TLMI Presented Ideas To Drive Business Progress At Annual Conference

The Tag and Label Manufacturers Institute (TLMI) held a very successful annual meeting (again) in Naples, Fla. last month. TLMI Chairman Art Yerecic, president of Yerecic Label, opened the meeting with some upbeat stats: 35 new members during the past year, with total membership surpassing 300; 34 locations certified by TLMI's L.I.F.E. environmental initiative with more on the way; 100+ supplier table-top exhibits; and more than 400 meeting attendees. During the course of the 4-day event several awards were presented: Converter of the Year went to Scott Pillsbury, president of Rose City Label Company; John Bennett, VP of FLEXcon, won Supplier of the Year honors; and Environmental Leadership awards were presented to The Label Printers and Mitsubishi Polyester Films.

Meeting Chair Daryl Hanzal, president of Ritrama, put together a typically outstanding line up of presentations including High Performance Leadership by Andrew Boynton, dean of Boston College's Carroll School of Management; Social Media, Social Networking, and Social Relevance by business consultant Scott Klososky; and a session on mergers and acquisitions led by Tom Cobery, senior consultant for NAPL.

In his presentation, Boynton stressed the theme of "winning with ideas," postulating that "ideas drive economic progress." He added some bullet points to help drive home the concept:

• I - Be more interested than interesting;

• D - Diversify, avoid the same trail others take;

• E - Exercise your idea muscles;

• A - Hunting ideas requires agility.

Capping off these points, he added, "behavior trumps IQ."

Boynton emphasized the fact that many times successful endeavors come from an open-minded repurposing of existing concepts. Some (slightly) successful examples:

Henry Ford first got the idea for the assembly line watching beef being transported in a Chicago slaughter house;
Walt Disney first thought of the Magic Kingdom after visiting Tivoli Gardens in Denmark;
Warren Buffett got his "circle of competence" investing concept from Ted Williams' book, "The Science of Hitting."

Boynton also highlighted Thomas Edison's Invention Factory in which it was said "failure drives ideas." If failure drive ideas, and ideas drive progress, then failure drives progress. Makes sense; just ask the Wizard of Menlo Park—he knew failure; he drove progress.

Tom Polischuk, Editor-in-Chief

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