Inherent in this statement is that the driving motivation of typical CEOs is personal financial greed. I've known my share of egotistical CEOs, and of CEOs who don't know their industry and don't want to listen to their experienced people. I've known CEOs and CEO wannabes whose main qualification is their HBS degree or their golf partner. I've even watched one of my previous bosses, who owned his company, go straight to prison. But I've known very few who would throw their company under the bus just to sweeten their compensation package. They all wanted the company to succeed, seeing that as the path to achieve their personal goals. Even the one who went to prison was caught paying off a bureaucrat (who spend even longer in prison) in order to improve his chances of winning projects.
But we weren't talking about CEOs in general. We were talking about Perez, and Kodak, and sheet film. Let's assume, just on a lark, that Perez is trying to find a path forward for Kodak that successfully takes them out of bankruptcy into long-term sustainability. Will maintaining consumer film production do that? I don't see how. Sure, stopping that production might undermine any chance of getting a return on investment on the development of newer films such as Ektar, but ROI for one tiny sliver of the business footprint might not be important when cash flow is in crisis. Selling off the branding might be the only strategy for survival.
Selling their intellectual property does seem like selling blood, and they are anemic as it is. But that's not the issue that affects us directly.
And how is selling a piece of a company to a competitor so that the competitor can throw it away and remove the competition a useful description here? There is no competitor for color negative sheet film in the U.S. Fuji has abandoned the U.S. market altogether. If they bought the consumer film division, shut it down, and imported their own stuff now that it was free of competition, that might actually be the best thing for us. And it may be our only hope of having available color sheet film.
What I do see is Kodak trying to keep consumer film in production...somehow. If the company was driven solely by the motives you ascribe, they'd have dumped it altogether long ago. Nobody among their stockholders, big or small, would have shed a single tear.
Rick "who has known quite a few CEOs" Denney
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