23 www.printmonthly.co.uk Issue 363 - November | December 2026 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK the past. So, the way we’ve taught managers to make decisions and consultants to analyse problems condemns them to taking action when it’s too late.” Not everything can be, or should be, measured and we cannot live by data alone. It’s time to redress the balance and stop accountants from running our business. Yes, data is power, but why should it be? What happened to empathy, compassion, and changing our world for good? How about allocating a percentage of your Whatever those goals may be, and they’ll be different from one organisation to another. You may want to influence society, improve quality of life, change opinion or, most likely in a print business, make money. Consider the simple graphic below. • If your efficiency and effectiveness are both low you will slowly die • If you become more efficient but do not address effectiveness it’s actually worse: you’ll die even quicker • Add some effectiveness to your poor efficiency and you have a chance at survival • Only when you have high efficiency and high effectiveness together do you start to thrive The Goal In his 1984 novel The Goal, Eliyahu M. Goldratt tells the rather cheesy and certainly dated story of production manager Alex who is solely measured on the efficiency of his factory. Alex lurches from one production crisis to another; working late, upsetting his wife, and alienating his children. Then he meets business guru Jonah who tells him he’s chasing the wrong goal. It’s pure Karate Kid ‘wax on, wax off’ stuff as Jonah guides Alex to the ultimate goal of a commercial operation – profit. 42 years later company goals have progressed and become more nuanced. Mission Statements have more recently moved aside to make way for an even simpler company purpose. For most of my time at Fujifilm we boldly proclaimed in our mission statement that we were striving to “enhance the quality of life of people worldwide”, more recently this has developed into a more memorable company purpose of “Giving our world more smiles.” Try measuring that one – I’d love to see a stacked bar chart showing grimaces, sneers, grins, and smiles, per head of population, over time. Data is Only Ever About the Past To quote Clayton Christensen, the late Harvard Business School professor: “The problem is, the data is only available about marketing or PR budget to wellbeing in the workplace for example, even if the benefits never show up as a number? Doing Things Right and Doing the Right Thing Recently I attended a Printing Charity webinar for World Mental Health Day, where Michelle Knight, UK wellbeing lead at Smurfit Westrock, told the story of a deepening relationship between the two organisations. She spoke about the benefits of a staff wellbeing programme for employees and the company as a whole. I wanted to ask what made Smurfit Westrock decide to take wellbeing seriously even though it would be hard to measure. Surely some benefits would not become apparent for years to come. Maybe some stories would never be told. Whatever the history, it’s an encouraging story with ongoing benefits for employer and employees. Unfortunately, we ran out of time on the webinar for me to ask my questions. Take Control It doesn’t really matter how we choose to consume our data, dashboards, or spreadsheets, more is not necessarily better. We need to be wary of eating so much that we lose sight of the ground beneath our feet. Here is what happens when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally: The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide. – Daniel Yankelovich, The New Odds ▲Newspaper press at The Coventry Evening Telegraph
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