On Friday in my post Decline of the traditional IT department George O’Connor
had quoted Lewis Platt – then CEO of HP – from Fortune in 1994 saying "We have to be willing to cannibalize what we're doing today in order to ensure our leadership in the future. It's counter to human nature, but you have to kill your business while it is still working. Or as they say in Silicon Valley, it's better to eat your lunch before someone else eats it for you.”
I have used the “To be reborn, first you have to die” maxim on a number of occasions. Eg in my homage Happy Centenary IBM. I was reminded of this, yet again, when I read the sad but probably inevitable news that Kodak was on the verge of applying for Chapter 11. Platt was definitely not referring to Kodak back in 1994. Back then Kodak was flying high – indeed even ‘Early adopter Holway’ still had only a 35mm SLR. It wasn’t as if Kodak didn’t know what might happen. They are widely acknowledged as the inventors of digital photography back in the 1970s.
This ‘how do you kill off your business whilst it is still working?’ conundrum affects many more businesses today. Microsoft is perhaps today’s most high profile example of a company still wrestling with that question. Chris Roebuck, a professor at the Cass Business school, was quoted in The Mail on Sunday today saying “The problem with sitting on a dominant market position is that you may continue to deliver what the market has ceased to demand and you end up behind the curve”.
Hard as it is, ‘die and be reborn’ can be achieved. Apple is a pretty good example as is IBM.