Why looking out for ‘weak signals’ can help European companies stay in business |
A Kodak engineer built the first digital camera in 1975. The bosses said: “That’s cute, but don’t tell anyone”. On inventing a filmless device that would revolutionise photography, the reaction inside the company, was more or less that it was a charming little toy and that they should probably keep quiet about it.
Kodak had owned photographic film for most of the 20th century. That was the problem. They were so attached to what had made them rich that they could not see their own invention for what it was. Bankruptcy followed in 2012.
I start my book “Seven Building Blocks of a Successful Corporate Restructuring” with that story on purpose. After three decades running corporate restructurings as a CFO and then a CEO, I am convinced this simple anecdote explains almost everything about why companies die. Not the bad ones. The good ones. The information was sitting there.
The innovation was invented right there in their own laboratory. What was missing was the nerve to act on a signal while it was still quiet. Because that is the whole game. The best crisis management is making sure the crisis never shows up. And that depends on something the strategist Igor Ansoff named decades ago: weak signals. Early, messy, hard-to-measure hints that something is shifting, long before it lands on the balance sheet.
Why does this matter right........