Last week ISL hosted Summer Institute. With 3 tracks going on, my week was spent in the C3 track: “Improving Library Services: Cooperation, Collaboration, and Communication.” What an amazing week! Not only did we have the opportunity to learn from the likes of Pat Wagner (Tools for Successful Project Management), Linda Silva (The Brain: A Manager’s Guide), and Susan Swetnam (Fostering Grassroots Support for Public Libraries: the Example of Idaho’s Carnegie Library Applications); but we were also privileged to have an amazing learning group to learn from. Participants shared their ideas, experience, and knowledge with each other and truly made C3 a week to remember.

As I am getting reacquainted with my regular work routine, I find myself frequently referring back to bits of information I picked up during the C3 track. One is about the bottom line.

You see, we often think of the bottom line as money. Pat Wagner, however, introduced the concept that projects actually have 3 bottom lines: Cost, Time, and Quality. That create a triangle with 3 sides that could be labeled:

Good
Fast
Cheap

Do we want it good? Do we want it fast? Or, do we want it cheap? We can’t, she says, have all three. We could, though, have two. And choosing means asking hard questions and making hard decisions.

I know I’m going to keep the image of this Management Triangle in mind as I approach my work in the future. How do you balance time, quality, and cost in your management decisions?