Interview with Kodak CMO Jeff Hayzlett

by Adam Burns

Here are some excerpts from my video interview with Jeff Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of Kodak:

1. Are you a big believer then in this leadership idea of good leaders ask good questions?

Absolutely. I think good leaders, more than anything, listen. I think that's the most attribute to being a leader. Asking questions is one thing and asking the right questions is good, but to listen, to really hear what the real answers are, I think, are real key, because they're usually buried in there somewhere, so you have to listen very carefully. I think that's that best thing a leader can do.


2. Having an outsider's perspective and a very "can do" attitude, I've read and seen quite a few interviews with you previously. You've also very much entrenched yourself in the Kodak Company law. You know the history of the product. How do you balance those two tensions within yourself? How do you make sure that keep your outsider's perspective, plus being the company man?

When you say "being the company man or company person," it's more about I know the core tenants of the brand and the core tenants of what George Eastman started to do. So when I first came to the company, and I was already a big fan before, but when I came to the company, I read everything I could get my hands on. I read his biography. It was one of the most important documents and I got a sense if who he was and how he really made things very simple.

I thought, "If we can carry that forward, wouldn't it be a great thing? How can we bring those things that were so tantamount to what he thought the company should be, like push one button and we do the rest?" That translated itself into the EasyShare sub-brand, in terms of making an easy share. So we wanted to do the same thing with our printers, our cameras and our commercial print products. We make them so easy that anyone can really operate them or make them so easy that we make ourselves so easy to do business with.

So that's a big part of what we have to do, at the same time, challenge that. So ask the product teams, "How are we making this simple? How are we getting this easier for the customer? How are we eliminating the filters when we start talking to our customers? Why can't we get on Twitter? Why can't we get online? Why can't we design products more directly with our customers?" Those are the kind of questions, but, yet, keeping the core things that are important to our value, as a brand, at the forefront? I think that's important to do.


3. Absolutely. That "push one button," is almost perfect for today, isn't it?

It's brilliant. This guy, George Eastman is brilliant. He had some personal issues, if you get to know who he was as a man, but he was truly almost a savant, in terms of the way he did it. He wrote his own ad copy. He designed the business. He had major problems when he first launched where he put out photographic plates and they went bad. You know what he did? He replaced them all. That's what somebody who is a good business leader does. So how can you bring that same sense of core of your beliefs all the way through the organization? That's really what we try to do.

We put together a program very early on when I joined the company, called "FAST," which stood for focus, accountability, simplicity and trust, which really means fast or speed. So even if we screwed up, if that's all we got out of it, was we went faster, and even if we screwed up, we did it faster. That was kind of our joke, internally, because we pushed all these people together and all these companies together when we first started doing the turnaround and the transformation, and things weren't working the way they should have been. So what we said was, "Let's do it fast. What is it I do inside the company, my accountability? What are the promises that I must keep for the company?" My five promises I delivered to my boss, the five that my staff delivers to me, the five that their staff - and so on and so on.

Then simplicity is just not a get out of jail card free, because we don't believe in that, but a permission slip to change things, because you have a big, big company and things are gonna be procedures and rules and policies, which you need, but really more as guidelines, not necessarily that they're law. So if you see a simpler way of doing it, and you're not breaking the law, then go ahead. Why not do those things?

Then "T" stood for trust, which, for us, is healthy debate, to be able to question the status quo and to say, "I think there's a different way of doing that," and then to be comfortable in the organization to challenge a senior executive and challenge the CEO at a town hall meeting. That's what we instilled in the company and I will tell you, five years prior to us joining the company, 10 years, 20 years, there is no way people would have done that. It was a very hierarchal organization that had different lunchrooms for different people on staff. It had conference rooms had that only executives of the company could reserve. Who has that? Things like that that we had to just say, "Does that make sense?" And just give permission to people to change those things.


Here is a teaser for the video interview:




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Adam Burns is the Senior Editor of MeetTheBoss TV.