It also made me think about the word ‘world’. It appears to have the same relevance for Fortune as it does in baseball with the World Series. It is basically a classification of American companies, but unlike the World Series there are a few foreign companies allowed to join.
In the Top 50 of World’s Most Admired Companies according to Fortune there are 41 US-based companies and 9 foreign-based companies. It seems a little out of balance to me.
What however annoyed me more than anything reading through the different sections of the article was looking at the industry classifications. In this there are 64 different industries defined but no classification for the printing industry.
Now I am regularly told that printing is one of the ten largest industries in the world so why does Fortune not recognize this and include printing in its list. Now there are elements of printing in the list, these being packaging and containers, and publishing: newspapers, magazines. Leaving these out this leaves a very large industry throughout the world that is printing.
Now, despite what many people think, I am a printer and have been for a long time, but I feel that print is a non-industry in most people’s minds. Have you noticed whenever you fill in an Internet form that wants to know something about you, the form will ask you to define which industry you work in? How many of these forms every put down printing as an industry? Almost none!
Its about time we as printers fought back to get people to recognize the printing is one of the world’s core industries. Without printing almost no other industry would exist. Printing is one of the world’s vital and most significant industries so why is it so unrecognised. It is about time we fought back.
I was delighted to see the recent letter from Charlie Corr of Mimeo on the Infotrends Blog and this sums up many of the things the printing industry needs to concentrate upon in getting its messages out to the public.
I know that many organizations are doing a good job of getting messages out, but I still find many industry associations failing to promote our industry. I was amused to hear Frank Romano’s comments about President Obama meeting representatives from the printing industry.
These were senior executives of Kodak and Xerox among others and as Frank said this is not the printing industry. Lets start a campaign to get printing recognised as one of the world’s core industries so we can not only feel proud of what we do, but we can get others to recognise that we are an industry they cannot live without.
Comment below to have your say on this story.
If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at editorial@sprinter.com.au.
Sign up to the Sprinter newsletter