Are we relevant?
As employees we strive to be relevant to our managers and customers. We do this by “going the extra mile”, being solutions/knowledge experts, striving for efficiencies, and providing value to those interest groups. After all, if we fail to be relevant we are left without a employment. Call it the Darwinism of the workplace where only the strongest survive.
Note: Hear Dr. Joe Webb’s latest employment analysis for the printing industry which illustrates this point. It shows a 29% drop in employment since the recessions start in December 2007.
On more of a macro level, the entire print industry’s relevance is being challenged. Printing has lost ground in many segments due to a more efficient form of electronic creation, delivery, and capture. Look to the forms segment as an example. How many NCR forms do you run across on a daily basis? The Internet is great at disrupting and changing business models (just ask Blockbuster).
The print industry is at a crossroads – one path leads to finding opportunity, the other to being irrelevant. Today print is the value added for ideas and content that originated as something electronic. Quite a reversal of fortune from the past. Instead of ignoring this fact, we need create and market solutions that acknowledge this change. QR Codes, augmented reality, mobile applications, and personalized campaigns are just a few technologies that blend print with ones and zeros. But how many printers are even experimenting with these? It might be time to start or be faced with a Darwin-istic fate.
