Learning from History

There are many lessons we can learn from the Kodak story:

• Organizations must adapt to their changing customer needs.

  This is easier said than done. Human understanding and cognition are heavily influenced by our cultural beliefs and upbringing. We just don't see what others see. In some ways, this is what happened at Kodak. Their background and company history were from a chemical engineering viewpoint; indeed, Eastman Chemicals (which was spun off from Kodak) is still a very successful company today. At the time, Kodak's management was incapable of seeing the transformative change to the user experience that digital photography represented.

• The Kodak story shows us that innovative change can come from anywhere within an organization.

It often requires a different point of view from leadership for internal views to be promoted successfully as a business strategy. The old command and control structures themselves need to change...