Do You Wonder Why Perennially Successful Kodak Eventually Swirled Itself into Bankruptcy’s Toilet? — Ineradicably Entrenched Bureaucratic Stupidity — These Two Brilliantly Insightful Anecdotes from Mike Johnston and Hugh Crawford Imply a Larger Parable about the United States

© 2012 Peter Free

 

20 January 2012

 

Parables in disguise

 

Photographer-philosophers Mike Johnston and Hugh Crawford summed Kodak’s “failure to think” with two very short and superbly revealing stories about Kodak’s cultural self-imprisonment.

 

The genius of insightfully accurate story-telling does not get any better than this.

 

 

Citation

 

 

Mike Johnston, Priceless Memories, The Online Photographer (20 January 2012) (quoting himself and Hugh Crawford regarding frustrating customer experiences with Kodak)

  

Sheer delight

 

Please click on the above link.

 

You will be delighted at the instructive nature of both stories, unless your soul is irremediably dead.

 

 

Blindness and self-destructive stupidity go hand in hand

 

Priceless Memories’ less than obvious lesson for the United States is about the danger of intertwining stupidity and blindness in regard to defining the national “mission.”

 

The vignettes' message is not about free markets and innovation.  It is about cultural blindness, complacence, and a failure to aggressively plan and hold onto what is one’s own.

 

Kodak eventually forgot why it was here.  Just like the United States today forgets that it was arguably founded to better the lives of all Americans (as then prejudicially defined), not just a tiny portion its outsourcing top.

 

 

A proposition about the importance of “mission”

 

When we’re confused about our mission, we become flounderingly lost in its execution.

 

 

The moral? — The Kodak anecdotes serve as a teaching tool regarding the danger of continuing on in our mission-lost American condition

 

I doubt that most people will see this.  And certainly not our leaders.

 

A pity.

 

Subtle parables really do have the power to teach.  If we let them.