That's How I Rollerboard…

This is a Kodak Brownie No 2A, Model B that my great-grandmother purchased sometime around 1920. It still works. I was able to find some 116 film for it a few years ago and took this timeless picture of the Space Needle.

Much has already been written about the demise of Kodak and their likely impending bankruptcy filing. Many focus on the “cash cow” of film and how while Kodak invented many of the critical elements of digital photography they never capitalized as they should have. These articles are missing a critical piece to understand the long, slow death of an American great. Kodak had started to abandon and alienate even film customers as early as 1984.

What happened in 1984? Kodak eliminated the dated 116 and 616 formats used by my Brownie above. But that is not the real reason. Truth is that Kodak was starting to feel the heat of true competition from Japanese rivals like Fujiflim. How it responded is why the company failed. The company had twice been slapped with antitrust consent decrees. Kodak litigated its way to having those decrees removed in 1994. Later, Kodak attempted to inflame US-Japanese trade tensions with filing a Section 301 petition against Fujifilm. At the time, then CEO George Fisher had had success successfully used legal and political leverage to alter market behavior in Japan when he ran Motorola. The trade dispute was pre-emptive. Kodak’s never filed its concerned with the Japanese government before filing this petition. Amazingly the company disregarded that at the time it was being outspent in the Japanese market by a ratio of 10:1 while charging more for its own film. Somehow, Kodak was still able to have about 10% of the Japanese market. While the company sought to litigate in the US and Japanese markets, it failed to keep pace with innovation in film. Two examples where Kodak did not live up to its comparative advantage. First is the one-time use camera. Fujifilm introduced the one-time use camera that thrilled the Japanese public. A camera could now be purchased cheaply just about anywhere from a department store, drug store or kiosk. The product became an immediate hit. Kodak did not respond to this new product development for two years. Second is high resolution ISO 400 film, a technical breakthrough that addressed the image quality issues. It was a huge success. Again, Kodak did not respond to this new product development for two years.

Kodak consistently choose to cede two years of first-mover advantage to Fujifilm. This is not the Kodak you will read about over the coming days. This great American company lost its way long before the advent of the digital photography. Kodak lost the innovation edge and resorted to attacking the nature of free enterprise to protect its markets. As a result, it lost in the long-term.

That should be a lesson worth remembering today.

Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace 

by Gordon MacKenzie
Summary: Useful anecdotes about creativity and the creative process in a corporate setting.

Why I liked it: Great stories and vignettes. Enjoyed the pyramids and plum tree organizational structure idea.

First ballgame, July 7, 1974
Braves vs. Cubs at Wrigley Field

Hank Aaron hits number 725 off a young Rick Reuschel. It would be his last home run at Wrigley. My father’s good friend, Dave Norman, from Atlanta who went with us bought me that Braves cap which I kept on my head every day for the next three years.

Later when my father and I stated our HOF baseball collection, Hank Aaron graciously signed two balls for me. One went to my brother’s friend who was named for the Hammer.

Incredible career filled with grace and dignity.
Godspeed.

Godspeed Eddie Van Halen.

Recommend Van Halen Rising by Greg Renoff. A engaging read about the band, how they came together and took over rock and roll. Appreciated the entrepreneurial vision through the ups and downs to stardom.

I never did get to see Van Halen in their prime (pre-Hagar). Since I grew up in Chicago, we will always have that summer of 1984, Jump and the Chicago Cubs. I did get a chance to catch David Lee Roth at the House of Blues in Hollywood for a New Year’s Eve bash in 2003. No doubt DLR is a party. Great time and great show. I still truly think that “Panama” should be the national anthem of Panama.

Fast Company: Business Advice From Van Halen

This championship did not happen overnight. More than two years and hundreds of thousands of yards in the pool were needed to climb to that level. Lessons learned during this time have helped me to this day, primarily vision and resilience.

I have photo of this team tucked away in my office to remind myself of this team, what we accomplished, and what is possible. When you believe there are no limits and when you push past them, you will be a champion. Honored to be a part of Fenwick’s tradition of excellence.

Original post from 2011 below.

To date, gCRM has not happened. The Google G Suite Marketplace has a number of CRM players which are all capable. Some observations.

Compliance

First SAS70 and now SASE 16 and whatever is next have become more important to the enterprise. Not just in the dataroom but down to the application level. This is also seen in other verticals such as healthcare with HIPPA and financial with PCI DSS

Cloud Wars

Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure grab most of the headlines. Enterprise clouds (IBM, etc.) are real and growing. Still the market is addressing computing power and not next level applications.

Market consolidation of LinkedIn, Jigsaw, Gist, etc.

Key sales tools nearly a decade ago are now no longer independent. LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft. Jigsaw was acquired by Salesforce. Gist was acquired by Blackberry.

Email still key.

As a outreach tool email has become more important. Less time on the phone for cold calling. More rapport development through correspondence. Still hold by this thought that gCRM and Google entrance into the enterprise market will happen eventually.

Original 2011 post: Will Google enter the enterprise applications market?
It is a matter of time.

The recent GM announcement signal that the company is almost there. For many enterprises, the first business process to be put into place is CRM. Google will enter the enterprise application space in CRM to better leverage existing services.

Considerations:
1) gMail is becoming widely used in the enterprise. The cloud is proving privacy can work.

2) Email is the de facto CRM application. Sales, service and marketing all rely on email to connect with customers.

3) Google has great corporate data research with finance.google.com.

4) Searching for anyone (customer, prospect, etc.) involves a Google search in addition to searches in other services like LinkedIn, Jigsaw and Gist.

5) Alerts could be configured to prompt action based on search results.

6) Sales, service and marketing are becoming more about individual and less about the company due to social tools.

7) Microsoft and, Google partner, Salesforce are battling it out for cloud-based CRM. gCRM would be less robust, but give companies a reason to move from Office to Google Docs.

So what does Google need that they do not have today? I see 3 big pieces.

One, process across marketing, sales and service:
Process is a must. Organizations turn to a CRM system to give them best practices and process flows that they do not have. In my experience, all CRM clients are looking to improve process through technology — not the other way around. Process for marketing, sales and services organizations are very different, but all have a common thread of measuring the cost per call (also called contact, customer, or incident).

Two, sales pipeline and forecasting
Sales pipeline and forecasting is an extension of process, but it needs to be more flexible and dead simple to configure. Why? Because the average VP of Sales is on the job just 19 months. Every new VP of Sales will want to be measured by his or her own agreed to metrics, not by the old metrics that got the last VP ousted. This is very common and will be so for the foreseeable future.

Three, integration to back-end systems. Integration with back-end systems is one of the constants in CRM. This can be any system from ACD call routers to an ERP system. In the 30 or so CRM deployments I have been involved with, integration has played an critical part every time.

If Google will address these three missing pieces in a way that is robust yet flexible, gCRM will be a winner.

Congratulations to Seattle Mariners legend Edgar Martinez. Enshrined in Cooperstown at the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday, July 21, 2019. In many ways this is historic. Fans took to social media for several years to convince the Baseball Writers Association of America that Edgar was one of the game’s all-time greats.

It was a lot of fun to be a part of that effort.

Truly a privilege to be involved with the Burke Center for Entrepreneurship at University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. Hit PLAY for a fun half hour discussion.

Part hobby, part side hustle. Converting vintage Schwinn bicycles into single speed and fixed gear bicycles. Rolling history.