Peter Drucker

Everything I know that is really worth knowing, I learned from someone else. That's it! I'm out. I'm outin' myself. You thought I was a great thinker and now you find out that I'm just a great listener. Oh, I suppose I had a few original thoughts in the old days—after a few fingers of Jack Daniels. The really great thinking, however, always came from someone else. It coulda been from Peter Drucker on marketing or management. It mighta been from Socrates or Plato on human behavior. Sometimes it was the shoeshine guy at the airport on the subjects of politics or the economy. Plentitimes

I've been in sales and marketing most of my career and was delighted to be invited to contribute to Printing Impressions on the subject of marketing in the printing industry. This column will appear every other month, and in it I will be offering advice, guidance and suggestions about how you can use marketing strategies to grow your business and make your sales- force more effective. Peter Drucker, an expert in strategy and policy, once made the comment that the purpose of marketing is to eliminate the need for sales. While I'm certainly not as smart, experienced or well-known as the esteemed Mr. Drucker, I

We've never seriously considered process costing for printing, have we? All we know is job cost accounting. That's our business model—our security blanket. We see our business as the sum total of a series of jobs. We may have just about run out of time for that model. It's seduced us into overcapacity and razor-thin margins for years. I'm slowly getting the feeling that things began to change with the fax machine in the late '80s. It got so easy for print buyers to spew out a bunch of "Requests for Quotation" on the fax machine. The feeling of relationships became just a

Why Service Stinks," is the cover story of BusinessWeek magazine for October 23, 2000. Don't be misled by that negative title. If you haven't read it, by all means do so. Businesses and industry are recognizing that their best customers have been subsidizing the cost of servicing marginal customers. It's an awakening provoked by activity-based cost analysis that penalizes the high service cost/low yield customers and passes benefits to the top clients. The implications of this rapidly growing service business model change can be profound for printing. Why is it happening? Managerial accounting is shifting to a new medium, a revised platform. It's

Jim, Peter and I have a secret. Jim is James Geinke, president of Arandell Corp. in Menomonee Falls, WI. Peter is Peter Doyle, manufacturing manager at Action Printing in Fond du Lac, WI. Our secret is an exciting old way of constantly increasing the efficiency of a printing plant. Now, you'll read this and either forget it or be unwilling to try it. Well, maybe a couple of readers will give it a go. But Jim and Peter won't keep their productivity train in the station. They're ahead and you'll have to play catch-up. The secret is people: respect, trust and confidence in their

Both Peter Drucker, in his new book "Management Challenges for the 21st Century," and Jeff Papows, in "Enterprise.com," speak of "knowledge workers" as replacing blue- and white-collar workers of the past. Knowledge workers are the people in companies who make decisions. They have the "know how" and "know why" of the business acquired through training, or experience, or both. Their decisions translate to actions that establish the policy and competence of the operation. Knowledge workers receive information, assimilate it, decide what to do and execute decisions. Who Are They? Trouble is we're not accustomed to the concept of knowledge workers as a special classification