Anna Milholland
Episode 155: June 15, 2021
Good Books for Summer Vacation
The masks are coming off, we're gathering with family and friends, and many people are making plans for a much needed and well-deserved summer vacation. Whether you're heading to the beach, the mountains, or the in-laws, if you're looking for the right book to take along we have the right person who has several recommendations in terms of good reads for your summer getaway. Anna Milholland is the business librarian at the McLeod Library at William & Mary's School of Business. She oversees the Library, its databases, books and publications, and works closely with students and faculty. We invited her to join us today to share the titles of six books she thinks you'll want to consider for your summer vacation. Some on the list are new, some not so new, some are fairly easy reads while others may be challenging. But each book on the list is relevant, interesting, and thought provoking.
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TranscriptKen WhiteFrom William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, this is Leadership & Business, the podcast that brings you the latest and best thinking from today's business leaders from across the world. We share the strategies, tactics, and information that help make you a more effective leader, communicator, and professional. I'm your host, Ken White. Thanks for listening. Well, the masks are coming off. We're gathering with family and friends, and many people are making plans for a much-needed and well-deserved summer vacation. Whether you're heading to the beach, the mountains, or the in-laws, if you're looking for the right book to take along, we have the right person who has several recommendations in terms of good reads for your summer getaway. Anna Milholland is the business librarian at the McLeod Library at William & Mary School of Business. She oversees the library, its databases, books, and publications and works closely with students and faculty. We invited her to join us today to share the titles of six books she thinks you'll want to consider for your summer vacation. Some on the list are new, some not so new, some are fairly easy reads, while others may be challenging. But each book on the list is relevant, interesting, and thought-provoking. Here's our conversation with the business librarian at William & Mary School of Business, Anna Milholland. Ken WhiteAnna, thanks very much for sharing your time. We should say it should be quiet today. Graduation just occurred as we're recording. So it's the day after the big storm. What a great weekend it was. Right. It's so nice to see all those grads get their diplomas. And now it's nice and quiet again. Anna MilhollandAbsolutely. Ken WhiteYeah. Anna MilhollandYes. We have this giant celebration and then a day of recovery. Ken WhiteAnd you work closely with faculty and students. So, you know, you get to know everybody. So it's a big day for you as well. Anna MilhollandI do. Yes. Graduation is always a campus-wide celebration, and the library certainly takes part in that. We really relish in our student's successes. We recognize how hard it is to graduate from William & Mary, and certainly, we celebrate with our faculty as well. Ken WhiteYeah, it was a big weekend. It's nice to have you here. So now for a lot of folks heading off to vacation. Right. And it's always nice to take a good book or two with you. And so thanks very much for bringing a few suggestions with us. In terms of your list. Why don't you share it with us? What do you have? What are you recommending? Anna MilhollandAbsolutely. So my first is a classic business text, Leading Change by John Kotter. Dr. Kotter is the leading change management expert. He's on faculty at Harvard Business School. In this particular book, which was initially published in the mid-90s, is considered by many to be sort of the defining change management text. Ken WhiteYeah. Anna MilhollandThere was this recent commentary from the Canadian Medical Education Journal, which discussed how a hospital emergency room employee, Dr. Kotter's eight-step process for change management during COVID, which is really inspiring. I think this is one that can be used and is used across industries. Ken WhiteYeah, what has not changed. Anna MilhollandRight. Ken WhiteEspecially the last couple of years, right? Anna MilhollandYes. Ken WhiteInteresting. Anna MilhollandAnd we use this text in libraries, too, and I think it's really helpful, and it resonates just across the board as we all kind of consider how to create a sense of urgency around a change, how to build that guiding coalition, forming that strategic vision and initiatives, enlisting volunteers, removing barriers and enabling action when we do that, generating short term wins, which are just critical for any success to continue in sustaining that acceleration and then instituting the change. Ken WhiteIt could be an interesting read, especially because we all just went through a considerable amount of change. Anna MilhollandYes, yes. Ken WhiteSo you're looking back and forward. Anna MilhollandYes, absolutely. Ken WhiteExcellent. Anna MilhollandI think we will continue to see monumental change. So, yes, it's a great piece for reflection, but it's also a great piece for propelling us. Ken WhiteWonderful. So the first one is leading change. How about your second recommendation? Anna MilhollandSo this I would classify as my all-around must-read for summer. It's called Algorithms of Oppression How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble. It's published by NYU Press. And Dr. Noble is a professor at the University of Southern California. And she came to academia with an extensive background in working in advertising and marketing for Fortune 100 accounts. Ken WhiteWhat do you like about it? Anna MilhollandYeah, so this particular book was published after years of study about search engines, particularly Google, though Dr. Nobel does include examples from others and how Google queries for black and Latino girls and women reveal and reflect systematic racism, which is it's really interesting. It's incredibly relevant, as it always has been. And it's not an easy beach read, but I think it is a book that requires attention and focus and personal interrogation about biases, and it's 100 percent worth it. Ken WhiteAnd relevant again. Anna MilhollandAbsolutely. Ken WhiteRight. But the first two seem extremely relevant. We can tie it right to what's happening today. Anna MilhollandAbsolutely. Ken WhiteInteresting. Now your third recommendation. Anna MilhollandSure. This one is for motivation, motivating your team. I think, again, this year has been challenging for many of us. And as we are returning to the workplace in many places, we're kind of redefining who our teams are again because we've existed in this virtual environment, and now we're face to face. So a book that I have loved since I was in grad school is called Fish A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results. And it's by Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul, and John Christensen. And I first read it, as I mentioned, as part of a library management course. But the philosophies and attitudes, I think, just really continue to resonate. I particularly love the concepts of choosing your attitude. I think that's so critical for coming to work each day and for framing your workday, but also play because it's so important for creating a workplace where people want to be and where they can be their best creative selves. Ken WhiteYeah, again, relevant. Wow. This is what's happening today. Right. And work is changing so much. So fantastic. Ken WhiteWe'll continue our discussion with Anna Milholland in just a minute. Our podcast is brought to you by the William & Mary School of Business. The Post COVID World will require new skills and new approaches. And those skills and approaches are taught in the William & Mary MBA program. We offer four different MBA formats, including the full-time, the part-time, the online, and the executive, all taught by our top-ranked MBA faculty, the William & Mary MBA, will prepare you to succeed and lead in our new world. Check out the MBA program at William & Mary. Now back to our conversation with Anna Milholland on Good reads for your summer vacation. Ken WhiteHow about your fourth? Anna MilhollandYes, this is what I would call the twenty twenty-one-themed read, and I want to preface it with this. So amidst Jim Crow, segregation, and racial violence against African-Americans, Tulsa's Greenwood District, a center of African-American commerce which was also known as Black Wall Street, thrived. In light of the one 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. I want to highlight a book that I haven't read, but I want to read. And it's called The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre A Photographic History by Karlos K. Hill. Dr. Hill's research expertise and scholarship centers on racial violence. And he is a professor at the University of Oklahoma. And is it okay if I read the description from the OU press? Ken WhiteYeah, please. That's great. Anna MilhollandOkay, here's an excerpt. Historian and Black Studies Professor Karlos K. Hill presents a range of photographs taken before, during, and after the massacre, mostly by white photographers. Some of the images are published here for the first time. Comparing these photographs to those taken elsewhere in the United States of lynchings. The author makes a powerful case for terming the 1921 outbreak not a riot but a massacre. White civilians, in many cases assisted or condoned by local and state law enforcement, perpetuated a systematic and coordinated attack on black Tulsans and their property. Despite all the violence and devastation, Black Tulsan's rebuilt the Greenwood district brick by brick, by brick, by brick. By the mid 20th century, Greenwood had reached a new zenith with nearly 250 black-owned and black-operated businesses. Today, the citizens of Greenwood, with support from the broader community, continue to work diligently to revive the neighborhood once known as Black Wall Street. As a result, Hill asserts, the most important legacy of the Tulsa race massacre is the grit and resilience of the black survivors of racist violence. Ken WhiteNo doubt a light read this sounds powerful. Anna MilhollandIt really does. It sounds like an incredible read, especially considering the anniversary of the race massacre is May 31st through June 1st of 2021. Ken WhiteAnd your fifth recommendation? Anna MilhollandMy fifth is Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I want to say that I did not read this book. I listened to it, and I don't listen to audiobooks very often. But this one was amazing. So I was really on pins and needles waiting for this book to come out last year because I followed Doyle for a long time from when she was a blogger, and she authored a blog called Momastery. And this memoir was really a story of her living into her values and living into her authentic self. And I think after a year at home, a year of change, and a year of chaos, for many of us, it might have also been an opportunity for us to figure out what our values are and maybe do a deeper dive into who we are authentically and who we want to be. So I highly recommend this, and I recommend it as an audiobook because Glennon Doyle narrates it. Ken WhiteYeah, excellent. I'm going to put you on the spot. If you were going to leave for the beach today, what would you take with you? Something on this list or maybe something else? Anna MilhollandOh gosh. I would take Brene Brown's dare to lead brave work, tough conversations, whole hearts. I listen to one of her audiobooks actually about parenting. And it really, again, it really struck me. And I was able to apply many of the principles that she mentioned in my own life. And so I've long wanted to read this. I think it would be what I would take. Ken WhiteFantastic six excellent recommendations. And while we have you here, let's shift gears a little bit. You know, on our podcast, it seems almost on every episode we're talking with somebody in an industry and in a sector that is that's been disrupted. It's evolving. It's transforming. Your space I think if someone has not been to their alma mater and their business school library, they're not ready for what they're going to see. There aren't stacks of books anymore. If someone were to ask you what's the library look like in the business school, could you give them a, you know, sort of an explanation? Anna MilhollandI would say we are a place where disruptive change happens. And it's funny. When we all went when we when the world shut down, and many of us left and began working from home, I think there were there were concerns across the board about how we would all adapt to doing our work from home. Ken WhiteYeah. Anna MilhollandLibrarians, because we are so closely tied with IT, library, and information science, we had already pivoted. So we offer so many resources virtually, including our databases but also our research consultations. And I think that we were really adept and prepared for what that shift from physical to virtual would look like. Ken WhiteYeah. How do you spend a typical day with students and faculty? What do you do? Anna MilhollandSo I still work with books, but academic libraries, I think, are really centered on the research and curricular needs of our faculty and students. So this might involve engaging with work like Bibliometrics, which involves benchmarking faculty scholarship against our own brand, as well as other institutions. Thinking about how much our faculty are producing, how many citations those works are garnering, and so forth. But it also includes teaching students and teaching faculty about the resources that we have. So we I work with students in one on one and group research consultations via Zoom right now on finding appropriate resources that would meet their research question. But it also goes beyond just the discovery of the content. So we work with students on how they might analyze and use some of this information to create new knowledge. With faculty, we also can help with and do help with research as well. So it really runs the gamut. We license materials. We're copyright experts. We field questions about open education resources and open access, and where faculty and students can publish their content. So it I would say, like the scholarly communication side of the libraries, is really it's really grown in the last 15 to 20 years. And the publishing side, and we're all part of that. Ken WhiteThe typical, say, undergraduate student who uses the library, what do they tend to be coming for? Is there something they use more than other items? Anna MilhollandSure. I would say that many of them are looking for our undergrads are really smart. I should just say our undergraduate students are brilliant. So I'm not sure William & Mary, typical undergrad, is is analogous to another school's typical undergrad. But our students are looking for data. They're looking for a primary source market research about an industry or about a consumer. They are looking for scholarly articles, many of them. I work very closely with our marketing research undergraduate course. And so, they are looking for a primary source scholarship about marketing research methodologies that they could potentially apply to survey methods and so on. Ken WhiteSo some printed materials, some traditional kind of research, but also the database. Anna MilhollandAbsolutely. Ken WhiteDatabases seem to be huge. Anna MilhollandThey're massively huge. So we have about 50 databases that are I would consider to be business-centric. We also license a lot of data through a variety of providers. And, yeah, our students, they long for it. I mean, they desperately need data to make good decisions and to make their research fuller. So we work with them. Yeah. To on a lot of those things. Ken WhiteBut part of your job is to determine which data are important. Anna MilhollandAbsolutely. Ken WhiteTo give them access. Anna MilhollandAnd that's all part of the research question. So we do a research interview, rather. We do what's called a research interview with students whenever they come in for a consultation, or they come to the desk, and we ask a lot of probing questions to figure out exactly what they're working on and exactly what data they need to be able to complete their assignment. Ken WhiteAnd this can be costly. Anna MilhollandOh, data are expensive. Ken WhiteRight. Anna MilhollandYes. Our subscriptions, I mean, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ken WhiteRight. Anna MilhollandAnd that's just for the business school. That's not considering all of the other databases and information that students at William & Mary, students, faculty, and staff at William & Mary have access to through William & Mary Libraries. Ken WhiteWhat do you see in the year ahead as we and I put the word normal in quotes? How do you see the year ahead? Any major changes in terms of the library and the services and how it's used? Anna MilhollandYou know, I think that we're still all trying to figure out what back to work will look like. Ken WhiteYeah. Anna MilhollandI think across the board, though, I would say that the library services will remain consistent. We are still offering course reserves. We still offer students and faculty in our community the opportunity to come to the library and browse for books. We still will offer research consultations. How we do, that might be a little bit different, but our same core services will be the same. Ken WhiteThat's our conversation with Anna Milholland once again. Her six recommendations for summer reading include Leading Change by John Kotter, Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble; Fish A Proven Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results by Lundin, Paul, and Christiensen; The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, A Photographic History by Karlos Hill; Untamed by Glennon Doyle; and finally Dare to Lead Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts by Brene Brown. Well, that's it for this episode of Leadership & Business. Our podcast is brought to you by the William & Mary School of Business. Companies, organizations, and businesses are seeking professionals who think strategically, communicate effectively and manage ambiguity. You'll learn those skills and more in the William & Mary MBA program offered in four formats the full-time, the part-time, the online, and the executive MBA. Check out the William & Mary MBA program to learn more. Finally, we'd like to hear from you regarding the podcast. We invite you to share your ideas, questions, and thoughts with us by emailing us at podcast@wm.edu. Thanks to our guest, Anna Milholland, and thanks to you for joining us. I'm Ken White. Wishing you a safe, happy, and productive week ahead. |