柯达王朝覆灭的迷思

    当时，这种思维方式颇为流行。比如，1979年，索尼公司（Sony）利用微型化技术创造了风靡一时的产品——随身听。丰田汽车（Toyota）充分利用其在汽车喷漆和密封方面的优势，生产出的汽车质量远远高于底特律的产品。十年后，另一位英雄式人物CK•普哈拉在《哈佛商业评论》（Harvard Business Review）企业核心能力版块发表了一篇开创性的论文，阐述了这种趋势。事实上，战略性的问题在于：如果我们在现有领域已经做得很好，还有什么新领域可以进一步促进我们的发展？

    对于柯达公司而言，继续关注化学、光学和胶片成像也是顺理成章的事。在二十世纪九十年代中期之前，这种策略使柯达始终保持了健康发展的态势。但如同我们大多数人一样，公司的问题在于，虽然新业务经过了精心推论和设计，但与公司的基础业务相比，它仍然显得薄弱。也正是基于这些原因，辉瑞公司（Pfizer）才会如此钟爱立普妥（及其风靡一时的药品模式）；思科公司（Cisco）才会始终坚持路由器业务；这也是为何IBM很难抛售ThinkPad（不过，最终IBM还是将ThinkPad出售。而与之形成鲜明对比的是惠普公司（HP），它本应放弃笔记本业务）。而苏打水和薯片大受欢迎，因此，百事可乐公司（PepsiCo）仍很难决定改售健康食品。所以，我们常常希望创新不必那么大费周章——我们只需对熟悉的事物稍作调整即可，而无需尝试与顾客的生活方式紧密相关的事情。

    对于柯达而言，数码摄影业务不仅增长缓慢，而且还严重影响了公司最大的利润来源：照片和电影胶片。数码摄影业务只是个微不足道的副业，它的发展速度显然无法弥补胶片收入的损失，所以核心业务部门的人员没有能力也不愿意进行大力阔斧地变革。

    其实，几乎所有大型企业的创新都存在同样的苦恼。每周至少有一名公司高管来找我抱怨，称他们公司的新型增长型业务非常有趣，长远看来也可能非常重要，但是他们就是“不愿意作出重大改变”。说白了，就是“新的业务尽管炙手可热，但在眼下的这个季度里还无法产生足够的收入，所以，我这个高管也就没法指望拿到更高奖金了。”所以说，新项目缺乏的不是发展的潜力，而是资金投入。

    那么，柯达公司本该做出怎样的反应呢？或者更准确地说，一家公司应该如何避免这一陷阱呢？现在有一种新型的战略思维方式非常流行，称为整合。如果利用得当，公司领导就能深刻地理解新生态系统中，公司、产品、系统与服务之间的相互依赖性。这种思维方式推翻了有关供应链和垂直整合的旧有观点，激发出类似平台这样的新观点，将创新的成本与风险从自己的资产负债表转移出来，转嫁到他人身上。它使用直观的技术提示新机遇出现的领域——通常是整合新技术能力与新的客户行为。

    This way of thinking was fashionable at that moment. In 1979, Sony (SNE) used its skills in miniaturization to create the craze du jour, the Walkman. Toyota (TM) used its strengths in paints and seals to make better quality cars than Detroit was making. A decade later, one of my heroes, CK Prahalad, published his seminal paper on The Core Competence of the Corporation in Harvard Business Review to explain the fashion. In effect, the strategic question was: given what we are already good at, what new things can we do that will drive growth?

    For Kodak a continued focus on chemistry, optics and depositions on film made perfect sense. And it made it a healthy company through the mid-1990s. But what it missed, what most of us chronically miss, was that the new businesses, however soundly reasoned and engineered, were dinky, especially viewed in comparison to their base business. This is why Pfizer (PFE) loves Lipitor (and the blockbuster drug model); why Cisco (CSCO) loves routers; and why it was hard for IBM (IBM) to sell off the ThinkPad (though it did so, in sharp contrast with HP (HPQ), which should have). And it's why PepsiCo (PEP) has found it so hard to sell healthy snacks, when soda and potato chips are so very popular. So often we want innovation to be easy -- allowing us only to have to tweak the familiar instead of trying to do something more deeply connected to how customers live their lives now.

    In Kodak's case, the digital photography field not only was slow growing but it actively undermined their largest source of profits: photo and motion picture films. The tiny sideline businesses simply could not scale at a rate that might make up for the loss of film revenues, so those inside the core business were unable or unwilling to do what it took to foster drastic transformation.

    This exact phenomenon plagues innovation in nearly every large firm. At least once a week, top executives tell me that new growth businesses in their firms are intriguing and potentially important, but they simply "don't move the needle." Said in plain American: "The hot new thing simply cannot produce enough revenues this quarter to improve my bonus as a senior executive." So those projects are starved of resources instead of nurtured.

    So what should Kodak have done? More to the point, what should you do to avoid this trap? Well, there is a new form of strategic thinking coming into fashion right now, called Convergences. Used well, it gives leaders a deeper sense of the interdependencies that connect firms, products, systems, and services in new ecosystems. It challenges the older notions of supply chains and vertical integration to get at newer ideas such as platforms, which move the cost and risk of innovating off your balance sheet and onto others'. It uses visualization techniques to reveal where new opportunity hotspots are emerging -- typically the confluence of new technological capabilities and new customer behaviors.