Just a thought ...The printing industry's own 'Festival of Dangerous Ideas'

James Cryer mounts a spirited case for our industry to put aside its tried-and-true methods and adopt radical new ideas designed to inflame the passions and challenge the orthodoxy.

The printing industry has enjoyed being at the top of the food chain for the last 400-odd years. We have enjoyed having our “interests” protected (read: monopoly status enhanced) by an employers lobby group under various guises over the past 100 years. And for those of us who go back three or four generations, it has provided the basis for a very comfortable standard of living.

But what’s wrong with this picture? We still have our head in the sand in many ways. You look up an offset company’s website and it tells you it’s just acquired an “XL105-10-LYLLX-F” – whereas a digital printer will tell you young Kylie, who is the boss, has just had a baby and there’s a picture of the baby, jokingly captioned as the accounts payable clerk. It may be corny but it immediately invites the viewer to engage with this company. And nothing is mentioned about print quality. In the digital print world, whoever mentions the Q word first, loses.

Well, if enough people tell you something – often enough – maybe one should give it a go?

A scurrilous group of Bolsheviks are promoting the frightening concept of a Festival of Dangerous Ideas right under our noses here in Sydney. This is designed to undermine the very foundations of modern society. They ask people to put their prejudices aside and look at ideas afresh, on their merits. Why shouldn’t the printing industry do the same, hold its very own Festival of Dangerous Ideas? If the rest of society can occasionally put its practices under the microscope, why can’t we? My hat, we’ve got enough magnifying-glasses left over from when we used to look for blemishes on printing plates; surely we could use some of those?

But what sort of radical ideas?

I think our industry is facing three broad challenges –

1.  the need to attract and retain more new entrants,

2.  the need to improve/elevate the image of print to the broader public, and

3.  the need for more interaction/cooperation between different sectors within the broad print church.

So what kind of ideas? Try these for starters –

• A radical re-think of our showcase event, the National Print Awards to better reflect the goals and objectives of our industry now, rather than what it was, 30 years ago. And why not invite more print-buying clients along?

• Why not create a national Young Print Achiever of the Year award – including entrants from all sectors – not just offset!

• Why not have a series of workshops/conferences attended by representatives of not just commercial print, but also signage, packaging, mailing – we might discover that our similarities far outweigh our differences.

• Staying with that theme, why not combine with other sectors to create a print industry employment opportunities website, aimed at attracting school-leavers. They’ve done it in the signage sector – why just them?

• What is the optimal size and shape of a printing company? Size-wise, I’ve got a theory that around 60-80 is optimal – beyond that it becomes unwieldy. Why not encourage more outsourcing? I suspect there’s an entrenched resistance to sending work out, while presses are sitting idle. If it can be done cheaper elsewhere – send it out! Class, discuss among yourselves.

• Now here’s a really radical suggestion on how to cut costs? All MD’s please stop reading at this point. Fire the boss! Most printing companies have a traditional, hierarchical structure. Why don’t the heads of production, sales and finance get together and kick-out the MD. If those three are doing their job, surely they can manage the business without the extra burden of having to pay a rock-star sitting on top of the pile, extracting upwards of 200-grand!

• Print managers (ie, PMC’s) – friend or foe? This is a festering sore that never really goes away. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, print managers still occupy an important place in our industry. We tolerate them, rather than embrace them. We know their sentiments are the exact opposite of their words. Why not hold a workshop, attended by members from both sides, to debate the merits, the role and the future of print managers. One thing’s for certain: they’re here to stay. Maybe Andrew Price could be invited to act as impartial adjudicator?

• What should be the role of a printing company – to make or to sell? You can’t buy a car from the Toyota factory,  so why can anyone just walk in to a manufacturing environment, which puts coloured dyes onto smashed-up tree-trunks, and expect to buy something? We know customers only bugger up the workflow and as Frank Romano once said, “Workflow is everything!” Why not split our industry into – makers, printing companies who would morph into highly cost-efficient specialists, rather than quite inefficient generalists as we are now – and sellers with highly-trained sales teams who would deal directly with end-clients and who would expand the pie, not just act as order-takers.

• How should we respond to the newly emerging technologies that touch upon printing, but are not central to it. Obviously the likes of 3D printing spring to mind. A bit mickey-mouse? Or what about vehicle-wrapping? A bit down-market? What about textile-printing, which is expanding rapidly into office foyers and interior-decor applications? That’s more a fashion industry thing than printing, surely?

OK – but to just ignore them is to deny that they, and many other green shoots, represent the fastest-growing aspects of the so-called printing industry. And they’re the sexy aspects of print that tantalise and attract young people. Why not use these as bait to lure school-leavers into the broad print church. There they can learn about vehicle-wraps and colour-management and newspaper production and every other aspect of print, packaging and signage. Then let them be progressively encouraged to follow their own particular preference rather than the existing model, where you virtually have to decide at age 18 what you want to do!

And so who would be a suitable convener of such a radical gab-fest?

One group worthy of consideration would be that bunch of social dissidents, the LIA. That may be a problem, however, as they’d have to re-brand themselves as the League for Industrial Anarchy!

There is only one genuine closet radical, and that’s Garry Knespal, who’s built-up a solid reputation as a fearless champion of change. His organisation, GASA, is also agnostic, in that it spills across all processes and has application to all sectors – offset, packaging and signage.

Such a gathering would also be a magnificent opportunity for a coming together of the sectoral tribes, all supposedly part of the printing industry, but who rarely, if ever, get to share their own war stories. We in the commercial sector may also get the shock of our lives to discover there are people, just like us, in signage and packaging who may also have some helpful suggestions on the way forward.

Just a thought.