On the importance of knowing where are you going.
I was reading 10x but not 10% from Ken Norton and the story about Kodak’s fall made me remember a talk I’ve attended last Tuesday.
Ken explains that Kodak had the 90% of the film sales market and the 85% of the camera sales market back in the day, then one of their engineers invented the digital camera. Their answer? Yeah cool, but shut up about it.
Asshole and crappy move, right? Well, I wouldn’t be so sure.
Eventually, as many of you know already, Kodak became an irrelevant company.
Ken Norton goes on about The Innovator’s Dilemma and why yo shouldn’t take the obvious path to aim for 10% instead of 10x and stuff like use data, not opinions.
Wrong.
The truth is, Kodak probably used data to decide keep riding the Dollar wave instead of putting more money on the digital camera (or just put it on the roadmap). Kodak had a huge ass market to monetize on. Why would you innovate on camera and film technology, just to move on and let someone else profit on it?
So, am I saying that Kodak did the right thing? Yes, at that time.
Some would say that Kodak had to monetize on their market, but reinvest on innovation. Wait a second, but the digital camera was invented by them in their own labs, so they definitely invested in innovation, right?
Truth to be told, it wasn’t clear that the film market would disappear in a few decades and no one knew the digital camera was the one who would kill it. Visionaries are not always right and tend to envision much less detailed futures. They invested in innovation, but they lacked something else.
As the years went by and the technology favoured the appearance of the first digital cameras in the market at an affordable price, Kodak was already dead. Their problem wasn’t technology or investment in R&D, their problem was their lack of vision and, even more important, the lack of a sustainable mission.
Kodak’s vision, like most of the company’s out there (and especially public companies), was restricted to make more money out of their product line. The shareholders of a big stock want the company to play safe or else they would put the money somewhere else. To play safe means to squeeze the dividends out of the stock while they last and give exactly zero amount of shits about the company when they don’t own stock anymore.
So what did Kodak do as a public company? What was their mission? Make a bunch of people rich. Their mission was fullfilled and the world moved on.
Now let’s imagine the company’s mission was to democratize photography. Make it possible for every person in the world, especially including those on less favoured situations. Would they have reacted earlier to the digital imaging revolution? I would say so.
When you have a mission, you’re always on the lookout for hints and ways to accomplish it. If you don’t know where are you going, you will end up lost and wandering around or following someone else’s dreams.
Why did I mention a talk at the start of the article? Because it was my inspiration to get on Medium and to write this article.
Thank you James Whittaker for the Career Superpowers session last Tuesday and especially for inspiring us.
