The emperor’s new cowboy boots
A trip inside the dying days of Kodak
“Yeah, a guy was shot two blocks from here earlier tonight.” I should probably have taken that as an omen. November 2009 and I am checking in to the Comfort Inn West in Rochester, New York, a shabby hotel squatting sadly on the side of the highway, eight miles from the airport and seemingly a thousand from civilisation. I had flown in to write about a resurrection, instead I was going to discover a patient on life support and an extended family kidding themselves.
Almost exactly a year after Obama’s election, I landed at Washington Dulles airport on route to Rochester. I’d been assigned to write a feature for Wired UK after its editor, David Rowan, had been impressed by the firecracker performance of Kodak’s then-Chief Marketing Officer, Jeff Hayzlett, at the PICNIC conference. A burly South Dakotan with a penchant for teaming business suits with cowboy boots, Jeff is a born convincer. When he told the story of Kodak as the comeback kid, you could believe it despite the figures screaming otherwise.
Here’s how I described Hayzlett’s schtick in the article:
“Kodak is trying to reinvent itself, and Hayzlett – 49, with his bearlike stature, cowboy boots and self-deprecatory charm (“I’m just a guy from Sioux Falls, South Dakota) – is its cheerleader. At 44 conferences last year, he delivered speeches with the same message: Kodak stumbled, but it’s back.”
I first met Hayzlett at yet another conference, a painful social media jamboree called 140# Characters, held in one of the more soulless offshoots of London’s O2 arena. Sat in a dressing room with a towel draped around his neck, he greeted me like an old friend and immediately Oprahed me with one of the company’s Flip-fighting pocket video cameras, a pleasant but decidedly me-too product it had far too much faith in. The mobile phone camera was killing the briefly appealing pocket video cam market. In April 2011, Cisco shuttered Flip as a $590 million mistake.
That brief meeting with Hayzlett and an interview session earlier the same month with Steve Sasson, the long-time Kodak employee who invented the first digital camera, had kindled a small flame of hope in me. Despite the dire straits the company was facing, it had this incredible DNA stretching right back to its visionary founder George Eastman. And hell, weren’t the Oscars still held at the Kodak Theatre? I briefly let myself believe a new Kodak Moment could be coming.
Less than a month later, as I wandered Washington Dulles during a 6-hour layover, searching for a plug socket and finding myself eating bacon and waffles beside a bearded monster of a man who spat chewing tobacco onto my shoes, my optimism was starting to fade again. In the airport souvenir store where “Don’t blame me, I didn’t vote for Obama” t-shirts sat alongside copies of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, my “yes they can” spirit was dampened even further.
After a bumpy flight in a tiny plane where the stewards had to shift bags and passengers multiple times before take off to ensure the proper weight balance, I arrived in Rochester. 21 hours from the warmth of my friend’s flat in Kilburn, North-West London, to the snow-covered concrete of the Comfort Inn West. I had three days to kill until I met with Kodak. My questions were written. I took to my hotel room like some small time crook in witness protection.
I practiced my false smile in the bedroom mirror and gloried in the undiscovered delights of Hulu, gobbling up hours of Family Guy in bleary-eyed delirium. I fed myself on Lays and Mountain Dew foraged from the gas station next door, and candy bars from the vending machine. On the second day, after failing to hail a cab to take me into Rochester proper, I schlubbed my way along the perfunctory pavement beside the highway and went to Applebee’s.
The waitress eyed me as if I were an extraterrestrial fresh from the saucer. “You’re not from around here, are you?” People actually say that. Despite quizzing me about my accent, incorrectly placing me as Australian/Canadian/French, she was great and even gave me a free dessert after feeling sorry for me holed up in the Comfort, uncomfortably waiting for the go from the Kodak PR people, who didn’t seem to be answering their phones.
On day three of my self-imposed hotel house arrest, my phone rang. It was Nancy, Kodak’s head of worldwide PR, shocked that I’d been on my own out in the no-man’s land between the airport and city. A dinner was arranged for that night to soften me up before my arrival at Kodak HQ the next day. Little did I know that it was also the set-up for an ambush and a little corporate theatre.
Sadly, Nancy told me on the phone, Jeff was not in town until the following day so it would just be me, her and her colleague, David. But would you credit it, half-way through dinner as I was in the middle of an ill-advised disagreement with one of the other diners about her conviction that all British people love the Royal Family and consider Diana a secular saint, Jeff made an “unscheduled” appearance.
I presented the drop-in as a serendipitous moment in the article and I naively thought it was then but it’s obvious that Hayzlett was pulling out the charm. It was also why he chose to tell an amusing story from the previous weekend where he was woken in the night to the sound of a pair of nogoodniks attempting to break into his car, and pursued the perpetrators through the darkened streets of Sioux City, South Dakota sporting only his underwear. How could he possibly have guessed that the juicy anecdote would go straight into my article?
The underwear-clad crime fighting episode perfectly fitted the pen portrait of Hayzlett I was sketching. So did another story he regaled me with: the disastrous naming of a Kodak product and his solution to stop it happening again. A well-reviewed pocket video camera was called the Zi8 and slammed for it by the Boston Globe among others:
“When George Eastman needed a name for his camera company, he came up with something short, crisp and memorable: Kodak. When Kodak needed a name for its new pocket video camera, its marketing geniuses came up with something dreadful: the Zi8.”
My article made a big play of Hayzlett’s idea to crowdsource a better name for the Zi8’s successor, picking the best from Twitter submissions but I pulled my punches when it came to assessing the result. After the alphanumeric grommit of the Zi8, Kodak called the next model “The PlaySport”. It was really not much better, sounding like a South Korean sports car or a brand of cheap lube.
The Kodak Tower was built in 1914. Its archaic frontage was hidden behind scaffolding as we approached it – too heavy-handed a metaphor to dwell on for too long. Entering via the parking garage, we ascended through corridors stuck in the 70s, all brown and grey like a cartoon accountant’s wardrobe, classic photos on the walls trapped behind smudged glass. I was installed in a boardroom on an upper floor, a shiny showroom presenting the company’s future but couldn’t shake the image of the musty corridors below.
I was kept contained. Rather than allowing me to rove around the building, a desperate beauty pageant of executives and engineers was organised as I sat like a precocious potentate, this baby-faced boy in jeans, Converse and a fading corduroy jacket. Each interviewee presented a slightly different skew on the same story: Kodak had been through some tough times but things were on the up. I would love to see the talking points memo that went around before my arrival.
The forced optimism of my time in Kodak HQ was thrown into relief by my visit to the George Eastman House museum. Shown into the basement, a crypt for old cameras, I saw the whole history of Kodak and the industry it helped built laid out on the shelves. The creations of the modern Kodak seemed like cheap products of limited imagination when held up against the beautiful cameras that had come before.
Back in England, swaddled in the duvet, I picked through my notes and built the story of a comeback. It was the one I wanted to believe. In the article, Hayzlett references Jim Collins’ How The Mighty Fall:
“There are six stages of decline for business. But you can go to 5.5 and comeback from it. Apple did it. IBM did it. We’ve done it. We were at stage 5, for sure.”
The company was much closer to stage 6 than he could admit. Four months after the Wired piece went to print, Hayzlett left Kodak for a career as a public speaker and author. In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The Kodak Theatre is now The Dolby Theatre.
With hindsight, the story I wrote wasn’t about a resurrection but the tales a company tells itself when it can’t bear to face the reality. It is about putting too much faith in the power of one man’s personality to turn a ship around – it’s notable how tangential Kodak’s CEO Antonio Perez is in the narrative.
We look at the giants of today’s tech world as if they are permanent landmarks, solid in their multi-million dollar market caps, but there was a time when Kodak dying would have seem utterly inconceivable too. Nostalgia is intoxicating and few of us are immune to its appeal.
