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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.