The oldest millennials who are working in the industry today are in their early 40s. They are moving into ownership and key leadership roles. If you are in this group, this article is for you. You are entering leadership roles at a pivotal time in the industry’s history. Over the last 50 years, we’ve seen digital pre-press technology eliminate hordes of manual, highly paid craftspeople. We’ve been through the quality revolution and learned to improve our processes. We operate extremely lean compared to the waste and productivity levels that were the norm when I first joined our industry. We’ve seen automation make serious impacts on our technology to the point that the amount of skill and knowledge to do many of our jobs is much less demanding. It took four years back in the day for an offset pressman to learn to properly set color. That entire process is automated on today’s latest equipment.

We’ve come a long way and should be proud. In my view, there are still challenges that we’ve not confronted and dealt with and, frankly, a couple of them may be here for a while. We work in an industry that is awash in change in two areas: 1) advancing digital technology, and 2) how graphic reproduction and adjacent services are looked at and used by customers who have a plethora of media channels to choose from and whose expertise is not in what we do. To better equip ourselves to deal with these challenges there are two issues in the talent management area of our companies that need to be dealt with.

Carol Dweck in her book Mindset identified two mindsets: a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, in his book Hit Refresh explained the two mindsets like this.