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Sacrifice the sacred cow
In the 1980s, Kodak enjoyed a 90 per cent share of the US film market and sales of $10 billion. Such was its dominance that ‘a Kodak moment’ entered common parlance as a memory to savour.
By 2012, it was bankrupt.
How could they have been so knuckle-headed they didn’t spot the rise of digital cameras? In fact, they had. In 1975, Kodak’s designers had produced one of the first digital cameras (with a resolution of 0.1 megapixels and weighing 3.6 kilograms!). Its boffins knew where the future lay. The problem was that its executives just couldn’t accept it because they were making too much money from selling film.
It’s a salutary lesson that the greatest barrier to creativity in established businesses is often the ...
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