Lawrence Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, at NDTV Profit Ignite.
As the artificial intelligence revolution disrupts and dominates global tech spending, upending companies’ plans and the global job market, courage has become a critical differentiator, said Ranjay Gulati, Paul R.
He gave two examples to drive home his point — of Kodak and Google. “Kodak knew that digital imaging was coming. In fact, they had the largest number of patents for digital imaging. They had the prototype of a digital camera. But they had a belief, and the belief was: film has a ten-year runway. Right? Guess what happened? It was a two-year runway. They had realised that film is not a ten-year story; it’s a two-year story.
We have a ten-year runway to milk film, a 70% margin business, and in that period, we’ll figure something out and do something with it. Now, Fuji-which had the other 50% of the film market outside of Kodak-had figured this out.
And the outcome was very different,” he said.
“If you look right now in the world of AI, what did Google do? Google wrote the Transformer paper that led to the rise of OpenAI and the whole industry. But they didn’t want to do anything with it. Now they say it was reputational risk and worry about safety and all that. They were worried about their main franchise: that this thing takes off and our search business is dead. So, you know, let’s just kind of wait it out. And they were doing a Kodak moment. And then they had Code Red and launching Gemini and all this other stuff going on. They had it all. They could easily have just crushed the market, but they didn’t,” he added.
