Sam Chada

FN-003·Field Note

Run It Like a Library. Just Know How a Business Works.

Libraries shouldn't be run like businesses. But a library leader who can't read a budget or spot the corporate playbook loses the fight for library values to whoever in the room can. Take the discipline. Refuse the values.

Sam Chada·2026.06.07·10 min read

I wrote recently that you can't run a library like a business, that businesses count widgets and libraries count life events, and that every time someone imports the first kind of math into the second kind of place, the desk gets cut. I stand by all of it.

Now I want to complicate it, because there is an opposite mistake, and it is just as dangerous. The opposite mistake is the library leader who is proud not to understand money. The one who treats the budget as someone else's department, who can't tell a real fiscal constraint from a manufactured one, who hears "we need to be more efficient" and has no answer except a feeling. That leader does not protect library values. They lose them, quietly, to whoever in the room does speak the other language.

So here is the thing I actually believe, and it took me a while to pull the two halves apart. Libraries should not be run like businesses. And librarians who want to lead should understand exactly how a business works. Those are not in tension. One is about values. The other is about fluency. You can hold the first and still get the second, and the best library leaders do.

There is a difference between learning a language and converting to it. A library director who understands corporate finance is not thereby a corporate stooge, any more than a defense attorney who understands how prosecutors think has switched sides. You learn the system to work inside it, and when you have to, to fight it. Business illiteracy is not a principle. It is just a smaller toolbox, and the people on the other side of the table are counting on yours being small.

Two documents, two worlds

Want to see the two value systems in one place? Put a library's monthly board report next to a company's quarterly board meeting.

The library report is a public document. It happens monthly, in the open, with the minutes posted and the community free to walk in. The board is often volunteers or political appointees. The spine of the thing is activity and stewardship: circulation and visits and program attendance, new library cards, the director's report, fund balances against budget, a policy first reading, the consent agenda, maybe a closed session for a personnel matter. The duty runs to the public. The story it tells is "here is the trust you gave us, being kept."

The corporate quarterly is a private performance review. It happens four times a year, behind a closed door, in front of directors whose legal duty runs to shareholders. The spine is money, pointed forward: revenue, margin, cash position, guidance for next quarter, the KPIs, capital allocation, competitive risk, executive pay. The story it tells is "here is value, being protected and grown."

Different cadence, different room, different audience, different master. That is not a quirk of formatting. It is widgets versus life events, printed and bound.

So here is the move to watch for. When a director starts reshaping that monthly report to look like the quarterly deck, the dashboards, the KPIs, the "return on investment of the library," the satisfaction scores borrowed straight from a customer-service vendor, you are watching the logic migrate in through the paperwork. It is a quieter tell than renaming everyone a "chief officer," and it usually shows up first.

But I have to be honest about the other side of this, because it is where the whole argument turns. The traditional library board report is often genuinely weak. A lot of them are activity theater, "we held forty programs this month," with neither real proof that anything changed in anyone's life nor a serious, forward-looking financial picture. That emptiness is part of what invites the business version in. A board that has never once seen an honest five-year financial projection is a board that will be dazzled by the first person who walks in with one.

So the answer is not to keep the report folksy and thin to prove you are not corporate. The answer is to make it as rigorous as the corporate one and aim that rigor at a completely different bottom line. Real numbers. Honest risk. Multi-year projections. And outcomes measured in lives changed instead of units moved. Take the discipline. Refuse the values.

And this is the board's job as much as the director's. Every leader in these stories was hired and kept by a board, and a board that only ever sees a program count has handed away its own oversight. A trustee does not need an MBA to fix that. Show me administration headcount and salary against front-line headcount and salary over the last five years. Show me the multi-year revenue projection. And name one outcome we committed to measuring this year, then show me this month against it, not just how many programs we ran. A board that asks those three things every meeting cannot be dazzled by the first slick deck that walks in, and cannot be quietly rolled.

Fluency is a defense

The other reason to know how the machine works is that you cannot disarm a playbook you can't read.

Go back to the tells from the first piece. The "leaner" and "right-size" and "modernize" vocabulary that arrives before any funder has demanded a cut. The administration quietly growing while the front desk shrinks. The reorganization launched with money still in the bank. A leader who understands how those moves work in the business world can name them, put a number on them, and answer them on their own terms. The leader who does not understand them is left with a bad feeling and a losing vote. Principle without fluency gets out-argued by fluency without principle every single time.

And the leaders already know this, which is why so many of them go out and get it themselves. Look at who runs the biggest systems and the second degrees pile up, an MBA or an MPA, the management training the library credential does not supply. Chicago and Dallas are run by librarians who went back for a public-administration degree; San Antonio and Las Vegas by ones who went back for an MBA. They paid, on their own time and dime, for the half of the job the MLS left out.

The clearest case is Kelvin Watson, who runs the Las Vegas-Clark County district. Library degree, then an MBA, then Library Journal's Librarian of the Year. The business degree did not turn him into a corporate raider. It gave him fluency he points at the mission. That is the whole model. Bilingual, not converted. (Watson also appears in the companion piece as a data point in the national title-drift trend. He reads differently in that context, as one of the itinerant executives reshaping the biggest systems; here he is the counterweight, the proof that the credential and the mission can coexist.)

The degree won't give you this, and that's mostly fine

They have to go elsewhere because the library degree, by design, only gestures at this. Where a management course is required at all, it is usually a single survey, one seminar where budgeting and labor and governance each get about a week. No ALA rule forces a school to go deeper; the accreditation standards describe themselves as "indicative, not prescriptive," and management shows up in them as scope to "foster," not a required outcome. And it lands the way you'd expect. Only about a quarter of new public librarians say the MLS adequately prepared them for the work, and management is the gap they name first. One academic library director in a leadership survey put it flatly: the MLIS provided none of the skills they consider essential to the director's job. Most directors in that same survey felt prepared overall, but the skills they report learning elsewhere are the same ones every time: budgets, personnel, politics.

Here is where the easy conclusion is wrong, though, so let me say it plainly. The fix is not to turn library school into business school. The MLS is a short, practitioner degree, and every credit you hand to managerial accounting is a credit taken from cataloging, reference, the legal framework, intellectual freedom, the things that are the actual profession and that no MBA program will ever teach. There is even a serious argument that library education already borrows too much uncritical corporate management theory, not too little. Cram more business into the MLS and you do not cure the corporatization. You train it.

The honest fix lives on the far side of the degree. Leadership in this field was always meant to develop after the MLS, on the job and through institutes built for exactly that. The problem is that the pipeline is fraying right when it is needed most: two of the national leadership programs, ALA's Leadership Institute and the Leading Change Institute, are currently on hiatus. So the fluency that ought to be the profession's own to teach is increasingly something ambitious librarians have to go buy from a business school, which is precisely how the business school's worldview rides back in with it. If we do not want our leaders trained by people who think the library is a firm, we have to be willing to train them ourselves.

One more thing, and it is the limit of everything above. A bilingual leader is still a leader, and fluency cuts both ways. The person who can read a budget can also use it to dress up a cut, and knowing how the machine works does not, by itself, make anyone choose the desk over the suite. In the stories that opened the first piece, the thing that actually reversed the layoffs was not an enlightened director. It was the workers, organized, refusing, the union at Timberland clawing back most of the cuts after they were announced. So learn the language, all of it. But the floor's real protection was never a better-credentialed boss. It is the people at the desk having the power to say no. Fluency is a tool the leadership should hold. It is not a substitute for the leverage the workers hold.

Take the discipline, refuse the values

So no, do not run the library like a business. Run it like a library. But learn how a business works, all of it, the budget and the board deck and the language and the playbook, well enough that no one can ever turn that knowledge against the library because you never bothered to learn it too.

The goal was never a business-illiterate librarian defending the mission on feeling alone. It is a bilingual one who knows the machine cold and refuses, on purpose, to let the library become one.

Take the discipline. Refuse the values.

Sources

I'm not a writer and I don't pretend to be. This piece was co-written with AI. I've used Grammarly for a decade. This is the same deal, just faster. My integrity is on the line, not the machine's, and I'm not letting AI take that from me. More on how I work.

Filed · FN-003 · 2026.06.07