Milkshake Mistakes?

As an owner of a Kindle, one of the features about the service from Amazon that I like is the opportunity to test or "sample" a book before I commit to buy it.

I was looking around on the Kindle site the other day and was looking at Clay Shirky's new book, Cognitive Surplus. I read parts of his earlier book, Here Comes Everybody, about social networking and the impact of social networking tools on how we organize. I had also heard his TED Talk awhile back and everything he said just seemed to make sense.

So I downloaded the first chapter of Cognitive Surplus, to give it a test drive. The chapter was just like his TED talk - interesting, enlightening and generally thought provoking. My favorite part was in his discussion about "Milkshake Mistakes".

He relates how McDonald's wanted to figure out how to improve sales of their milkshakes. They hired researchers to figure out how to do this. Most focused on the Milkshake - Did the Milkshakes need to be richer, creamier, etc.? Were they cold enough? Was the packaging needing an update or change? Only one researcher approached the subject in a different way - the researcher ignored the milkshakes, and focused on the customers who were buying them. He looked at when milkshakes were being purchased, who was purchasing them, etc. Instead of looking at just the milkshake, they looked at how people were using the milkshake. And they discovered something quite interesting when looking at the problem in this way - a lot of people were buying milkshakes early in the day, well before lunch time.

Why were they doing this? The people who were buying the milkshakes were commuters, they needed something quick, portable and something that could be handled with one hand, without making much of a mess. Low and behold, the Milkshake was meeting all of those needs. So, in essence, the commuters were "hiring" the milkshake to fill a particular job. A job that McDonalds hadn't really considered for the milkshake. So the question wasn't "how can we make the milkshake better?", it was "what job do people 'hire' the milkshake for?".

Shirky then talked about how these were essentially "milkshake mistakes" - we spend too much time looking at the "thing" aka the milkshake, without looking at what job the "thing" is being hired to do.

Libraries and librarians as a profession have spent a lot of time thinking about what we do and who we are. With all the recent talk on E-books, the death of print and the possible end of the physical book , I was wondering if perhaps we are focused too much on our "milkshake mistakes". We spend a lot of time looking at the library and the profession, but do we spend enough time asking "what job are we being "hired" to do"? What job is the library doing for people? Any thoughts? I'd love to hear what you think.