Vision & Balance: Leading and Managing in the Academic Library

Many years ago, I gave a conference presentation on a controversial change that my department had made to its workflows. At the encouragement of my dean at the time, I had investigated the possibility of eliminating what was generally considered an essential task of serials management; we had tried out a new approach and found that it worked fine – and, of course, my dean and I wrote an article about the experience.

Unsurprisingly, the article generated quite a bit of controversy in the serials world, with the result that I got to give some conference talks about our experience. And after those talks, I found myself having a similar conversation over and over: a serials manager from another institution would come up to me (or email me later) and say something like “All of your arguments make sense and I would love to do what you did in my library. But I would never be able to get my staff to go along with it.”

While (for obvious reasons) I never said this out loud, I came away from most of those conversations with the same thought: “Why is it up to your staff?”. And this thought led me to formulate in my own mind, for the first time, something that I think is a bedrock principle of leadership: if you’re going to take a leader’s pay, you need to be willing to do a leader’s work.

A leader’s work consists in lots of things, of course. Setting an example of diligence, productivity, and balance is part of a leader’s work. So is resolving conflict. So is workflow management. Setting (and following) a strategic direction is part of a leader’s work, and so is helping one’s organization stay on the right strategic path, and so on. But one of the most important roles of a leader is – leading. That means, among other important things, taking responsibility for moving one’s organization in the right direction. A leader doesn’t say “X is the right thing to do, but my staff won’t like it, so I guess we can’t do it.” A leader says “X is the right thing to do, and I anticipate resistance among my staff. How will I work with them to overcome that resistance as effectively and humanely as possible?”.

Of course, what I’ve just said presumes that the leader has in fact truly determined that X is the right thing to do – which implies due diligence, which very often includes counseling together with staff. It’s essential to avoid locking yourself into a false choice between, on the one hand, simply bulldozing over your resistant staff and, on the other, letting resistant staff stop your organization from doing what it needs to do. Navigating the choppy waters between those two rocks is part of the difficult work of a leader; the expectation that leaders will do this difficult and challenging work is one of the reasons leaders tend to get paid more than those they lead. To take that money and then not do essential work of leadership strikes me as fundamentally wrong.

So how does an effective leader handle the problem of staff who resist necessary change? I’ll have some practical thoughts on that question in our subscribers-only post on Thursday.

On Tuesday, in my first post on the topic of workflow management, I discussed the importance of bringing complexity indoors, out of the patron’s experience. I called this internalizing complexity. 

Today I’m going to talk about the importance of moving the locus of authority for workflow management out of the offices and job descriptions of individuals, and putting it into policy or training documents – what I call externalizing authority.

To explain, let me share an anecdote – one that can stand for many such experiences over the course of my career.

Many years ago, when I was in a middle-management position, I supervised staff whose completed outputs were channeled to a different department. For this other department, it made a big difference whether or not my staff’s outputs were produced correctly. After a while, I noticed that a supervisor from the other department was regularly coming into my department to work one-on-one with my staff to train them in how to make their outputs acceptable. I didn’t have any particular concern about this arrangement until I started getting complaints from my staff that this person was training them to do things in a certain way, and then coming back a couple of months later to tell them they were doing it all wrong, and retraining them to do those things differently. This had apparently happened several times, leading not only to frustration on my staff’s part but also a lot of wasted time. 

I investigated and confirmed their reports. The problem, I concluded, was that authority over the workflow (and over the performance standard) was vested in an individual, rather than in a policy or workflow document. This meant that when there were questions or disputes about the workflow, they could only be resolved by appeal to the individual – which meant that this individual always won. More importantly, it also meant that my staff could never be 100% certain that they were doing this part of their jobs correctly, since there was no objective standard or set of criteria against which to compare their work. There was only the supervisor from the other department, who had been set up as the ultimate authority.

In a healthy library, personalities do not drive decisions and shape policies.

In other organizations, I’ve encountered a variation on this problem: a person who has been in charge of a particular workflow for so long that he or she has become the only person in the library who truly understands it, and who has adapted the workflow over time to accommodate his or her personal preferences – regardless of whether the resulting arrangement represents what’s best for the library or its patrons. People in this position often strongly resist documenting their workflow – partly because doing so would be time-consuming and difficult, and partly because it would remove authority from them and put it in a document that can be accessed and understood by everyone. When asked to document their work, people in this situation will often respond “Just let me know if you have questions.”

In cases like these, the solution is to externalize authority over the workflow – take it out of where it currently resides (that is, in the person of whoever oversees the workflow) and put it instead into a document to which everyone has access. 

In the first situation I described above, I ended up writing a memo to the supervisor from the other department, explaining that from now on, two things were going to be necessary:

First, since I (not she) was charged with managing the time of my staff and prioritizing their assignments, all future requests to train or retrain them should come first to me. She and I would discuss the request as needed and I would decide whether the benefit was likely to be worth the cost in staff time. 

Second, all such training in the future must result in documents that reflect the instruction given. This document would then serve as the standard against which the acceptability of their work would be judged. Changes to the document, and any necessary retraining, would be discussed as laid out above.

Unsurprisingly, this directive resulted in a massive decrease in the amount of time spent by this other supervisor in retraining my staff. But more importantly, it meant that authority for workflow standards had moved to where it belonged – in agreed-upon, written documents that could be referred to by all.

This is a general principle that applies in lots of different organizational contexts. The deeper principle that underlies it is this one: In a healthy library, personalities do not drive decisions and shape policies. Instead, decisions and policies are defined according to clear and fair principles, which are documented fully, communicated openly, and applied consistently. 

I know what you’re thinking: ”I’m a leader, not a manager. Workflow management isn’t my job.”

Two answers:

1. Managers are leaders, or should be, so workflows really are a leadership issue.
2. Administrative leaders may not manage workflows directly, but they create an organizational culture of workflow management (whether they intend to or not).

This week I want to talk about two leadership principles related to the culture of workflow management. These are principles that academic library leaders need to promulgate throughout their organizations both by precept and (whenever they can) by example. The first is internalize complexity. The second is externalize authority. I’ll focus on the first one in today’s public post, and on the second in Thursday’s subscribers-only post.

When I say “internalize complexity,” I’m invoking the principle that – to the degree possible – the library should deal with complexity behind the scenes in order to make the patron’s experience as straightforward and intuitive as possible. So: the processes involved with interlibrary loan may be complex, but the patron’s experience of using interlibrary loan should be simple and intuitive – we deal with the complex stuff so that the patron doesn’t have to. Cataloging is complicated, but if we’re doing it right – keeping the complexity behind the scenes rather than creating interfaces that require our patrons to understand how the catalog is structured – searching the catalog and getting relevant, high-quality results will be straightforward and intuitive. And so forth.

Now again, I can anticipate a couple of negative responses to this argument – because I’ve encountered them many times: 

1. “Our job is not to spoon-feed college students. This is higher education; it’s not supposed to be as easy as possible.”  To which I say: nonsense – at least in the context of the library. College students should be challenged by their coursework and by the content of our collections, not by the process of gaining access to library materials and services. The less time they have to spend trying to figure out how to use the catalog or the databases (or where to find the book they need, or how to fill out the ILL form, etc.), the more time they have to engage in the actual work of education, which has to do with encountering and processing ideas and concepts, not wrestling with library interfaces.
2. “Why is patrons’ time more valuable than ours?” To which I say: because they’re paying, and you’re being paid. I know that sounds crass and neoliberal and capitalist and managerial, but it’s still an important reality. Library patrons are not here to make our lives easier by adapting to our preferred workflows; our workflows are (or should be) adapted to make it easier for patrons to pursue their educational goals. And I’ll go further and say that anyone who doesn’t understand that should be working someplace other than an academic library.

Now, obviously, we can’t remove all complexity and difficulty from the lives of our patrons. No matter how hard we try to make the library easy and intuitive to use, it will still pose challenges to our users – to some of them more than to others. And of course, a big part of our job is helping them deal with that challenge. But it matters very much – and it makes a big difference to our patrons – whether our general strategy is to try to bring complexity indoors or to leave it in the patron’s experience.

So when it comes to workflows, what do I mean by “externalize authority”? Tune in Thursday to find out.

I’m going to close out the year with a lesson I learned many years ago from a column by Stanley Fish; I believe it was in the Chronicle of Higher Education (which, is, by the way, an essential read for any academic library administrator).

Fish made the seemingly odd observation that when it comes to staff and faculty morale, in some ways the best position an administrator can be in is to have absolutely no money to work with. Why? Because when you have no money, you can basically say “yes” to everyone – because saying “yes” is purely hypothetical and involves no difficult choices about resource allocation.

So, for example: if your travel budget is entirely exhausted, and someone comes into your office and says “It would be so great if I could present my paper at that

conference in Berlin,” you can say “Oh man, that really would be great. You wrote an excellent paper and the attendees at that conference would really benefit from hearing it and being able to ask you questions. I really wish I could send you.”

Or if you’ve just sustained a 15% cut to your personnel budget and one of your managers comes to you and says “I really wish I could give my staff a 5% salary increase across the board. They’re underpaid as it is and they’re doing such great work,” you can say “Absolutely. A raise would be well deserved and it would really help them out. I would love to do that.”

When you have no money, you can say “yes” to everyone – because saying “yes” is hypothetical.

In both of the above situations, the conversation is easy, because no difficult choices have to be made. You can express your sincere support, and while no one is getting the material things they want, they at least go away from the conversation knowing that you’re there for them.

When do things get tough? When you have some money to work with. When your travel budget is mostly depleted but still has enough left in it to send one person to a conference, but you have three equally deserving people who want to go, or when you’re given a small increase to your personnel budget and told to distribute it as pay increases to only your highest performers – and you have to decide who those are and how much they get. It’s these situations, when you have to make difficult decisions about allocating limited resources between deserving people and programs, that lead inevitably to hurt feelings and difficult questions about fairness and equity.

But those difficult decisions and tough conversations are an essential part of the leader’s work.  And as we’ll discuss when we come back from the holiday break, taking a leader’s pay entails the obligation to do a leader’s work.

And with that, I’m going to sign off for the next two weeks. I wish all of you the happiest of holiday breaks, and we’ll pick up the conversation again on January 7!

I came into my current position as a library leader about four years ago, saying what I’ve always known all good leaders are supposed to say in that situation: “Don’t expect me to swoop in here and starting being disruptive and making a bunch of changes. I’m going to spend my first year getting to know the organization and listening to you. Then, once I’ve had a chance to build that foundation of understanding – and not before – we can start having conversations about what might need to change.”

See, I thought that kind of messaging would demonstrate humility – a humility I genuinely felt as I took on the oversight of a large and complex academic organization. But what I truly thought was humility turned out, in hindsight, to be hubris.

Why do I say that? Because within a couple of days of my arrival, an inch-thick document was dropped on my desk. That document contained a carefully prepared proposal: one of the departments in the library wanted an additional 10,000 square feet of space, and had put a huge amount of effort into explaining and justifying their request, and I had to respond.

My hubris consisted in the idea that I could simply come into a large organization and choose not to make any big decisions in my first year. As if that were up to me! 

Of course, to some degree it was up to me – there were certainly issues that I could (and wisely did) put on the back burner while I gathered more information and experience. But no organization simply stands still for a year and waits for its new leader to get acclimated. The work of libraries requires things to be done every day, and some of those are big things that involve change and difficult decisions. Some of those things can be deferred, and some can’t.

So here’s the lesson I learned the hard way about hubris and humility for new leaders: instead of indulging in the hubris of thinking you can put your organization on hold for a year while you get to know the place, instead exercise humility by working with your leadership team to identify those issues that need prompt attention and those that can be deferred while you get your feet under you. 

Takeaways and Action Items

• Ask yourself what issues you unwisely deferred when you came into your new position. What were the downstream effects, for both you and others in the organization?
• Ask yourself what issues you unwisely took on before you had enough information. What were the downstream effects?
• Look around you at the constellation of challenges and projects your library faces. If you were a brand-new leader in your current position today, what would you take on now, and what would you defer? Why?

The words “simple” and “easy” are not synonyms. A task or process can be simple but not easy, and it might be easy but not simple. 

Let me provide a couple of quick examples to illustrate what I mean:

Driving a manual-transmission car is one of the most complex that a human being can do. It requires you to do multiple things with your hands (steering, changing gears) while engaging each of your feet in a separate task (one on the gas and one alternating between brake and clutch); furthermore, you’re required to make constant decisions about how to manage each of those tasks while maintaining a sharp focus on road conditions and making constant decisions about lane strategy and routing – some of them in a split second. Very few daily tasks require anything like this constellation of simultaneous duties and decision-making. And yet for most people who drive, the process is quite easy; for experienced drivers, a lifetime of practice and skill acquisition make driving a car, even one with a manual transmission, something that can be done without too much conscious thought – and can be accomplished safely and effectively while listening to music, carrying on conversation, thinking about work, etc. For most people, driving a car is not simple, but it’s easy.

Walking on a smooth, paved surface, on the other hand, is one of the simplest things a human being can do. It involves no skill beyond what most humans have typically acquired by the age of two. However, I once had an experience that really

conveyed to me the difference between simple and easy. My family and I were walking the trail up Mount Timpanogos to Timpanogos Cave. To call it a “trail” is almost laughable; it’s a paved walkway about one and a half miles long. Walking it is a very simple matter. However, the trail is very steep: over the course of that mile and a half you rise in elevation almost 1100 feet, and very soon you find yourself stopping to rest about every 20 yards. Walking this trail is simple, but it’s not easy.

Why am I making this point in Vision & Balance? Because over the years, I’ve noticed that in casual conversation, people often conflate these two words as if they were synonyms. And in casual conversation, it’s not usually a high-stakes problem – not one that really needs to be noted or corrected. In fact, noting or correcting it would probably make you sound like a pedant and a jerk. In an organizational context, however, the conflation can have more significant impacts.

For example, one institutional dynamic that is important to understand is that the further you are from a system, the simpler it looks. (I’ll be discussing this further in a future article.) Ask yourself how many times you’ve heard someone in your library say to someone else “Look, it’s simple: your department just needs to _________.” In this case, the speaker is usually arguing that the other person’s department needs to do something that he believes to be both simple and easy – but it may only one of those (or neither). The first person’s distance from the department in question is likely leading him to underestimate the actual work that would be required to make the requested change.

In other cases, a proposed course of action may be genuinely simple, and may be incorrectly perceived as therefore easy. You may have someone in your library who speaks up too often and at too-great length in meetings, making it harder for others to participate; you may have someone else who tends to erupt in anger in unprofessional ways and at inappropriate times. The bloviator needs to control his impulse to constantly speak up; the eruptor needs to control her tendency to lash out. Both of those are simple expectations; both may also be incredibly difficult for the people in question.

There are many complex tasks in librarianship that those who have been doing them for a long time, or who are particularly talented, might make look easy. Employees – including leaders – who allow themselves to be fooled by the ease with which their colleagues are accomplishing those tasks may be led to underestimate the tasks’ complexity, which can lead to strategic errors. (“Phyllis has no problem producing 25 original serial records every week. We should expect the same thing of our other two serials catalogers.”)

One of the important skills of a leader is the ability (and willingness) to see below the surface to realities that are not immediately apparent. Keeping alert to the distinction between “simple” and “easy” is one habit of mind that will help you do that.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Not everything that looks simple is actually simple; not everything that actually is simple is easy. Keeping this in mind will help you be effective and strategic in leadership.
• Ask one of your direct reports to tell you what he or she thinks is the simplest of your duties. Don’t correct that person if s/he is wrong – but consider why it is that s/he that the duty in question looks simple from that perspective. 

Ever heard the saying “reality always wins”? I have no idea who coined it, but I first heard that phrase some years ago, and for a long time I found it comforting. Sure, nonsense and denial might prevail for a time, but eventually we can count on the ineluctable power of reality to assert itself and prevail. 

However, in more recent years I’ve been reminded of another famous quote, this one much older and attributed to the economist John Maynard Keynes: “In the long run, we are all dead.”

The context for Keynes’ quote was the Great Depression, during which some economists argued against significant government intervention, saying that in the long run, the forces of an unassisted free market would bring balance back to the financial system. Keynes didn’t disagree exactly, but he pointed out that there would be a tremendous human cost to waiting for the market to self-equilibrate and argued that this cost could easily dwarf the costs of decisive intervention. His arguments prevailed, and changed the conventional economic wisdom for a whole generation.

But what does this have to do with library leadership?

In my experience, Keynes’ economic view translates pretty well to organizational problems more generally. There are some problems and conflicts that you can let play out on their own time, because reality is likely to intervene in a timely way and resolve them – and others that require quick and decisive intervention before they snowball or create potentially disastrous knock-on effects. Developing the judgment necessary to discriminate between those two categories of problem is an important element of preparation for leadership.

So how do you develop that judgment? Obviously, there’s no easy or simple answer to that question. But there are questions you can ask yourself, when faced with a problem in the organization, that I believe will help you decide whether (and if so, to what degree) intervention is needed: 

1. How does this problem interact with our mission? Does the problem you’re seeing represent a threat to the library’s ability to do its core work? If so, does it seem to pose an immediate threat – or is it a minor problem now that will only become serious if it drags on for a long time?
2. How does this problem interact with our strategic priorities? Is this problem affecting one or more of the areas of most strategic importance to your organization, or – if it does metastasize – is it most likely to have serious effects only on the margins of your strategic priorities?
3. What is this problem’s apparent trajectory of seriousness? In other words, if you leave this problem alone, does it seem more likely to get better on its own or more likely to get worse? A complicating (but important) question is: if the problem represents conflict between people or units in the library, does it seem likely that they (and the library) will benefit more from being left alone to work it out for themselves, or from intervention by a leader? If the latter, how likely does it seem that letting the problem work itself out in the long run will undermine the library’s mission or priorities in the short run – and to what degree?

So remember that “reality always wins” in the long run. But remember also that “in the long run we are all dead.” Sometimes we can wait for reality to win, and sometimes we need to step in and intervene. Discriminating between those two circumstances is one of the crucial skills of leadership – and unfortunately is more likely to be learned by experience than by precept.

(In the discussion above, I alluded in passing to the distinction between “simple” and “easy.” That distinction will be the topic of this week’s subscribers-only post, on Thursday.)

This is one of those conversations that tends to happen between two lobes of my brain – I’ll refer to them as Rick Brain 1 and Rick Brain 2. Here’s how this particular conversation goes; maybe it’s somewhat the same for you:

Rick Brain 1: It seems to me that when you accept a leadership position, at that point you waive the right to talk about how tired or how busy you are. Leaders who talk that way sound like they’re complaining about the difficulties of leadership, which is annoying to those who might wish they were in leadership positions, not to mention to those who secretly feel that they actually work harder than their leader does. So I need to be really careful not to do that.

Rick Brain 2: OK, but what about the importance of modeling vulnerability and work/life balance? You’re always talking about “defaulting to openness.” Why shouldn’t you trying to show your humanness and vulnerability? Could it be that you’re really just worried your team will think less of you if they can see there are limits to your energy and bandwidth?

Rick Brain 1: If I’m being completely honest, I do like the fact that people seem to think I have unlimited energy. I don’t mind having that kind of reputation. But I don’t think that’s what my real concern is. I genuinely recognize the privileged position I inhabit, and I don’t want anyone to think I don’t appreciate and recognize that privilege. And I really don’t want anyone to think that I have illusions about being more fully employed than they are.

Rick Brain 2: But if a leader isn’t willing to express openly his feelings of overwhelm or fatigue, isn’t he sending a message to his team that they’d better not complain about feeling that way either? If you always put up a happy, energized front, are you sending the message “If I can do my big, important job without complaining, surely you all can do your smaller, less important jobs without complaining”?

Rick Brain 1: Maybe. But that argument cuts both ways. I once reported to a leader who never missed an opportunity to brag about how tired they were. They would come into meetings and put their head down on the table and say “I’m so exhausted,” at which point we were all expected to say things like “I don’t know how you do it!” and so forth, which was really annoying – in part because we were all pretty sure that we were just as tired as this leader was. That was the moment that I vowed I would never do that.

Rick Brain 2: I agree, that’s kind of obnoxious and oblivious. But surely you can be open about how you’re feeling without doing so in an obnoxious and oblivious way. You don’t have to choose between pretending to be Superman and fishing for sympathy – you can be open while still being thoughtful and exercising good judgment. And I think your employees will appreciate it – you may like being seen as a high-energy force of nature (or at least thinking they see you that way), but how does it benefit them for you to be seen that way? Maybe they’d benefit more from seeing when you’re stressed, and from seeing how you deal with it. 

Rick Brain 1: Maybe so. But I still worry about being seen to complain in any way about my job. Again, I know there are people in my organization who wish they had this position, and who think (in some cases, with good reason) that they’d do it better than I do. How will it make them feel if I’m complaining about how tough it is?

Rick Brain 2: So maybe what you need to do is figure out how to be open and human and vulnerable, but to do so in a way that doesn’t communicate “My job is so tough and demanding and I’m working so much harder than anyone else.” Maybe the key is to create context for your own openness by making sure you’re always noticing and expressing appreciation for the people you work with – so that when you do express feelings of overwhelm or fatigue, people see those expressions in a context of appreciation for them, and will be less likely to see what you’re saying as a sort of humble-brag about how hard you work and how much is expected of you.

Anyway, this conversation with myself is an ongoing one and I don’t suspect it will ever end completely – at least not until I retire, at which point the conversation will probably just change topics.

Takeaways and Action Items

• Think about how you handle the stressors of your job, and what messages your coping strategies might be sending to the people you lead. Are you confident that the messages you’re actually sending are the ones you want to send?
• When was the last time you openly remarked on the difficulties you deal with in your work? To whom were you speaking? Can you remember how they reacted? How would you have reacted if your places were reversed?
• Think carefully about how you balance the need to show confidence as a leader with the need to show openness and vulnerability. How do you strike that balance in your own leadership? Is it something you think about consciously?

When you were a child, there’s a very good chance that you were told by your parents to do something you didn’t want to do. And there’s a very good chance that you asked why you had to do it, and a very good chance that, at some point (perhaps often, and maybe it felt like every time) the answer you got was “Because I said so.” And there’s a very good chance you hated that answer, and for a very good reason: it’s a terrible answer.

Now, speaking as a parent and as someone who has nothing but empathy for other parents, I do recognize that sometimes that phrase is not the answer of first resort – sometimes it comes after an interminable exchange with your child during which you offered many very good reasons, none of which was deemed acceptable by your child, and that in those cases “Because I said so” may simply have been the only way to end an unproductive exchange.

The problem, though, is that no matter how justified you are as a parent in using the “Because I said so” gambit, it’s still a terrible answer. And if it’s a terrible-but-sometimes-necessary answer when dealing with, say, a seven-year-old, it’s a terrible-bordering-on-never-appropriate answer when dealing with professional adults.

Of course, as leaders dealing with professional adults, we almost never use the actual phrase “Because I said so.” But we often do find ourselves tempted to do what is functionally the same thing, by refusing to explain our decisions.

Why?

Very occasionally, it’s because there is a genuine reason for not explaining. The decision may have been informed by a sensitive personnel issue that can’t be shared, or by a confidential institutional situation that you can’t reveal. But that’s not the case with the great majority of decisions you make as a leader. Most can be explained, and should be – for multiple reasons.

Reason #1: Banking Political Capital. Earlier I wrote about the importance of defaulting to transparency, and explained that one reason for doing so is that by being transparent as a matter of course, the leader builds a fund of essential political capital with her team – a fund that can then be drawn upon, when necessary, in a moment when she needs to say “I can’t be transparent in this moment; I need you to trust me.” The leader who defaults to “Because I said so,” however, never builds that fund of political capital, and will eventually lose her people’s trust.

Reason #2: Effectiveness. Your team will function better if they understand the reasons they’re being asked to do things, and if they understand their leaders are doing the things they’re doing. Reasons provide context, and understanding context equips people to deal more effectively with ambiguity and unexpected roadblocks. 

Reason #3: Fairness. At a fundamental level, it’s not fair to issue instructions without telling people why. Now in some contexts, of course, it may be necessary. In the heat of battle, a commanding office can’t lead a discussion group every time he issues an order; during an emergency in the library, people may need to just do what they’re told in the moment and then seek deeper understanding later. But let’s be honest: in a library context, such situations are relatively rare. And again, a leader who has established a pattern of working with openness and transparency will have much more luck getting her team to respond with trust when a moment arises that requires unquestioned compliance.

Why do some leaders resist telling people “why”? In my experience, it’s usually for bad reasons. Sometimes they don’t like explaining their decisions because information is power and they want to keep that power for themselves; sometimes it’s because they know they can’t justify their decision on a rational or ethical basis; sometimes it’s because they genuinely aren’t sure what led them to their decision and don’t want to have to examine their own thought processes too closely.

But whatever the reason, a library leader who routinely refuses to explain his decisions to the people he leads is going to end up hurting them, himself, and the institution and patrons they all serve.

And, for that matter, to those who don’t. Today is a holiday in the US, so there’s no new Vision & Balance content today. But I hope all of you have a joyful weekend.