THE EXPERT’S VIEW | COLUMN
Survival of the Quickest
During most of the 20th
century the small, yellow Kodak film can was
recognisable throughout the
world. If you had a camera then you almost certainly used
Kodak film — in fact a report in the mid-1970s estimated that 90% of all films for cameras were sold by Kodak, a market
dominance few companies even to dare to dream about, let
alone achieve. However, barely 30 years later, Kodak was filing for bankruptcy protection and its stock was worth next to nothing. How did this happen?
The demise of Kodak has become a textbook case study for business schools in how a seemingly dominant company can very quickly go out of business when it fails to respond quickly enough to market trends. Other recent high-profile crashes, for example Nokia, have a lot of similarities with Kodak’s problems but although the causes are generally multiple and complex, there does seem to be one common theme: the failure to change in response to an external threat. This external threat can be from rival competitors (Apple and Samsung in the case of Nokia) or from rival technologies (digital cameras as in the case of Kodak) but it is something, nonetheless, which has to be addressed correctly if it is not to disrupt things completely for the business.
The demise of Kodak has become a textbook case study for business schools in how a seemingly dominant company can very quickly go out of business when it fails to respond quickly enough to market trends.
Of course all businesses respond to numerous external threats all the time so this is nothing new. What is different in the case of the big names like Kodak or Nokia was that their problems stemmed from underestimating the scale of the threat posed to the very foundations of their business; the lack of an appropriate response in a timely manner cost both Kodak and Nokia their market positions and neither company is ever likely to recover their former glory.
It’s easy enough to be a wise sage in hindsight but not everything may seem so evident when you are in the middle of running a successful business — Kodak actually developed its own megapixel digital camera in 1975 but would many senior managers have listened to the tech people telling them to abandon a billion dollar film business and invest in non-film technology? All businesses have to juggle the maintenance of their current USPs with adapting to things coming over the horizon, but it’s how responsive this juggling act is that can often be a company’s saviour; for the likes of Kodak and Nokia, they did not change course quickly enough and were overwhelmed by their external threats.
The raft of 21st century micro technologies affecting many businesses today have one major difference from the pressures which companies have faced in the past: today’s technologies are arriving on the scene
extremely quickly. This means that if companies are to survive in the micro-enabled world, their speed of response also has to be rapid; otherwise they risk being overwhelmed by events or simply out-manoeuvred by competitors. So, much like in the natural world, companies have to keep evolving, assimilating the best features of others to make themselves stronger and fitter. However, unlike in nature, the evolution for micro tech businesses has to occur extremely quickly, otherwise it might just be too late.
NADEEM RIZVI, MANAGING DIRECTOR, LASER MICROMACHINING LTD
21 | commercial micro manufacturing international Vol 7 No.4
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