This Company Refused To Eat Its Own Babies. The Results Will Shock You

Imagine for a moment that the Kodak company represents the earth and you are the CEO.

Life is good right now but pretty soon there's going to be a Black Swan event that will rival covid. You are going to be faced with some difficult decisions. Make the right choice and your company will survive. Take the wrong road and it's a death knell for the company, you and thousands of others. The question is, what will you do?

Are you ready for the challenge?

Good. Let's go.

It's the 1980s and Kodak is King. Life is abundant and everything in the garden is rosy. Profits are good and everything is growing exponentially.

It's so good that Kodak even has its own sprawling city in New York, with 200 buildings on a campus spread over 1300 acres in Rochester. Your employees, 145000 of them, are happy, well paid, well fed and they collectively generate 19 billion dollars in annual sales.

Life is peachy for Kodak, its employees, its shareholders and everybody who buys their products and uses their film processing services. No one believes that these giants of industry can fail. To quote a cliche Kodak is just "too big to fail."

But all good fairy tales have a twist in the tail and some turn out not to be good Fairy Tales at all but grim. Which one will Kodak be?

One day, your clever researchers discover something truly amazing. You recognise immediately that this discovery will radically change your business model. It is so incredible and yet terrifying at the same time.

Your researchers have spawned a new baby for your company - revolutionary digital cameras.

Very quickly, you realise that this magnificent child has been cursed by a Wicked Witch and that you are in a perilous situation. It's a great product, but you are not sure how to make money from it. It's so different from traditional film which is so lucrative.

This child has the potential to grow exponentially. Now this is a term that is often misunderstood, so I'd like to use the example given by Calum Chace in his book Surviving AI, to explain it.

Imagine being in a football stadium that has been made waterproof. The referee places a single drop of water in the middle. A minute later, he puts 2 drops. Another minute and he adds 4 drops. At 45 minutes, the stadium is just 7% full of water. But by 49 minutes everyone in the stadium is dead because of the rapid exponential growth in water.

"Exponential Growth is back loaded" Calum Chace

You and the boffins at Kodak must decide whether you should nurse and develop this magnificent child with its unknown and unlimited potential but with no clear money making system. If you do this, it will one day kill off your Golden Goose, the traditional film and developing industry.

What will you do?

Here are your choices:

- Take a chance on an unproven opportunity knowing that if digital cameras take off, they will likely kill off traditional film.

- Do nothing because you don't want to kill off your golden goose, the film processing business, because it's just too lucrative.

Too bad. You made the wrong choice. You buried your head in the sand and made like an ostrich. By the time you pulled it back up, it was too late and your castle was crumbling.

Other digital babies were being born to outsiders and, unlike Kodak, they knew exactly what to do.

They worshipped the new digital cameras. They birthed them with joy and sent them out into the world to multiply exponentially and, as a result, Kodak lost their advantage.

Chaos ensued.

Each year, Kodak lost 20–30% of their revenue. This was before the arrival of smart phones. Once smart phones arrived it was game over for Kodak.

In 2012, they filed for bankruptcy. 

Their sprawling chunk of prime real estate was destroyed or sold off.

They went from annual sales of 19 Billion to just 2 billion and from 145,000 employees to a mere 8000.

In 2013, a new slim humbled Kodak emerged. A shadow of its former self.

They had lost so much and all because they were afraid to take the action they needed to survive.

They should have killed the Golden Goose and looked after their new digital baby, but they were afraid to let the old ways go. They were afraid to lose money, they were afraid to kill off the cash cow. Kodak was afraid to eat its own babies.

Mother Earth has no such qualms, she has no concerns about money she wants to survive and if she has to kill off her babies, that includes you and me, then she will.

So let's stop pretending we are ostriches. It's time to take our head out of the sand and take some positive action.

We are in a climate crisis that is getting exponentially worse and now is the time to stop, rethink and kill off the cash cow babies of the past and bring forth new sustainable babies for the future.

We have to change, we have to evolve and we have to learn how to learn to live with the heat in a sustainable way.

We get to choose our fairy tale - let's not make it grim.

Live Strong, Love & Get A side Hustle.