Word: carp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Carp's clarity of purpose and Perez's management seem to have engendered some enthusiasm, but this is epic work. Very few companies of this size, faced with a seismic shift in technology, emerge intact. When his team gets weary, says Pierre Schaeffer, director of business strategy for Kodak's digital and film imaging business, he boosts their spirits with a reminder. "We're involved in a really exciting transition," he tells them. "Regardless of the outcome--and hopefully, we're playing it for the best--the moments we're going through now will be making the textbooks...
...from a very rich, very successful company, [Kodak's management] was sloppier than we wanted it to be," says Perez. "We were looking for accountability. We organized the company so it was very clear who was responsible for what." Perez also had to find the right people to--as Carp puts it--"teach" Kodak about the brave new world it was entering. Many have come from outside--including seven of the 10 most recently appointed senior managers--though Carp himself joined Kodak as a statistical analyst 34 years...
...when the little yellow box reached the customer; today such cycle times are half as long. So far, says Brown, KOS has saved "tens of millions of dollars worth of capital and hundreds of millions in inventory" and has contributed "hundreds of millions in productivity." Impressed by such stats, Carp asked Brown in late 2003 to inject KOS into Kodak's entire corporate plumbing, from human-resources management to product development to the products themselves. "It's an entire management philosophy," says Brown...
...helping put some of the shine back on Kodak's prospects, but its hometown, Rochester, is hurting. It has borne the brunt of the company's downsizing, as Carp has sought cheaper manufacturing abroad. Most of the company's digital cameras are now made in China. In Rochester's northwest, the 2,200-acre Kodak Park, once the hub of Kodak's industrial operations, is full of vacant lots and demolished buildings. At its peak in 1982, the firm--once called the Great Yellow Father--employed more than 60,000 people in the city and had long been famous...
...Carp says Kodak's workers understand the pressure the company is under. But that does not necessarily mitigate their misery. The tyranny of micromanaged productivity, says a veteran employee, hangs like a cloud over Kodak's rank and file: "You're accountable for everything you do, or don't do, all the time. You're worried that you may not have a job from one week to the next, and you don't know whether, if you come up with a good idea to save the company money, you could cost people their jobs...