Mind the gap between the gravy train and the burning platform

4 years after its spectacular fall from No.1 to Chapter 11, Kodak remains a high definition beacon of what happens if we get too comfortable. A global supply chain that was too vast for any competitor to replicate fed our insatiable appetite for capturing memories. So why did the company implode? Well, as Kodak was at the forefront of digital photography (!), the answer lies not in the technology itself, but in the attitude of the company to change.

The more successful an organisation becomes, the harder it can be for its people to admit that they need to change. It is a frailty of human nature that if everyone keeps on telling us how brilliant we are, (through repeat buys of our products and services), even the most modest amongst us will eventually find it hard to resist believing them.

We need to look for the next big thing before our current big thing becomes the current small thing (at which point it will probably be squashed by someone else’s next big thing). We should not rest on our laurels, because they are used not only to make crowns, but also wreaths.

Embracing change is not a finite project, but an infinite journey that will keep us humble and ambitious, by enabling us to see how much further we can go. But if it’s mountains we used to climb, today it’s volcanoes. What was once a rock solid environment is now molten, with the risk of a competitive eruption at any time.

Kodak’s people once embraced change so tightly that they disrupted and then monopolized the global photography market. But eventually they let go, seduced instead by the comforting embrace of their own hype. Any organisation that wants to survive longer than a Kodak moment should take a selfie of their success, and keep moving.