Just remember… things aren’t always as they may appear. I’ve had a lot of surprises along the way.
This morning a rather insignificant example… I was looking forward to walking to Kodak, Tennessee. I found Kodak on my maps app last night, and figured I needed to go there, walk the old Kodak road to town from east of Knoxville. Before going, I also figured I should read up on the history, thinking it would be a spectacular “company town”. So I went to Wiki… ready for this?
Surprise surprise… whodathunk? So much for the Old Kodak Highway.. bagged that in favor of the much prettier Asheville Hwy, which turns out is just a section my old friend US-70, buddies since Texarkana, five weeks ago!
You may ask why the interest in Kodak? I worked for the Eastman Kodak Company for a handful of years back in the early years of this century. Had someone told me, at anytime before the age of 40, that I would be working for Kodak, I would have called them crazy. Never say never right? I never expected I’d be working for a huge corporation - wasn’t in my supposed plans.
I got to Kodak in a roundabout way. I had been in the US for about three years at the time, and I had already worked for three different companies. The first was sold to the second, which I didn’t agree with. The third was a relatively small but very cool film digitizer and computed radiography (CR) company in California. I loved all I was doing there, and had made some significant inroads in the radiation therapy imaging space. I had just received a very significant order from MD Anderson in Houston, and was actually installing a CR unit at their facility, when we got the fateful message… mandatory conference call at 3:00 today. Oh crap. The news was simple… Kodak announced it was buying Lumisys, the little California company.
By that point, I was getting a little tired of being bought and sold, so this big company had that going for them - I mean, who is going to buy Kodak right? During the first conversation with my new Kodak boss, he assured me that the company was very paternalistic, took very good care of their employees and their families, was a relatively stable company with about US$25B in yearly revenue. I would be coming into a relatively small business segment which felt like its own small entity, I went for it, and officially became a Kodak employee in June, 2001.
The first few months were of constant travel, mostly by air. As the CR specialist in our group, I did a lot of training and supporting our team. By August, I was getting pretty tired of the air travel, and my peers were trained and well underway, so my boss and I agreed to curtail my travel and focus locally. And then 9/11 happened.
Nine eleven - we all have our own stories of that day, and that’s a whole other book. But 9/11 affected Kodak in a serious and unforeseen way. People stopped travelling. Back then, people still bought film, Kodachrome film, to record their vacations and travels. After the awful day, film sales, the bulk of Kodak’s revenue, fell dramatically. Upper management panicked, and for the first time in years, there was a major downsizing, or right-sizing, or mass firing, whatever you want to call it, but about 7,000 people lost their jobs at Kodak. When I heard the rumor a few days before, I was sure I’d be one of the unfortunate, having only been there officially for three months.
Instead, I received an offer to be a medical film specialist. Given the situation in the country at the time, I accepted the position, even though I didn’t even know how to spell f-i-l-m, let alone explain how it worked! I had been in digital medical imaging for several years and our main objective was to replace film. How was I going to explain that? For a couple weeks, all I did was learn as much as I could about developers and fixers, silver halide and glutaralehyde, and how they all work in a film processor. I was anything but a specialist, and kind of questioned what in the world Kodak was thinking about. It certainly wasn’t the last time.
Fortunately, my stint as a film expert was short lived. About three weeks after it began, there was an opportunity to become an Account Executive, which although not my first preference, was a good position. A couple of years later I became a CR specialist, a position I loved, primarily because of whom I worked. Am looking forward to seeing my then boss this week - never have I worked for anyone better. Things were great, until the mandatory conference call! Eastman Kodak announced it was selling the Health Imaging Division to a private equity firm. At that point, I really should have just hired myself out to anyone wanting to sell their company (or a division thereof)… I had a 100% success rate.
But I have followed Kodak over the years, and it saddens me, for it was once one of the most important companies in the world, and for many years, had the world’s most recognized brand. They invented cool stuff, very important scientific stuff, and they did great things for mankind, in the form of photographic memories, x-rays of disease, philanthropy. I saw the last couple of good years at Kodak, and have watched as it has become a mere shadow of what it once was. When I joined, my employment package included stock options, at about $80 per share. Today it is worth $2.52. A lot of people think Kodak will eventually be forgotten, but I do hope they’re wrong. I hope to see the Kodak company in every business book, in the chapters about how not to do things. Kodak had some of the best engineers and inventors, very smart innovative people among the ranks. But top level management, and the board that governed it, missed so many opportunities to embrace digital imaging, in favor of film profits, which were enormous. When film sales and margins dropped, it took them forever to regroup and finally use the technologies Kodak invented, such as the CCD chips that were in most every early digital camera, and Kodak didn’t even have one on the market. It had become way too top-heavy, unsustainable, but remained that way for way too many expensive years, which eventually led to a bankruptcy filing in 2012. It’s still around, I wish everyone there well, and hope they can bring it back to their glorious splendor. Fortunately, today I am on this walk, and frankly, haven’t thought about Kodak for several weeks, until this morning, thanks to Mr. Underwood and his little ‘ol town with the catchy name!
So back to the walk… loving eastern Tennessee. Today was one of the best walks so far, albeit different from the rest. First of all, it was 72 degrees! Perfect, little breeze full of post-rain smells from a good pour last night. I wore long socks and pants. It felt different, it was Fall today, finally. I’m not going to say anything about it being here to stay, but love not having to deal with the heat or running out of water when the nearest store is 15 miles away! And I have a new set of challenges now; keeping my backpack dry (it sprinkled a while today), keeping myself dry, Listened to the weather guys, said there was supposed to be hard rain behind the cold front. Didn’t happen, so I ventured off. I typically don’t pay much attention to the weather, unless I’m going sailing or camping, but I think I might start again, at least for a couple more months! Internal weather is at peace, calm. warm and happy.
