Changing Focus

For most of this century, managing Kodak required little more than making sure the film-making machines ran day and night. But years of easy success fostered complacency, bureaucracy, and overspending. By the late eighties, Kodak had lost its edge. Threatened by Fuji and other competitors and plagued with debt from ill-conceived diversification attempts, it became one of the first major U.S. businesses to seek salvation through downsizing, slashing thousands of jobs. Later, a new CEO, George Fisher, was wooed from Motorola with a huge, controversial contract to lead a last-ditch turn-around effort. Swasy vividly recounts Kodak's roller-coaster history - including a string of failed product launches and management blunders (such as the time a Kodak CEO fell asleep during a meeting with Bill Gates). And she surveys Kodak's "morning after" - the laid-off workers in Kodak's devastated hometown of Rochester, New York, who are learning never to trust any corporate parent ever again; the brilliant would-be white knight Fisher, trying to revolutionize Kodak from within; the current managers and assembly-line workers scrambling to find new ways to improve Kodak's products and profits - and to save their own jobs. There are encouraging signs: quality is up, and a generation of attractive new products is in the wings. But the crucial question remains: Can the new, leaner Kodak regain the trust and marshal the creativity of its people for the grueling competitive battles that lie ahead? Kodak's is a story in progress, one that is emblematic of American industry today: back from the brink, having shaken off its old complacency, but still groping to find a formula for success. Changing Focus tells an important story with implications for thousands of other companies engaged in similar struggles in today's intensely competitive business arena.