Grounded or Ground Down? How’s your dashboard? Hands up if you love a spreadsheet. All those neatly aligned rows and columns sometimes made even more exciting by alternating colours on each line. Or are you a fan of the dashboard with its shiny fuel gauges, pie and bar charts with data sliced and diced into an orgasmic feast for the eyes. Maybe I could even categorise the Print Monthly readership by their data consumption preferences: Baby Boomers: Opting for the discipline of Excel’s traditional matrix Millennials: Preferring the metaphor of dials and gauges in a pseudo 3D panel Gen Z: Eschewing the visual for an AI voice prompted conversation answering the question of the moment: “What was my top performing press this week, based on the criteria I defined last time I asked” Gen Alpha: Don’t ask! Their future employment opportunities will be in roles that don’t exist currently Collecting data is certainly more efficient with the arrival of new technologies and possibly it’s even more fun, (did I really say that?) with tools to help us visualise and understand the outcomes. But, and there’s always a but, are you collecting and analysing the right data to inform the decisions you are making? Hot off the Press I visited an old newspaper print works recently that had been converted into a hotel. The refit has preserved a large control desk for one of the Crabtree presses, probably an addition in the 60’s or 70’s. There were lots of lights and buttons, a little like the original Starship Enterprise, but only one gauge, labelled ‘CPH’ – Copies Per Hour, the only number that counted to the operator. Metres per minute or sheets per hour don’t really help here. All they needed to know was, regardless of how many pages there were in each newspaper, were they going to get enough copies onto the vans before the deadline for that edition? Out for the Count Having established that we need data that need to be relevant and in context, we need to dig a bit deeper. I’m not talking about “taking a deep-dive into the numbers”, I think we’ve all had enough of that phrase. Rather than looking ever closer at the data we have, it’s wise to lift our heads, take a step back and see what we might be missing; something that U.S secretary of defence, Robert McNamara failed to do during the Vietnam War, with such disastrous consequences that The McNamara Fallacy is taught to marketing students to this day. Stick with me here as we look into the story. In an effort to calculate who was winning the Vietnam war, McNamara decided the best metric was to measure the number of deaths on either side. If enemy body count is up and one’s own is down then surely, we are winning. McNamara loved the simpliAre you in charge of your data or are the numbers in charge of you? Rather than measuring twice and cutting once, we seem to be measuring all the time and cutting very little. Mark Stephenson looks at some lessons from history and offers a little redemption Mark Stephenson began his 48-year career in the print industry at the age of 16, working as a letterpress compositor. Following a few ‘wilderness years’ of employment outside of print, He then returned to the industry in 1989, supplying Apple Macintosh to designers, repro houses, and printers. In the mid-1990s, he became a Fujifilm customer, working as marketing manager for a chain of professional photographic labs. He went on to work across various roles within Fujifilm Graphic Systems from 1999 until starting his own promotions business in early 2026. city of this model so much that he discounted all others. Anyone suggesting other factors, such as guerrilla activity or the sentiments of the Vietnamese people, was ignored, ridiculed, or even sacked for suggesting “unmeasurable or impractical” statistics. Even before the war had ended, McNamara’s Fallacy was referenced by marketing specialists and educators in a non-too positive light. You can see from the quote on the next page [23] how the slippery slope develops. If we become overly reliant on the numbers, we can become blind to possibly more important factors. Just how many KPIs do you monitor? Are they all serving you well? What about the things that are more difficult to estimate or or can't be measured? Efficiency vs Effectiveness So, we track our production efficiency by spreadsheet, dashboard, KPI, or AI prompt. We check that the metrics we consider are informing us correctly and if they are relevant to the decisions we make. But is ultimate efficiency the goal? What about effectiveness? What’s the point of being hyper-efficient if you are not reaching your overall goals? THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK 22 email: editor@printmonthly.co.uk Issue 363 - November | December 2026
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjM0NDIxOA==