Last week Kodak filed for bankruptcy. (Here’s a great blog from Seth Godin on the subject.)For many people the idea of a company that was once as solid and blue-chip as Kodak being forced to restructure, and ultimately perhaps be sold off for it’s pieces, is shocking.
But there are lessons for business and non-profit leaders, and they are lessons we need to be painfully aware of:
1. You’re never too big to fail. Pridefulness, and your personal inability to imagine your business ceasing to exist, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. In fact, those attitudes are exactly what put Kodak into trouble in the first place. They never imagined what would happen if htey didn’t evolve.
2. Take the leap. At some point Kodak needed to bet the farm on a technology that wasn’t wrapped up in film, but they didn’t do it, and now they’re irrelevent.
3. Have your vision be broader than a technical or specific unit of delivery. Kodak was in the film business. They promoted like they were in teh memory business, but they didn’t manage that way. If they had a broader operating purpose, to capture images-no matter what the technology, there is no doubt they’d still be a successful business.
4. Reinvest in the future. My guess is that in the good times, they reinvested in keeping the good times going, and not in digital, and other cloud based image capturing systems. They were tepidly interested in digital, but were outpaced by so many others that they eventually seemed to give up on it all.
There are so many lessons in the Kodak story. What are your thoughts and opinions about how they could have moved to save their company? What parts of their story translate to your work?
David Curry
