Courage.

Today's Marketing Cookie is about courageous leadership.

There is a story told by Jeffrey Hayzlett, former CMO of Kodak, which has rattled around in my brain since I first heard him tell it at the Social Media Strategies Summit in Boston. Back in 1975, one of Kodak's engineers, Steve Sasson, created the first digital camera, which took photos with 10,000 pixels. The company invested in developing the technology, secured several patents, and then, as Hayzlett says, "they put it back into a closet." They locked their brilliance away and hoped no one would ever think about cameras that can take pictures without film.

Being so focused on film, I can see how Kodak might have been too terrified to derail the good thing they had going, but what if Kodak had the courage to unveil its new digital camera in 1975? It isn't easy for me to look back that far because I was just three years old at the time. However, I do know that if Kodak had offered a "filmless" digital camera in the 70s, everyone would still have had to go get their pictures printed somewhere.

Home computers weren't very good for viewing photos and printing with an inkjet until Windows 3.1 was released in 1992 with a 16-bit operating system. As usual, if you had an Apple, you were ahead of everyone else and could use the first version of Photoshop in 1989. That is a full fourteen years after Kodak had developed the first digital camera. Fourteen years is more than enough time for Kodak to own the digital imaging space and develop the storage, viewing, and printing technology that would go along with their new cameras.

Kodak was a leader. They knew where the world would be headed before any of us could have imagined it, but they were too afraid to lead the way. They saw a vision of the future but refused to print a picture of it. They loved their outdated world of film and refused to look at the negatives. If only they had embraced their own innovations, Kodak would continue to be a household name, but that position is now open for some other courageous leader. Hopefully, they will do as today's fortune says, "A successful leader knows the way, shows the way, and goes the way."