Team Zebra
Insider account: a Kodak manager on turning around the film unit.
Summary
The reference has not verified this book in detail; the summary states only what the title, author and subject establish.
Stephen Frangos ran Kodak's black and white film manufacturing division and wrote this with Steven Bennett about turning it around between 1989 and 1993. The division made products in a declining market, was losing money, and had been treated as an afterthought within a company focused on colour film.
The changes Frangos describes include reorganising a functional structure into flow-based teams responsible for a product from start to finish, giving those teams accountability for their own results, reducing cycle times substantially, cutting inventory, and improving quality and delivery reliability. He emphasises the cultural work: he describes the effort required to persuade people who had been told their business was dying that improvement was worth attempting, and the recognition and communication practices he used.
The book is a manager's own account, written while the results looked good, and it does not address what happened afterward: Kodak's overall decline continued and the film business disappeared entirely. Frangos does not examine whether the divisional improvements mattered to the company's fate, which is the question a reader would want answered. The material on organising for flow and on motivating a workforce in a declining business is the useful part.
Key takeaways 6
- Reorganising from functional departments into flow-based teams gave each team accountability for a complete product outcome.
- Cycle time reduction produced quality improvements as a consequence, because defects were detected closer to their cause.
- Frangos argues that persuading people in a declining business that improvement is worthwhile is the first and hardest task.
- A neglected division can improve substantially without corporate investment if its people are given accountability and information.
- Inventory reduction exposed process problems that had been concealed, which is the standard lean finding.
- The divisional turnaround did not alter Kodak's trajectory, which the book does not address and a reader should.
Who should read it
Operators leading turnarounds in neglected or declining business units who want a first-hand account of reorganising for flow and rebuilding morale.
Where it sits in the reference 2
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