Innovating Out of Crisis

Shigetaka Komori became chief executive of Fujifilm in 2000, as demand for photographic film began falling by roughly twenty per cent a year, and this account describes how he redirected the company. The comparison with Eastman Kodak, which held a similar position and did not survive intact, runs through the book without being laboured.

Komori describes a two-part response. The first was structural surgery: closing film manufacturing capacity, cutting the distribution network and reducing headcount by thousands, which he argues had to be done at once rather than gradually because the revenue decline was not cyclical. The second was redeploying the company's technical base. Fujifilm's film business rested on chemistry, particularly collagen, antioxidants and thin-film coating with nanoparticle control. Komori directed those capabilities into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, regenerative medicine and functional materials for flat panel displays, and made acquisitions including Toyama Chemical to build the pharmaceutical position.

The book is a chief executive's own account and reads accordingly, with limited attention to what went wrong or to the internal opposition Komori faced. It also treats the diagnosis as clearer in retrospect than it was at the time. The valuable content is the specific reasoning about which capabilities transferred to which markets, and the argument that the transferable asset was the underlying technical competence rather than the brand or the customer relationships.