Welcome to Vision & Balance

This is a twice-weekly newsletter devoted to management and leadership in academic libraries, drawing on things I’ve learned over the course of a 30-year career – sometimes by making mistakes, sometimes by doing things that worked really well, and always by carefully watching the examples (both good and bad) of other managers and leaders. If you’re a supervisor, a manager, or an administrator in an academic library, Vision & Balance offers you the chance to learn things the easy way that I’ve learned the hard way.

The newsletter's title and subtitle incorporate four important concepts:

Vision. To lead, you need to know where you want your organization to go – whether it’s a small work unit of two or three people, a department, a division, or a whole library. Determining your desired direction and figuring out how to move accordingly are essential elements of leadership. So are understanding the unique possibilities and limitations of doing so in the context of an academic library – which leads to the need for balance. 

Balance. Supervision, management, and leadership require difficult choices about how resources will be allocated and how competing needs will be negotiated. Maintaining a productive and appropriate balance between competing needs in a context of limited resources is one of the most fundamental duties of library leadership, at any organizational level.

Leading. In the context of this newsletter, “leading” refers to the work of both leadership and management: managing in the library entails leading and leading in the library entails management. While we’ll observe distinctions between the work of higher-level leadership and that of more operational management in the course of our discussions here, the words “leadership” and “leading” will often be used as umbrella terms for leadership, management, and supervision.

Academic libraries. This newsletter’s author, Rick Anderson, has over 30 years’ experience working in and around academic libraries, as a service provider, a manager, an administrator, and a dean or director. While Vision & Balance will regularly address issues common to many different kinds of libraries, the focus will be on his more specific area of expertise: issues of particular relevance to academic libraries.

Vision & Balance is published twice weekly: a briefer entry on Tuesdays (freely available to the public) and a longer entry on Thursdays (for paying subscribers).