What We'll Miss: Productive Flamboyance

The Graph Expo show in Chicago, like the printing industry in general, is going to be a lot less interesting than in past years, and not because of the unrelenting pall cast by a lack of printing activity, the stubbornly weak economy, and managers' perplexity regarding what to do about either.

No, I think that activities at shows and industry events will be less fun for a while simply because Harry V. Quadracci will not be inhabiting that rarefied part of the world where big imaginations, outrageous ideas, cheeky but sensible projects, and can't-believe-it initiatives jolt the status quo and create new leaders.

Over three decades, he rewrote—or created the fertile atmosphere in which others on his staff could rewrite—just about every rule, policy, procedure, and tradition in the graphic arts industry. And he did it on the industry's biggest stage, the high-quality manufacture of weekly and monthly magazines and catalogs.

In 1971, we have to understand, it was unthinkable that anyone could start a very large printing operation in the heartland, in Wisconsin. The major printers at the time were old-line companies that had a firm grasp on their part of the business and weren't interested in letting go.

But in an often-told story, Harry and 11 partners bought an abandoned millwork factory in Pewaukee, installed a Baker Perkins common-impression-cylinder web offset press and a borrowed saddle stitcher, and began selling printing jobs. The turning point came in 1977, when, in a pinch, Quad got the chance to print an issue of Newsweek magazine; it now prints two million copies each week.

Quad, still privately held and built from the ground up with only a few exceptions, today employs about 11,000 people, has revenues of $2 billion, and operates about two dozen print production facilities on three continents.

Under Harry's guidance, Quad/Graphics was aggressive in expansion, not just buying equipment and starting up a network of fully equipped plants, but carrying out the logical extension—upstream and downstream—of the activities of a printing company in the service of its clientele. Thus was created Quad's imaging centers (now in six metropolitan areas) and fleets of delivery trucks, hundreds of them.

Quad also undertook a different kind of logical extension: first, improvement of existing machinery to run faster or better; second, engineering the systems for itself and for sale; and third, the start-up of a major rotogravure operation, the first such initiative in the publication segment in perhaps half a century.

Then there were the scores of innovations on the human side: affordable employee housing, bus transportation, child-care centers, fitness centers—the list goes on.

On the business side, Quad was dedicated to technological innovation, regularly investing hundreds of millions of dollars on infrastructure. But Harry made even this a lot of fun. The Quad entourage, a group of printing customers with Harry in the lead, was a fixture at a lot of trade shows, here and overseas. Yes, they were fun trips but he organized them with a purpose, so that his customers—his partners, really—could see the new technology and become part of important capital investment decisions.

In a splashy event at the international Print 97 show in Chicago, for example, Quad signed a deal for $148 million with Heidelberg for 23 new web presses and finishing systems.

Harry Quadracci's death in early August at age 66 crushed the Quad/Graphics family, which includes its many customers, but it also dimmed our industry's light. Yes, there will be other flashes, big imaginations, and outrageous ideas, but it will be a while before we see the likes of Harry's flamboyance again.