26. How to do the mental journey

26.

How to do the mental journey

We now know that the most important step in our transformation is to mentally adapt the change. Being analog and then adding digital as well is a mental game. Of course, it doesn’t stop there, adding a new tool is much more work regarding the way you change and implement it into your new method of doing business with customers. But it all starts in your own mind.

The worst thing you can do in a market that is rapidly changing is to NOT change. You need to adapt accordingly to the change, not stay as you’ve always been. You need to evolve. Even worse is craving to stay the same way as you and the company have been in generation after generation. I’m sorry but that doesn’t work anymore in the graphic market. There are markets where disruption hasn’t entered yet, where that point of view could be acceptable, where things handcrafted through generations could become an advantage. We see brands expressing it, in bakeries, restaurants, etc. But in the graphic business there isn’t much room left for “typesetters”. That disappeared already in the 1990s and today we see a clear drive toward less volume print per job. On the commercial side, we also see the total volume of printed sheet going down. But on the industrial side we see a growth mainly in label and the flexible side. Not so much on the board side, 1-2%. The number of jobs increases big time. From formerly 5-6 jobs per day and machine up to 500 jobs per site today with digital and adding e-jobs as much as 5,000 per day and site. It’s the right way going forward and to succeed you need to maintain the upcoming adaption

in your mind. Do the mental journey. There are some wise words to make friends with: “If you want something you have never had before, you must be willing to do something you have never done before.” Therefore, you are convinced but still scared. Scared for the possibility of everything not going as planned. You’ve made the best plan out of what you know and that is probably all you can do, and still you may fail. The good thing with failing is that you can learn from it and never make the same mistake again. It’s OK to fail! The successful business people of the world know that failing is the best school of learning. Changing plans because of failure is also okay – but don’t change your goal. The road (planning) is the fun part and the everyday driver for you to reach a little bit closer to the goal. Accept changing roads but never goals. The target can be one of many milestones and when approaching the final goal, set a new one. The goal must be the driver for both you and the whole company. If you’re the boss of your company, be the leader – lead and coach. Be crystal clear with your goals. Let the people around you get involved in which road you’re taking and if a road won’t work, change roads together but do not change the goal. To be as transparent as possible helps you in getting a committed team around you and that will make a big difference. I have seen too many leaders who have kept goals and plans to themselves, not involving the employees. I still remember one leader and owner of a company who made an investment and added a new digital machine, without doing any homework before. The leader signed the deal for the machine without allowing anybody to mention anything to anyone before the day the machine arrived on the factory floor. Yes, it became a big and bad surprise for everyone in the production. I remember our installation team calling back and saying they never felt so embarrassed before. It was like “look what the cat dragged in”. The boss called it a gift to the company and all the employees. No one understood what it was and more importantly why and for which reason. It’s not an excuse but an explanation why it didn’t work out at that company. The employees never let the gift be a part of their toolbox, as they felt completely left out. Another example was a company where the homework was made, the whole company was in the loop, but the boss didn’t change their business plan. He didn’t have a strategy for how both technologies should complement and support each other. He didn’t plan for this being something else, it wasn’t just another offset press that would offload the fully loaded old press from the short runs. The digital press instead competed on jobs with the old presses in the old

way of selling and setting prices, cost pricing per job. That meant maybe 50% of the number of jobs that they removed from the old press only stayed for 5% of the print volume and was done in the digital press in less than an hour. Taken the monthly cost with one-hour production per day, it’ll be the most expensive hour and can never compete with his old press counting cost. That said, I promise you that most of the transformations made over the years (both in the graphic market and outside) have succeeded. It only takes a different amount of time for them all to reach the goal. The most common reason for that success is people accepting the mental journey as a fact. They have made a number of mistakes down the road – but never lost sight of the final goal.