kartooner

Kay Whit­more, for­mer CEO of Kodak and friend of the fam­ily, was one of the many guests at our wed­ding two years ago. As you may have heard in the media, he passed away yes­ter­day at Rochester Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal from com­pli­ca­tions of leukemia. He had only been diag­nosed four weeks ago.

Mr. Whit­more spent 36 years at Kodak, even­tu­ally suc­ceed­ing Colby Chan­dler as CEO in 1990. He climbed the lad­der of suc­cess, but was fired — by the Kodak board — three years later after the abrupt depar­ture of Chief Finan­cial Offi­cer Christo­pher Stef­fen of whom he clashed with numer­ous amounts of times, over the pace of the company’s restructuring.

Accord­ing to Bloomberg.com, “The board, in oust­ing Whit­more, cited the need for deeper and faster cost cuts than Whit­more was will­ing to make.” Whit­more was replaced by George Fisher of Motorola, Inc. to expe­di­ate the tran­si­tion to dig­i­tal media.

David L. Swift, Whitmore’s exec­u­tive assis­tant at the time, sums up the decency of White­more in say­ing that “Every­one rec­og­nized the needs to cut costs… Kay could have caved in and rode along, but he believed in doing what was best for the company.”

And with that, I offer my con­do­lences to the Whit­more fam­ily and remem­ber­ance for a decent soul.