomas Jefferson University.   She is a candidate for Division Cabinet Chair-Elect for the 2012 SLA Board of Directors.

by Liz Wallach, Washington, DC Chapter, Environment & Resource Management Division

As we work to demonstrate our value to our organizations, we may be asked to participate in projects with other groups or divisions. Being asked to contribute to a project is an opportunity to showcase our skills and knowledge as information professionals. Here is a new project management concept that I recently learned about.

Agile Project Management gives a flexible framework for completing a project with an iterative approach. Agile is not new (only new to me) and it is not something that you learn quickly. There is a whole industry devoted to training seminars, consulting, and software tools. I had never heard about the Agile concept before attending a 3 day “boot camp” seminar last summer. I realized very quickly that I had a lot to learn.

The main advantage of using an Agile approach is that it allows you to make changes to your concepts as you move through the process. Agile participants accept that there is no way for you to know exactly what the end product will look like – no matter how many requirements you write. Ideas should evolve as you gather more information. So Agile allows you to refine and revise your concept as you learn more about the possibilities. These few sentences are just scratching the surface of how the Agile method works.

There are 2 reasons that I connect this with our FutureReady blog:

1. It’s healthy to be challenged by learning about something with which you have no experience.
2. I am building new relationships with other groups within my company by working on these projects.

I am an SLA member who has always worked in a “nontraditional” library position, but I have strongly associated myself with the information professionals in SLA. As we move into the future, we should remember to challenge ourselves by learning about new ideas to keep our profession “agile”.

Liz Wallach has worked at BNA for 22 years in various research positions, most recently as a Manager of Special Projects. She has been a member of SLA for almost that long, since completing her M.S.L.S. at Catholic University.

by Cindy Hill , Multiple Chapters and Divisions

Some of my best memories of elementary school are of playground time, before, during and after class. My friends and I would race to the jungle gym, running to our favorite spot, the parallel bar, where we would spend wonderful hours (at least it felt like hours) hanging from bent knees and then start spinning around and around. When we found the just perfect moment, we would let go, flying up into the air and then landing as far away as momentum and our bodies would take us. While I’m pretty sure we knew we could get hurt (we landed on tan bark, not rubber mats) we also were fearless, physically agile and willing to take risks.

One aspect of being Future Ready is to take that youthful fearlessness and incorporate it into our work environment, especially when we are considering starting something new or changing an existing service. Too often it’s difficult to start something new for many reasons. Often there’s the fear of failure, lack of resources, concern about being able to provide the service to everyone, or not enough funding. Considering a new service or providing a new resource, but not sure how it will be received? One way to test its viability is to launch it as a pilot using the 3Ss + 1S more model, rather than a full-scale entity. You won’t find this model in any management or text book as a former executive VP at Sun Microsystems created it. The 3Ss + 1S more model stands for:

• Start small
• Be highly successful
• Make it scalable
• And keep statistics (aka metrics)

Start small: Create the big vision and then break it into smaller components. One way to start small is to limit the new service or resource to a specific group. Can it be introduced to a particular segment of your audience rather than the entire organization? By choosing a group that wants or needs the new service or resource, you are already working with a receptive audience, one that will give useful and constructive advice and observations and will be willing to work out any kinks with you. Which group would benefit most from being a “first adopter”? Would they then be your advocates and supporters?

Be highly successful: Plan for success by defining what success looks like. Is success having a specific group use it and want it to continue? Does success mean that the technology is working seamlessly? Or is success having the new resource embedded into the daily workflow of your users? By defining success before the initiative is launched, you will know when you have reached it.

Make it scalable: A highly successful initiative is one that can grow to meet the demands of potential users. Is there enough staff, funding, technological support and/or support from your internal or external partners as the demand expands? Is there a plan to acquire the needed resources in order to scale?

Keep statistics: Statistics should be both quantifiable and qualitative. How many people are using the new service or resource? How are they using it? What value is it adding to their productivity? What stories are they telling you about its value? Metrics provide the foundation for building a rationale to continue or scale the initiative.

With limited budgets, staff and resources, it’s often daunting to take a risk in changing a process, launching a new service, or introducing a new resource. Think back to your childhood days of playing, experimenting with new techniques, and being fearless and then bring those agile aspects into your daily life. As Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media and innovator recommends, “Try fast, fail fast, keep trying and never give up.”

Cindy Hill is the manager of the Research Library at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. She’s a past president of SLA and is currently chairing the 2012 Conference Planning Council. She is a newly selected Commissioner for the Los Altos Public Library and is a part-time faculty member at San Jose State University.  Cindy can be reached at cindyvhill@yahoo.com, tweets @cindyhill and can be found on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/cindyvhill. She’s currently working on her latest 3S + 1S initiative.

by Cynthia Eastman, San Francisco Bay Region Chapter, Engineering and Environmental & Resource Mgmt Divisions

We as individuals need to be future ready but so does our support structure, in other words, SLA. We talk about attracting members from outside our traditional venues but if they don’t see any division or caucus activity that is in their line of work how can we ask them to join? If we want to attract members from non-traditional fields, we need to identify those potential fields and think about what SLA should have in place to attract those people. One approach would be to identify say three fields where we think we can attract new members and then set up a new forum for those fields. Obviously these forums won’t be like divisions but they could grow into divisions over time. Perhaps they are just a few existing members getting together for discussion sessions at the annual meeting. Yes, we already have caucuses that do this but I suggest we do away with the formal caucus formation process for these forums. Perhaps it’s as simple as asking for a few volunteers to lead a discussion and then setting up a web page where discussion notes and other information can be posted.

Switching to the opposite direction, is it time to look at de-structuring some of our current divisions to help us attract and retain active volunteers? At every conference I hear stories about the difficulties some divisions have filling Board positions and supporting conference sessions. On top of that are the burn-out stories where someone steps up to be Division chair and then disappears from volunteer roles after their term ends (or even sooner). Can we come up with a “small division” option with fewer positions to worry about and a lower number of sessions to plan? Yes, I know that divisions aren’t required to fill all positions or to do the maximum number of sessions allowed. But many people are intimidated away before we get them to a point where they understand the option to wrestle things down to a manageable level.

The keynote speaker at this year’s Leadership Summit showed that “Opportunities to Gain Leadership Experience” is not one of the aspects of association membership that is rated high by non-volunteers. If we want to turn those folks into volunteers, we need to think about new options for engagement. Less structure and fewer procedural requirements might be one way to go.

Cynthia is Corporate Librarian at Kennedy Jenks Consultants, an environmental engineering firm in San Francisco. Prior to Kennedy Jenks, Cynthia was Director of Information Services as Keyser Marston Associates, a real estate consulting firm. She is program planner for the Engineering Division for the Philly and Chicago annual conferences and has served as Chair of the Environment and Resource Management Division.

by Jill Heinze, Virginia Chapter, CI Division

From my vantage point as a research analyst, I see novel-worthy tales play out daily in the form of mergers, lobbying, new product launches, bankruptcies, client wins and losses, and on and on. With all of the drama unfolding in the marketplace, how proficient are we at capturing that dynamism in our presentations and reports? If you’re like me, you could probably stand to become a better storyteller. Even more, if you listen to some observers, you have to become a respectable storyteller to be future-ready.

In his book A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink asserts, “When facts become so widely available and instantly accessible, each one becomes less valuable. What begins to matter is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact.” Skeptical? Consider the success of Freakonomics¸ the book that transformed a collection of dry statistics into possible explanations for how society works and become a bestseller.

When weaving your tales, try emulating what I consider to be the traits of a good storyteller:

Creates well-developed characters.

A talented storyteller knows the history of her characters, their emotional and physical make up, what motivates them, and how they will grow and evolve. Similarly, a business info pro could enhance research by communicating the back story and drivers influencing “characters” like companies, executives, politicians, and products, and include suggestions about how those characters could change or act in the future given certain market conditions.

Says enough, but not too much.

There are few things more tedious than reading a story that leaves nothing to the imagination. While I don’t suggest leaving out key details or making too many assumptions, I do recommend considering how you can say more with less. Sometimes a single descriptive adjective, a clear graph, or a powerful image can get the point across and even improve the audience’s retention.

Constructs a plot.

Stories have a beginning, middle, and end. If you feel you’re assembling a collection of facts but losing the point in the mix, step back and see how you can reorganize the information so that it has a logical, compelling progression and reinforces your main conclusions.

Displays unique insight.

The best authors examine everyday occurrences in a new light and discover something profound. Maybe you’re no Shakespeare, but sometimes it’s those little nuggets that are commonly overlooked that can add large amounts of value to your deliverables. Try looking for themes, outliers, contradictions, trends and anomalies to deepen your clients’ understanding of a topic.

A note of caution: Unlike fiction writers, info pros need to tell stories responsibly. If you exaggerate too much for dramatic effect, you could sacrifice your credibility and, even worse, support bad decision-making.

To get going on your page-turners, check out some of the suggestions in Pink’s book and start small. In my case, I’m making a concerted effort to use graphics to convey my meaning and ensuring that each of my PowerPoint slides paints a verbal and visual picture. The future-readiness of PowerPoint is, well, another story.

Jill Stover Heinze is a librarian, marketing research analyst, active member of SLA’s Competitive Intelligence Division (CID) and Virginia Chapter, and a proud member of her profession. She earned her M.S.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has worked in academic and business environments and is an invited presenter on library marketing topics. She is currently serving the CID as blog editor and is participating in the division’s annual conference planning.

Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web, and a founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures.  Previously, he was the chief evangelist of Apple. Kawasaki is the author of ten books including Enchantment, Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Cindy Romaine, SLA President 2011, caught up with Guy at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show, where he was talking about his new book Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions. The ideas he brings forward in the book seem particularly relevant for information professionals right now.

This year, at the Consumer Electronic Show, you introduced ten ideas from your new book Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions. I came away from your talk convinced that librarians and information professionals need to learn about enchantment and take that lesson to heart. Using a broad brush, tell us what Enchantment is about.

Did you hear the story that a reporter asked Tom Clancy what his new book was about and he said, “It’s about $26.00,”? Mine is about $14, street. Actually, my book is about learning skills to become more enchanting so that you can delight your customers, employees, and bosses.

One key point you mention in Enchantment is achieving trustworthiness, which requires a knowledge of our users. What’s the best way to gain that knowledge and trust?

There isn’t a “best way” to gain knowledge and trust. Rather, the process requires an array of skills. The starting point of becoming trustworthy is that you trust others. There is a definite order here: first, you trust others and then they trust you. Then you need to be a baker, not an eater. A baker makes a bigger pie so that everyone’s slice is larger. An eater just tries to get as much of a finite pie as possible. Finally, trustworthy people are transparent and give for intrinsic,  as opposed to quid-pro-quo, reasons.

In an era of diminished resources and limited bandwidth, it’s tempting for information professionals to hunker down and focus on their core competencies. Yet in your new book, you share your idea of “defaulting to yes.” How does that work?

Defaulting to yes and focusing on core competencies are not mutually exclusive. Defaulting to yes means that when you meet people, you’re always thinking, “How can I help this person? If she asks for help, I will try to help.” Whether you help along the lines of your core competencies or not isn’t the key. What’s important is that you want to say yes and help.

I would think this is how librarians think anyway. Isn’t your default attitude to help people find information? Librarians can skip this part of the book.

This is me enchanting my boss. What does it look like?

Like it or not, the key to enchanting your boss is to drop everything when your boss asks you to do something. This can produce sub-optimal prioritization of tasks in the “big picture,” but it works. I never said enchanting people would be easy.

As you’d be the first to admit, not everyone has your phenomenal chutzpah. So, some of your prescriptions may seem a bit daunting. Can anyone be an enchanter? Please expand on this a little.

Enchantment is a matter of degrees, not either/or. Almost everyone can be more enchanting. Enchantment is like fitness: almost everyone can be more fit. Imagine if people were either fit or not fit, and there wasn’t anything you could do to change that.

I’m intrigued by your concept of reciprocity. In fact, I’ve been drawn into it, in asking you for this blog post—a great bit of mental jujitsu, by the way. What do you mean when you advise people to say “I know you would do the same for me?”

Reciprocity is what makes society work, and when society doesn’t work, it’s often because someone has violated the basic principle that if people help you, you should someday help them back. My hero, Robert Cialdini, is the person who taught me that when people thank you for doing something, the optimal response is “I know you would do the same for me.”

This phrase communicates three important points: first, I believe you’re an honorable person; second, we both know I did something significant for you; and third, someday you should repay me. That’s a lot of meaning packed into a simple phrase.

Cindy Romaine & Guy Kawasaki

In your book, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit you encourage people, when investigating their competitors to, “by all means, suck up to a research librarian.” We certainly appreciate the plug! Can you explain what you meant there and provide an example of your relationship with research librarians over the years?

Research librarians at the time I wrote that book held the keys to the golden castle of all the knowledge that was written down on paper. Mere mortals had a difficult time acquiring this knowledge without help. I can remember using the Reader’s Abridged Guide to Periodical Literature for hours in my youth.

Fast forward to today. There’s probably more knowledge than ever, and it’s more accessible than ever but the reinvented research librarian holds the key for using the Internet in the most effective manner. Many, but not all, people know how to use Google and Wikipedia, but Google and Wikipedia do not provide all of human knowledge. Some of that knowledge is locked away in private databases and some of that knowledge is difficult for a novice to find. That’s where research librarians still hold the key. They are the ultimate information curator no matter what hocus, pocus you hear about the “semantic web.”

You have your hand in many pies—writing, speaking, and running your company Alltop.com and Garage Ventures. How has a librarian or information professional helped you along the way?

Honestly, I don’t do much in-depth research for my writing, speaking, and running Alltop.com. The nature of my work is grinding it out and sucking it up. I’m the Mike Rowe (Dirty Jobs) of technology.

What’s your advice for a new college graduate just entering the workforce as an information professional?

The bottom line is that the Internet is the greatest threat or greatest promise ever to an information professional. On one hand, it democratizes information–bad news, does this mean information professionals are no longer necessary? On the other hand, there is so much information that it’s harder to find good, credible sources–good news, does this mean information professionals are more necessary than ever? A new college graduate should understand this dichotomy and, I think, has to reinvent what “information professional” means.

Get enchanted! Find Guy Kawasaki’s new book at his website: Enchantment: the Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions.

by Reece Dano, Oregon Chapter, Advertising& Marketing Division

Much has been made about design-thinking and its supposed ability to summon up innovation and transform organizations. True, its flashier proponents have led many to question the scope of its utility. However, working as an information specialist within a design consultancy, I’ve seen how carefully designed systems, products and communication methods can change lives. So what is it all about?

In brief, design-thinking is any process that allows you to change your point of view. These processes often use abductive thinking to promote creativity and temporarily subdue logical constraints. Participants in design-thinking activities are asked to make logical leaps in service of idea generation. The more ideas generated in this manner, the more your default (and possibly stale) thinking patterns are shaken and called into question.

The change of perspective design-thinking grants can lead to the acceptance of information that opens you to greater flexibility. For information professionals, this flexibility can inspire more relevant user-oriented services, career agility and the chance to envision even greater opportunities.

Design-thinking isn’t that hard. Changing your point of view is.

If you’re interested in opening your current services to a creative examination, here are some questions you can ask yourself to kick off a design-thinking session. Some of these questions are challenging. Others may seem a bit silly. However, the insights gleaned from all can easily lead to new and fruitful perspectives.

• If I were to plot my services on an axis from least-used to most-used, what would I see?
• If I were to plot my services on an axis from most-mission-critical to least-mission-critical, what would I see?
• If I transformed these axes into a Cartesian coordinate system, where would my services lie? Would I feel the need to reposition any of these services to a new quadrant?
• If the CEO or president of my organization suddenly became my assistant, what would I have them do? Why? What would that say about me and my role?
• If the receptionist of my organization suddenly became my assistant, what would I have them do? Why? What would that say about me and my role?
• How would I characterize the differences between the tasks I would assign the CEO versus the receptionist? What does that say about me and my role?
• If I had to take away all my services, save for one, which one would remain? Why? Would this remaining service be the core of my identity? Should it?

As you can see, these questions are loaded with imaginary scenarios that could easily lead to oversimplification. However, the purpose of these questions is not to generate carefully framed hypotheses – at least not yet. Rather they are meant to provoke thought, begin dialog and reposition perspectives.

Try them out. Come up with your own. See if you can use them to spot emerging opportunities for you, your customers and the information industry as a whole.

Reece Dano is an embedded Information Specialist within the Consumer Insights and Trends Analyst Group at Ziba Design. He has worked in both corporate and academic libraries since 1999. He holds an MLIS from the University of Washington iSchool. He currently serves on the board of the Special Library Association’s Division of Advertising and Marketing and is Chair of SLA’s First Five Years Advisory Council. He was a recipient of the SLA Rising Star Award in 2010.

 by Judy Anderson, Oregon Chapter, Academic Division

What keeps you coming to SLA? Is it because you are making things happen that benefit you and those you know?  Is it meeting new people and making contacts? Supporting a strong volunteer campaign and program can bring that enthusiasm and interest to others, too. One of the saddest comments is, “I would like to get involved but don’t know how.” Or even sadder, “I said I’d like to be volunteer but no one got back to me.”  Making getting involved easier may spark new life into our Chapters.  Volunteers bring fresh ideas and positive energy that can’t be beat.  

A few thoughts to keep in mind when working with volunteers:

1. Match their interests and opportunities for career growth (something to add to their resumes as a skill) with things your organization needs done; busy work is not helpful for anyone.
2. Support their enthusiasm and fresh ideas…try new things. If they work, that’s fantastic; if not, you know now that they don’t work and can move to something else.  Both experiences are valuable.
3. Choose projects that are needed but not mission critical or time sensitive to get them started.
4. Break the project into small segments that are easily managed and have an end point so it’s readily apparent that progress has been made and there is a finished product to be proud of.
5. Figure out the type of recognition needed for that person…verbal praise? Recognition at a meeting? A plaque? A thank you letter to their employer? How are you going to thank them in a way meaningful to them?

Like many of you, Oregon added a volunteer coordinator position to our Board. Not only does it provide a volunteer opportunity, but it’s helping us reach our members to let them know how they can take a more active role in the organization and is keeping track of their areas of interest so we can match projects with volunteers.  After all, we’re all volunteers, so think about why you’re enjoying our association and work to bring that life and joy to others in the membership and beyond. 

 Judy Anderson is the current Past-President of SLA’s Oregon Chapter. She is the Head of Reference & Instruction at Concordia University-Portland, Oregon.

by Kevin Carroll, Kevin Carroll Katalyst LLC

Think back to your childhood and to the years dominated by playtime, when there were endless hours to fill and the only agenda was to be captivated in the moment, to have fun. But playtime was also productive time, even if as kids we did not realize it. What we thought was entertaining was also instructive. Activities we called tea party, show-and-tell, kick-ball, finger-painting, hide-and-seek, daydreaming, and tag were also exercises in planning, strategy, design, decision-making, creativity, risk-taking, conflict resolution and teamwork.

In play we did not avoid obstacles, we looked for them by voluntarily challenging ourselves. We eagerly tackled insurmountable odds—height, speed, lack of money—to make our desires reality. Using imagination, we climbed Mt. Everest, competed in the Super Bowl, conquered the world or made a house out of a cardboard box. We voluntarily tested ourselves and accepted failure as part of the play. We ran, stumbled, and got up to run again. When we lost a game we simply started a new one. When something did not pan out as intended, we tapped into our seemingly endless supply of cleverness, resourcefulness and/or our creative agility to prototype or experiment with new solutions until we were satisfied. When faced with an enemy or new challenge—be it a competing team, a broken toy, or our friend playing a cop to our robber, an ogre to our princess—we figured out how to win, remedy the malfunction, or flee the imagined danger.

Far from frivolous time, our childhood play was constructive because it strengthened our resolve as well as our skills. Play gave us courage and instilled confidence. No doubt about it, the many forms of play—board games, sports, pretending, arts-and-crafts, writing, exploring, building—required us to invent, analyze, innovate, socialize, plan, communicate and problem solve. Play was serious business in our youth and play should continue to be serious business in our adult life.

Lifelong Play + Creative Confidence = Future Ready!

Kevin Carroll is the founder of Kevin Carroll Katalyst/LLC and the author of three highly successful books: Rules of the Red Rubber Ball, What’s Your Red Rubber Ball?! and The Red Rubber Ball at Work. As an author, speaker and agent for social change (a.k.a. the Katalyst), it is Kevin’s “job” to inspire businesses, organizations and individuals – from CEOs and employees of Fortune 500 companies to schoolchildren – to embrace their spirit of play and creativity to maximize their human potential and sustain more meaningful business and personal growth.