Library Leadership Reading Group #llrg

10 Jun Library Leadership Reading Group #llrg

Following some discussions at the CILIP in Wales Conference on leadership, there seem to be a number of people interested in reading books/articles on leadership as part of a reading group. I put together a list of any of the works mentioned from the conference and shared it as a Google Document which others have added to (and added their details if they are interested in joining in).

A few people have asked about the Library Leadership Reading Group so here are some FAQs on how I see it working.

Can I join in?

Of course, this is just a group of people interested in reading works on leadership and discussing them with others. If you’d like to be part of that, add your name to the Google Document. I’m setting this up to help encourage me to read some of the interesting books I can’t seem to find time to read, but nothing is set in stone so if you have an idea for making it better please feel free to do so.

What will it involve?

Reading the book/article over a period of time and discussing it on Twitter (or elsewhere if anyone thinks there is a better way to manage it). We’ll be using the hashtag #llrg as that’s nice and short and doesn’t seem to currently be in use for anything else. I’ve set up a public archive of tweets (edited to add v2 and v3 archives), or of course you can set up a saved search to keep track via Twitter or Twitter apps.

It’s really up to you how much you want to join in. I’m a relatively slow reader and I know we’re all busy people so I’m going to start off by allowing around two months for each book and one month if it’s an article. Of course, if the current one doesn’t interest you that’s fine, you can just join in the next one or suggest an alternative.

Can I add a title to the list to read?

Certainly – the Google Document is editable so please feel free to add to the list of resources to read.

What should I read first?

At the time of writing this blog post here are 16 resources on the list so to choose which to begin with I used a random number generator which selected number 12:

This means the first book to read will be Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World by Margaret Wheatley. This was initially published in 1992 and has been updated since (I’m going to read the updated version). If you’d like to join in, please do so. I’m going to set a deadline of the end of July for discussing this, and it’s really up to you how you do that. You might want to write a book review, or jot down some thoughts about the book on your blog, or you might want to discuss via Twitter as you read, or when you’ve finished. I think it would be worthwhile setting a specific time to discuss it to as that seems to work well for other Twitter chats, so I’m going to say 7.30pm (UK time) on July 31st using #llrg tag.

Hope you can join us 🙂