Amateur Photographer & What Digital Camera: Leica sacks CEO

Put's, as ever, has an interesting perspective on Leicadom, even if he doesn't always "hit the nail on the head". Whether he's done that this time I don't know, but there are many points that I think have 'resonance'. My own ("cathartic") thoughts are these, for what they are worth:

At times, Leica seems to have adopted it's customers' agendas in respect to 'innovative' (in Leica terms) products: the R-series, M5, digital R & M, etc. Maybe it has, as Put's says, possibly paid too much attention to vociferous and persistent chat-room champions for change, whist in reality being incapable of always meeting such 'popular' demands with cheap and technically well-proven products, delivered in a timely manner.

Partnering other companies, such as Panasonic who can deliver a wider spectrum of Leica-derived or Leica-branded products, such as digital compacts, to global higher-end consumer markets makes business sense. This can be done in tandem with the traditional, specialist, niche-market products without undue risk of damaging the brand identity and values. Obviously all of the products (new and traditional, consumer and 'professional') have to be good, as does the marketing. The last thing a company needs when the going gets tough is for a vociferous minority "dyed in the wool" users of, say, M cameras, to continually publicly snipe about declining values and causing mayhem. This may not be particularly damaging to consumers' perceptions of the brand, but can be potentially disconcerting for the company's other 'stakeholders'. The corollary of this is that if things go wrong, fix them quickly: something Leica hasn't always done.

At the core, though, there seems to me to be some fundamental, possibly philosophical, differences between Leica's R&D, manufacturing and marketing departments. These department often appear to be moving in different directions, or are out of step with each other in other ways. These differences may account for Leica's lack of product innovation and strange marketing, etc. Leica always appear to me to be a company run by the production engineers above all others, but maybe not in the way that engineers have been integrated into both product development and marketing in Japanese manufacturing.

Whatever the real situation is inside Leica Camera AG, it does appear from the outside to be quite dysfunctional at present. The person whose job it is to overcome chronic corporate dysfunctionality is normally, hopefully, the CEO. If the CEO doesn't address such fundamental issues with vigour, as well as setting a clear, achievable, medium to long business strategy in place with in a couple of years, it is debatable whether he/she is doing the job satisfactorily.

Exit Mr Lee?

The bottom line, for me is that I was thinking about buying an M8 ... until a few days ago. Now I really don't think I'll bother.

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