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Inside Kodak, U.S.A.
The "Koda Vista" is not a Kodak marketing slogan for taking saturated snapshots of dewy sunrises. Rather, it's a neighborhood that abuts the vast industrial park once known as Kodak Park, where tony homes were sold to middle class families seeking a view of their workplace. Because, according to Monroe County historian and professor, Carolyn Vacca, working for Kodak was never just a job.
When you worked for Kodak, you gained a whole social milieu along with a job. It was a very different approach to working.
Dr. Vacca pointed out the Koda Vista neighborhood as we drove around the 1,200-acre complex, with its well-kept homes and gracious porches.
According to Dr. Vacca, Kodak Park started out as only 20 or 21 acres in the 1890s, but George Eastman had the foresight to build it far enough away from downtown Rochester that he could easily expand his manufacturing facilities. Aside from the factories, the park includes 17 miles of railroads, 30 miles of roads, and is a self-sustaining little world with its own sewage treatment, power generation and water processing. Back in its heyday, Eastman ensured that there was little reason to ever leave work.
He had his own fire department; he had his own recreation division. They had one of the premiere baseball leagues in the nation, with some of the best amateur baseball players, and he had a theatre.
At its peak in 1982, Kodak employed 60,400 people in the greater Rochester area. And often it wasn't just a single member of a family who worked there, but cousins, brothers, sisters, children -- Kodak employed entire families. And it was a job for life. According to retired photographer and Kodak-lifer, Bob Harris (inventor of the Harris Shutter), Kodak was a marvelous place to work. His social life centered around the company and friends he made there, and he noted that while Eastman was resolutely anti-union, the company's employees didn't need a union, they were so well taken care of by.
The word was around, don't bother looking at all those manuals, just say "yes" to everything that Kodak offers you in terms of health care. The cost was minimal, [for] health care and all those kinds of things.
Today, Bob Harris worries about his Kodak health care and his generous pension. Both are in jeopardy as Kodak struggles to stay afloat.
And Kodak Park has been rebranded as the Eastman Business Park to attract new, and hopefully profitable, corporate tenants. (Looking to start a secret lab/empire? For a reasonable price, you too can lease part of The Hawkeye Facility, infamous for manufacturing the GAMBIT camera, used for Cold War "reconnaissance" missions.)
And while Eastman Business Park has attracted 30-plus companies, it is also known locally for the impressive implosions it has done of some its facilities, in order to keep costs down. But whether the Kodak moment is shrinking or disappearing is still to be seen.
For more on Kodak's past and present, check out today's Marketplace: Decline of Kodak offers lessons for U.S. business
As a serious amateur photographer and a small business person, I really enjoyed the segment on Inside Kodak, U.S.A. I totally agree that Kodak missed the boat when it ceded the camera business to the Japanese and Germans. However, that was just one, perhaps the most serious, of seminal events that has led Kodak into the situation it faces today.
Kodak came out with its Instamatic camera line as a means of making photography very easy and accessible to everyone. All one had to do is put the film cassette into the camera, point, and shoot. Voila, a memory on film. However that coincided with its forsaking the more serious photographers, from hobbyists to professionals in both making cameras and film. Kodak's Kodachrome and Ektachrome films were the once the gold standard for film. However, that led Kodak to take the market for granted. Meanwhile Fuji innovated with super saturated and finer grain films in much the same way the foreign automobile industry did to the American automobile industry. Then there was the debacle of the 1984 Olympics where Fuji became "the official film" because Kodak didn't take the competition seriously, and Fuji out hustled Kodak.
These mistakes cost Kodak dearly. The 1984 Olympics gave Fuji incredible publicity and probably got a lot more people to try its film than otherwise would have. For many the difference was obvious, but if nothing else it gave Fuji the leg up it needed to take Kodak on head to head. That was something Agfa never could do. Many of the more serious photographers began using Fuji film because is was qualitatively better than what once was their gold standard for them. So Kodak had to play catch-up, which is a position it should never had had to be in.
Lastly, Kodak appears to have had a similar mentality to other U. S. industries that began in the same era of hubris and not paying attention to the market and their customers. I was on a focus group in 1995 with other more serious photographers asked about Kodak films. It was clear the facilitators did not want to hear anything but praises for Kodak, which wasn't the consensus of several members of the panel. In retrospect, they wanted to listen the photographer who uses the signs in Disneyland pointing out where to take a photo from. It is a shame. What a great company that did so much in terms of preserving people's memories, for its employees, and in philanthropy.
Thank you for airing that segment.
Kodak, DEC and all the minicomputer companies, now H-P - I could name dozens more. Many of the icons of tech business when I started in the mid-60s have gone down the tubes. Most seemed to fail as the vision of their founders faded and management was replaced by MBAs who only saw the company as spreadsheets, balance sheets and P&Ls, not products and technologies, employees and customers.
As a tech entrepreneur, I've watched many of them come and go.Nothing has really changed today except the time scale has compressed - sometimes the life cycle of Internet companies is only a couple of years before they flame out. But as soon as the founder's vision fades and the spreadsheet jockeys move in, they're doomed!
..a great story on what was once an American icon. How unfortunate that the powers within saw themselves in the film business and not the imaging business until it was too late. As a son of a lifetime employee, I worked at Kodak Park while I was in college and to this day remember how dedicated and loyal Kodak's employees were. The demise of Eastman Kodak is truely a management lesson in how a lack of vision can ruin even the greatest corporations of America.
I, too, am the child of a Kodak retiree; I spent a summer at the long-shuttered Color Print & Processing plant in Kodak Park. Your story was heatbreaking for me to hear. To my father, Kodak was the epitome of corporate stability. I even remember him discouraging me from working for a law firm because it might be a "fly-by-night" operation.
By the time my father, a research physicist, retired in the 1980s, he was having frequent conflicts with management. His contributions, as well as R&D in general, seem to have been disparaged by management. His lengthy and productive career ended in constant frustration and disappointment, just waiting for the right buy-out offer to come around. The company's rejection of research and innovation was a betrayal of George Eastman and his embrace of new technologies as they were developed.
Everyone in Rochester relied on "The Big Yellow Mother" as the bedrock of the local economy. Kodak's contributions were crucial to the development of charitable institutions in the community, including the Eastman Dental Center and distinguished Eastman School of Music. My fear it that Kodak's misguided management will pull the entire community down, along with the company.
