Quick Printing

Not that long ago, trendy and hip business practices were based on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Victory should be the objective and harsh discipline the norm. The latest BusinessWeek magazine outlines some basic principles from Sun Tzu: Greed is good. Be tough. Attack only when victory is likely. Beat the enemy. Winning is essential and requires clever tactics and, sometimes, deception.

Ah, but that may be changing. According to the BusinessWeek article, the latest business fad is based on the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu text based on the wisdom of Lord Krishna. Here it is important to focus on your thoughts and actions rather than the outcome. Greed is bad. Be fair. Act rather than react. Seek higher consciousness and be sensitive to shareholders, partners, employees, and neighbors. Feel the Karma, y’all?

Frankly, I find the latter approach more to my liking, perhaps because I got a belly full of the former while in the Army. In any case, I find it amusing to see these business fads come and go while some simple truths remain constant - not the least of which comes from Johnny Carson’s old sidekick Ed McMahon: “Honesty is the single most important factor having a direct bearing on the final success of an individual, corporation, or product.”

All this philosophical stuff makes me thirsty and my Karma says I should go get a cold beer.

Last week was the 25th Annual Banned Books Week sponsored by the American Library Association and several other book selling and publishing associations. If you are thinking “so what?” then you might want to heed the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas: “Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.”

In case you think these challenges arise from one particular segment of the political spectrum, think again. Challenges are just as likely to come from the liberal left as they are from the conservative right. As author Nat Hentoff writes: “the lust to suppress comes from any direction.”

Granted, there are some tomes I might find inappropriate for any number of reasons, but I would never tell anyone else that they couldn’t read them. Along with some challenged authors whose topics might make me uncomfortable there are also any number of others I have enjoyed. John Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Maya Angelou come to mind.

In case you’re interested, the Top 10 banned classics are: “Ulysses,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Madame Bovary,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Of Mice and Men,” “Brave New World,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Moll Flanders,” and “Candide”.

If you want to learn more, go to www.ala.org. Printers should be very interested in such things.

I hesitate to mention fast food again, but I’m going to anyway. This is prompted by one of my rare visits to the golden arches where I was presented with a Big Mac constructed with all the loving care of dirt being flung. Buns askew, cheese lopping down the side and meat patties half exposed. It didn’t look anything like the picture behind the counter.

It’s not just Mickey D’s, of course. Ask yourself when you have ever gotten a fast food sandwich that looked like the picture on the wall or the sandwich on television. Now, let’s carry this on a step further and spare the fast food industry for a minute. Let’s look at frozen food.

On the boxes of frozen entrees there are always pictures of scrumptious looking, neatly arranged repasts. If you search carefully you will find the disclaimer “Serving Suggestion.” It would be nice if it were possible to serve up the contents of the package in such a lovely manner, but most of the time it’s not. Somewhere in shipping and handling the peas got in the gravy, the turkey migrated to the mashed potatoes, and the stuffing got distributed all over the place. There are exceptions to this – pot pies come to mind – but it is true too often.

If printers delivered their products in such a sloppy and haphazard manner they’d be out of business, but yet we accept often shoddy foods and come back for more.

Reminds me of a story the late Paris Walker told me years ago.

A man comes into a print shop and says he has a very specific order: “I want you to print 1,000 sheets but charge me for 1,200. Skew the type on the page, smear the ink, put on enough powder to coat each sheet, and dog-ear the corners before you box the order.

“I can’t do that!” Replied the printer.

“Why not? You did it for me last time.”

The fast food joints here are offering cash rewards for new employees. The bounty at one place is $200. Judging from the encounters I have had with both new and long-time (usually four weeks or so) employees, respiration seems to be the only absolute requirement for hiring.A lot of us have worked at fast food or other menial jobs early in life. As I recall, my friends and I were able to count change, handle requests for no mustard, and smile while doing it. Nowadays, you seldom even get eye contact because the clerk is busy studying the cash register buttons looking for the proper picture icon. Last week I tried to order a Wendy\’s Frescata sandwich and I thought the poor kid would have a nervous breakdown looking for \”Fresca\” on the key pad. The manager finally stepped in and saved him.

Of course, every generation looks back nostalgically on how things weren\’t. (\”Kids. What\’s the matter with kids today? Why can\’t they be like we were, perfect in every way? What\’s the matter with kids today?\” From the movie Bye Bye Birdie, 1963.) So maybe my griping about lousy service at fast food places is overdone. If I want good service I should go to a nicer place with more skilled employees - although price alone does not always guarantee good service.

People in our industry are competing for the more competent young people, who seem in such short supply. If the folks in fast food are offering cash rewards for warm bodies, we\’re going to have to figure out some workable incentives to attract people with skills or, failing that, at least the ability to learn.

The Internet can be a wonderful tool, but it has its dark sides.It can be a colossal time waster. I wonder how many printers spend precious hours surfing the Internet and sending e-mail messages back and forth rather than going out the door and selling something to somebody. Quite a few, I\’d wager.

The Internet encourages bad manners. People can say mean, untrue, hurtful, and ignorant things in e-mails and on list-serves and blogs without the risk of having to deal face to face with those the comment\’s effect. I remember one particular reader who had become so incensed by something I wrote in my editorial that he bombarded me with hate e-mail that culminated in a message alleging that I had a \”comb-over.\” Heck, I don\’t have enough hair for that.

The Internet also offers up a mind-numbing amount of information of dubious usefulness. Sure, I can do a Google search for \”printing\” and be told in 0.09 seconds that there are 599,000,000 references to \”printing\” on the Web. (No lie.) But that is of no value whatsoever. OK, I can refine my search to \”quick printing\” and trim the hits to a mere 84 million, but so what? As that new \”old saying\” goes, we\’re drowning in information and thirsting for knowledge.

Also, the Internet has removed most of the gates that used to help us revise, correct, and evaluate information before it was disseminated. When I first went to work in newspapers, there were several minds and sets of eyes that went over a story before it hit the press. Now all some yahoo has to do is compose a message of dubious content and hit a button to send it out into the world where it is given the same weight as well-researched, thoughtful and actually true offerings. (I won\’t even get into spelling here.) And the Internet can give folks like that a highly inflated sense of their own importance. They are out there competing for attention with the New York Times or Washington Post, whether they have anything of value to say or not. \”Look at me! I\’m somebody.\”

Finally, the Internet is also a remarkably cheap and easy way for con artists to disseminate their scams, infiltrate your computer, or hijack your personal information with little or no risk of getting caught.

Don\’t get me wrong, the Internet is a valuable tool and I use it every day. That said, it is just a tool and is no better or worse than the people who use or misuse it.

FedEx still hasn’t quite figured out what to do with Kinko’s. They’re obviously not pleased at the financial performance of FedEx Kinko’s as evidenced by the rather unceremonious departure of former Kinko’s CEO Gary Kusin. When FedEx bought Kinko’s they were more interested in increasing retail locations to support their shipping business than they were in building print and copy volumes.The FedEx Kinko’s folks were insistent that I meet with them at On Demand, where they had a major presence. It didn’t take but a minute to figure out that the PR folks there had no clue that our magazine’s readers consider FedEx Kinko’s to be competition – although perhaps not very serious competition. They wanted to tell me about plans to double the number of locations from the current 1,200 to around 2,500, and I listened politely. The one question I really wanted to have answered was the desired ratio of copy/print sales to shipping sales in existing and planned stores. Nobody knew and I doubt they would have told me if they did.

Meanwhile, FedEx says it plans to use 100 selected Kinko’s locations as parts distribution centers for companies that need emergency replacement parts – including biomedical supplies. Now that’s really from left field.