GoKawiilOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Listen to this post
Key Takeaways The habits that built the business often become the very ones that hold it back later. It’s what happens when circumstances change faster than habits do.
Most business owners already know they should delegate more and approve less. What’s harder to let go of is the identity built around those habits.
Gratitude for a habit and lifelong loyalty to it are two different things, and taking an honest look at which one you’re actually practicing is a start if you want to grow.
1975. A young engineer named Steven Sasson walked into Kodak‘s research lab carrying something that looked more like a science project than the future of photography. It weighed nearly four kilograms, captured black-and-white images at 0.01 megapixels, and took over 20 seconds to record a single photograph onto a cassette tape. By today’s standards, it was almost laughable.
It was also the world’s first digital camera.
The company that would later become the textbook example of missing the digital revolution was the very company that invented it. Ask most people today, and they’ll say that Kodak failed because it couldn’t see the future, but not everyone knows that it literally built the future — in its own lab, over a decade before anyone else.
So what actually happened?
The answer wasn’t a shortage of imagination. Kodak had spent decades building one of the most successful businesses in the world around film, and every roll sold, every print developed, reinforced a model that had made the company extraordinary. Digital photography didn’t threaten the technology; it threatened the identity of the entire business.
... continue reading