A Kodak film photographed with my smartphone as I am writing this post.
I have just learned this morning about Kodak heading straight foreword to bankruptcy.
In the late 19th century, George Eastman (the father of Kodak) envisioned to “make the camera as convenient as a pencil”. And his company practically did it through a series of innovations over about a century. They made the first portable dry camera for consumers, the first “home movie camera”, the color film, the first automatic snapper. I also learned that they invented actually the digital technology in 1975 (“the film less camera”). See a beautiful story here.
However, what appeared to be their discovery ended up being their killer too. Slow to monetize their digital discovery (it took them 19 years until they came to market with digital camera because they did not want to cannibalize the film business) they kept losing market in the last two decades in favor of camera makers and even new entrants in the image market. Even worse, the photo camera market is shrinking rapidly as many consumers are satisfied enough with their smartphones and consider un-necessary carrying another device just for photographs. Sadly, what appears to be “as convenient as a pencil” ended up being as convenient as a phone and computer and radio and clock and lots of things together. Is it bad? Or is it just life. Everything will sometime come to an end.
Some thoughts:
- Is not as important to have great ideas as it is to work on them and put them in practice. And do that all the time with the risk of failure.
- Where will be your products in 1-5-10-15 years? Who will integrate them into something else? Will you?
Nicolae Iordache Iordache
Nicolae Iordache Iordache has 15 years of professional activity in the NGO sector and pharmaceutical business. Graduated as medical doctor, he holds an MBA joined degree from Case Western University, Cleveland, Ohio and CEU School of Business, Budapest, Hungary. He has more than 11 years of experience in pharmaceutical industry ranging from medical representative to senior level. His main interest is field force effectiveness and he has been consulting for pharmaceutical companies holding either global or regional leadership, both R&D and generics. Nicolae Iordache Iordache was involved in consulting projects in 14 countries, especially in CEE and Mediterranean region. Within some of the consulting projects he has trained and developed FLSMs and FFMs in skill and capability development. Iordache is a former Country Manager of Richter Gedeon in Romania and was responsible for all sales and marketing activities for the imported portfolio of the company. In this function he served as advisor, keynote speaker and chairman in several occasions at pharmaceutical industry events. Nicolae Iordache Iordache has established, and is Managing Director of, Iordacheiordache T&D, a company specializing in human performance and productivity especially in sales organizations with the aim to support highly motivated sales executives to lead effective sales teams.
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