BPIF Awards spotlight business performance – James Cryer
The BPIF aims with its awards ceremony to 'reflect and reward' the full variety of business skills that can be demonstrated by any company looking to survive in today's fast-changing world.
It can be argued that an awards programme is like a mineshaft that drills down through the superficial surface layers of an industry – revealing to the world its core values and attributes. Introspection is never an easy process, as it sometimes reveals the good, the bad and occasionally the ugly, but that is the value of true self-analysis.
The Brits (who we occasionally love to bag) have in fact done a worthy job of deconstructing their industry into several identifiable areas of endeavour that they regard as vital to its future success. These qualities or 'dimensions' cover an impressive range of disciplines, and are not restricted just to the offset brigade as the BPIF readily acknowledges the growing strategic significance of digital print in carving out new growth opportunities.
As an industry progress along its path to maturity it must recognise a multitude of criteria that needs to be satisfied in order to become a good corporate citizen. This means looking beyond just producing a good quality product, important as this may be. The Brits have themed their showcase event around the importance of 'change' – even adopting the tag-line “making change positive” – as a reminder of the importance of initiating change rather than responding to it on the back foot.
But that's heresy, that is
Part of this process has involved weaning themselves off the bloated carcass of 'quality', the rich nutrients of which have sustained our industry for decades, if not centuries. It's a hard habit to toss, particularly when, as tradespeople from birth, we are taught that quality is next to godliness, and those who don't bow down at that altar are guilty of heresy.
Counter intuitively, the British printing industry appears to defy logic, commonsense and gravity by not officially acknowledging 'quality' per se in their awards, favouring instead other measures of corporate 'good business practice'.
Cicely Brown, deputy director of the BPIF and one of the drivers of their Excellence Awards program, made the point that “quality alone is no guarantee of survival.” Their awards philosophy is to become 'a celebration of business excellence', where in a tough economic climate a printing company should be encouraged to 'focus on the quality of all its business practices.'
Their array of awards cover a broad range of disciplines and initiatives designed to recognise good management in all its manifestations, including marketing, health and safety, training, technical innovation and environmental responsibility. Furthermore, they have recognised the different dynamics that exist within large and small companies, and have split many of the categories according to the number of employees.
They have also not been afraid to recognise the growing digital segment, by introducing a 'best use of digital' award and the 'digital apprentice of the year' award.
Bearing in mind that every country has to adapt and evolve its own awards structure to its own needs, we could do worse than investigate the British response to the problem. Australia has produced a number of small, highly successful niche players that have developed prepress software now being sold worldwide. Currently they receive no recognition, but they would get it if we adopted the British approach.
Conceptually, the British awards may be grouped into four categories - 'Good Employer', 'Good Business Manager', 'Good Manufacturer' and 'Overall Winner(s)'. The Brits include recognition of various Apprenticeship awards in their Excellence Awards, which we already recognise separately so I've not included them in this discussion.
Good Employer Awards:
Good Business Manager Awards:
Good Manufacturer Award:
Overall Award Winners:
Concluding Comments
Exclusive reliance on 'quality' as the way forward is like feeding a sumo wrestler a diet of Smarties. It's seductive but not sustaining. Quality has become a chimera, a distraction, a seductive feel-good remedy that imparts a temporary feeling of well being. But the rest of the world has moved on.
An adaptable, responsive industry needs to ingest the multi-vitamins contained in a broad-spectrum diet as demonstrated by the British 'Excellence Awards' - a diet that addresses a whole range of muscle-building programs including innovation, health and safety, the environment and staff morale. These are the drivers of long-term viability and the dimensions by which a successful company, and its industry collectively, should be measured.
For our industry to move forward in this country, we need to 'kick the quality habit' and adopt these other measures as benchmarks for our success.
It must be acknowledged that we've made a good start with the NSW Business Awards. However, they should become the role model, the beacon that guides us into the future. The PIAA may have to re-calibrate the relative 'weight' it assigns to the existing National Print Awards versus the Business Awards, as at the moment the former tends to crowd out the latter. A first step (which I believe is happening) may be to take a leaf out of the Brit's book by re-branding the Business Awards as the NSW (or National) 'Excellence Awards', which would be more reflective of their true nature.
The problem of course is the entrenched nature within our industry's psyche that has assumed a semi-religious status (before some people get too incensed, the British program consists of 13 awards, not one of them quality based). Our 'Business/Excellence Awards' concept however will struggle while it has to 'compete' against its bigger brother the NPA. This may be one of the reality checks facing our industry: whether we have the maturity, far-sightedness and fortitude to re-visit the fundamental issue of what should be the showcase event for the industry.
I believe our British cousins have provided a rich minefield for debate on what constitutes an appropriate awards program for the Australian print industry of tomorrow.
James Cryer
So, what do you think? Do you agree with James that we should move away from quality-based awards? Come back to him at james@jdaprintrecruitcom.au