Empower Creativity, Don't Control It!

Credit: Bill Gillespie

For as long as I can recall I have heard printers talk about controlling clients and trying to “make them behave.” They’re referring, of course, to requests that seem to come out of the blue or off the wall to printing reps or executives. The designers seem to push the envelope and make production managers nervous. They want a trick ink or a stock that doesn’t like the printing process or a fold that won’t work, and these things make us nuts.

At the risk of getting slammed by my printing friends I have to say, this is totally wrong. We need to turn our plants into playgrounds for the creative. We need to encourage them to dream big and ask for the impossible or what we think is impossible. We need the designers of the world to see our equipment and people as another media they can use for artistic expression. We need to turn them loose.

Doing so will make the work better. It will make our people better too. We’ll learn to push our machines to the limit on behalf of people that can give us work. We’ll discover we can do more than we think.

We’ll also become the place creative people want to do business. They’ll think of us as fertile ground where any idea might spring to life. We’ll be fun rather than frustrating. We’ll be liberating rather than limiting. We’ll be the first number they call when they want to say ”I’ve got this idea and I’ve been wondering about how.”

Now, I can hear the comments about cost and hitting estimates now. Let me respond by asking, how many of you printing executives and sales managers have asked your reps to get clients focused on value rather than cost? How many of you have expressed private frustration with one of your reps calling him a price seller…or worse a client, calling them price buyers. And, what does it cost for your equipment to sit idle while you pay reps to find people that will buy that thing you want to produce, that thing that fits your plant?

Creative people love to create. They live to do new things every day. They get excited by language, color, texture, funny folds and a zillion other things that only they understand.

We can help them have fun and do business in the process. We can connect their idea to unbelievable tools. We can help them invent new looks. We can help turn brainstorming into tangible solutions. We can be the fun place people naturally gravitate to.

Then, we will be valuable. We’ll be partners rather than vendors. We can talk about what it will cost to produce this grand thing rather than bid against ourselves for something that isn’t exactly what they dreamed anyway.

Just say, “if you can imagine it we can make it happen!”