C. Clint Bolte & Associates

Naples, Florida was the venue for the National Association for Printing Leadership's annual Top Management Conference held February 25-29. The 247 in attendance heard several messages of how positioning a printing company to participate in the economic rebound will require innovation and forethought.

Keynoter Patrick Lencioni, book author, lecturer, and management consultant discussed the organizational development precepts forming the basis for his best seller, The Five Temptations of a CEO. Overcoming the temptation of invulnerability requires building trust. This can be accomplished by a CEO acknowledging his own weaknesses and mistakes and allowing direct reports to see his human side. Harmony must be overcome by establishing productive conflict. Differing opinions need to be drawn from the staff while encouraging passionate discussion about key issues. Lencioni suggested that the management team take "the Myers-Briggs personality profile test to help understand why people act and react the way they do."

CEO's should give up "certainty in favor of providing clarity." Clarity requires repetitive communication about the firm's core purpose, values, mission, strategy, and goals. The organization should then practice making decisions without complete information on less risky issues. And then set public deadlines for making key decisions.

The temptation of seeking popularity should be overcome by holding people accountable. CEOs should consistently clarify expectations upfront and then confront direct reports immediately about behavior and performance shortfalls. Lencioni stated, "The most effective accountability is posed by the team, rather than their boss." And finally the CEO must overcome the status quo by focusing on results. Both the CEO and organization should publicly commit to measurable results and then evaluate their success based on these results alone. Instead many heads of firms rationalize shortfalls by a series of uncontrollable environmental phenomena.

Andrew Paparozzi, NAPL's Vice President and Chief Economist, offered his State of the Industry. "While business is picking up, it is not enough to create any pricing relief," commented Paparozzi. The litmus test of a recovering economy is hiring plans. NAPL's printing business panel reports that over the next six months four firms expect to hire for every one company expecting to lay off. Over the last six months for every printer that hired there were two firms that laid employees off.

Most economists are masters of numbers. Mr. Paparozzi's interpretation of these numbers to provide a cogent action plan makes him the most highly regarded among economists following the printing industry. In that sense he concluded that management will be the endearing competitive advantage. He surmised, "The most significant change in the printing industry isn't digitization or any other technology. It's the broad range of management skills from marketing and financial analysis to strategic planning and human resource development that is now a prerequisite for enduring success."

In the critical trends panel discussion NAPL's Technical Consultant Howie Fenton reported that Adobe Acrobat version 6 is correcting many of the bad PDFs being sent to printers as "the printer standard, PDF/X-1a, is built into the preflight." The consistency of digital proofing devices is no longer in question for publications as many units are SWOP certified. Soon GRACoL certification will resolve these concerns for general commercial printers.

John Sweeney of Integrated Color Solutions discussed the seven enabling technologies facilitatiing, "print by the numbers." These are (1) standard color measurement, (2) CTP, (3) standard reference printing, such as TR-001, (4) ICC color management, (5) standardized color proofing, (6) closed loop color control, and (7) CIP4 JDF. He offered the case study of closed loop control on an M1000 web press running with Telecolor II. It is able to achieve density-measured salable copies with no operator intervention in less than 2,000 impressions.

For the second year NAPL invited the Document Management Industries Association (DMIA) to host a panel discussion on the marketing opportunity of working with print distributors, 900 of whom are members of DMIA. Last year the panel was comprised of print distributors. This year the panelists were printers who have successfully developed this supply chain specialty. Lloyd Tucker, Senior Vice President of DMIA, reported that surveys of their distributor members confirm that 47% are looking to increase their offering of general commercial printing services over the next two years.

Jim Laurain, General Manager of Royal Oak Michigan's Arbor Press, described how his firm has integrated the print distributor network among their direct sales efforts. It begins with a "Distributor Protection Policy" which states that the firm will not knowingly produce a job for one distributor that should belong to another distributor. There is a six month protection policy for identified accounts. Laurain emphasized repeatedly, "Be upfront and candid (with the distributor client) to build trust." While there is normally no manufacturer identification on the packaging to allow the ultimate client to cut out the distributor and come straight to the printer, occasionally the client will find out and call the printer directly. "As a courtesy, call the distributor and tell them that the client called us direct," remarked Laurain.

If an Arbor direct sales person inadvertently prospects a distributor's account, which happens two or three times a year, the sales person is pulled off the account quickly and professionally. Arbor feels that there are more than 600,000 accounts in their regional market so there are plenty of prospects to go around.