In my recent posts on secular trends in the global asset management I often pointed out “Darwin” as one of the metatrends in the industry. Not “survival of the fittest”, but “survival of the most adaptive”.

The asset management industry is not the only one having to deal with this global metatrend – let’s take photography as a case study. Kodak’s CEO this weekend in an interview with the Financial Times said he expects the firm’s annual digital revenues to reach $7 billion in three years, because of strong demand in Asia.

There are three cases of Darwin in this statement.

First, adaptation on steroids: Kodak’s business five years ago was all film – today 70% of revenues are digital. This means management at some painful moment realized that the “Kodak moment”, and with it the firm’s entire business model, was a dinosaur and bound to die. Soon.

Second, Asia rings in a new world order. CEO Perez in his FT interview noted that the proportion of revenues from Asia will grow quickly from today 15% and thus necessitate significant regional investments.

Third, reverse engineering. Economies (and populations) in Asia are growing much faster than those in the US and Europe (and Japan). Kodak will focus its design, R&D, business relationships and manufacturing on where the growth is coming from (you can find numerous examples on companies trying to stay relevant in my recent blogs: e.g. Facebook; Porsche; iPad, Andy Warhol, et al.

Specifically for asset management the process of reverse engineering is becoming ubiquitous: many European and US fund houses are moving their global heads of product development to Asia or are testing innovative ideas locally in Asia first (e.g. DWS launched its climate change theme first in Taiwan, then in Germany and the US).

One can of course argue that photography is the exception (firms have no choice but to move towards new technologies (digital) to stay relevant) and that industries like money management, luckily, don’t fundamentally change much over time.

Au contraire.

The turnover in industry leadership in the asset management industry is among the highest in the world – and accelerating. Each five to ten years close to 70% of industry leaders disappear from the league tables (and new leaders emerge – Blackrock, Pimco, T Rowe, Carmignac, Aberdeen, ring a bell?).

Moreover, even the most steadfast icon of all times, Mickey Mouse, had to undergo an extreme makeover recently, when executives decided that Mickey needed to be revamped in an upcoming video game called “Epic Mickey” in order to stay relevant with new audiences.

This prompted the New Yorker to write an imaginary memo from the board of directors entitled “Modern Mickey” with advice including: “Let’s have Minnie appear on “The Real Housewives of Disney,” along with Cinderella, Snow White, and the Little Mermaid. Then Minnie could sneer, ‘Do any of you bitches not have a gay husband?’”.