For 25 years, Antonio Perez worked at Hewlett-Packard, where he built H.P.'s world-dominating printer business. But when he was passed over for the C.E.O. job in favor of Carly Fiorina, he quit, and in 2003, Eastman Kodak pulled him away from writing a management book, which he never finished, to become president. He took over as C.E.O. two years later.

Today, Kodak is in the top three for U.S. market share in digital cameras, with 15 percent of all sales. When Perez was hired, Kodak had 64,000 employees. Now, it has about 40,000—only 20,000 of whom were there on Perez's first day. Still, Kodak has a long way to go. The biggest maker of digital cameras is currently Nokia, which builds them into cell phones. In response, Perez cut a deal in 2006 to supply Kodak components for Motorola phones over the next decade. He also created a digital-printing business from scratch, which now generates close to $4 billion in annual sales.

Perez was interviewed by Condé Nast Portfolio contributing editor Kevin Maney before an audience at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. An edited transcript follows.

K.M.: Let's talk about how you wound up at Kodak. There came a point in time when H.P. needed new leadership, and it was between you and Carly Fiorina.

A.P.: It should have been me, definitely. [Laughter]

K.M.: So get rid of the PC business?

A.P.: Yeah. H.P. took the other route. They bought [Compaq]. So obviously I wasn’t a fit for what they wanted to do. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And so I left. There are a lot of stories underneath that, but I’m not going to tell you.

K.M.: There are just a few people here. We won’t tell anyone.

A.P.: In a magazine? [Laughter] Carly is a great person. She doesn’t say the same thing about me. But I think she’s a very hardworking person, very intelligent. She didn’t know anything about technology, but other than that, she was...she’s a very capable individual. I couldn’t work with her.

K.M.: When you took the job at Kodak, was the company still in denial about the film business?

A.P.: The banner that was spread in my office read EXPAND THE BENEFITS OF FILM. That was the first thing that I took down. Kodak had 14 factories dedicated to film. We had to close 11 of them in the past three and a half years.

K.M.: Were you hated around Rochester, New York?

A.P.: Not at all. When I started to go through all the factories around the world, I would stand in front of 3,000 people and say, “Would you please stand up if you have a digital camera in your household?” About 40 percent of the people would stand up at the beginning. By the end of the trip, it was 70 percent. And I would say, “My name is Antonio Perez, I’m your new leader, and we have a problem here. You make your living by making film, and you’re not buying it. You think anybody else is going to buy it? This cannot continue. So I’m asking for your help to do the right thing. We’re closing this plant. So help me do it with dignity.”

K.M.: Kodak got into the printer business fairly recently. That’s a market dominated by the business you built at H.P.

A.P.: If you go to Kodak Park and see how we make film, you’re going to see a machine tool that is about 50 feet long. It has a piece of plastic that is about six feet wide, running at incredible speed. And then you’re going to have 18 different coatings that are falling onto the piece of plastic moving at that speed. The purpose of the exercise is to locate the right amount of each of the 18 coatings in the right place on the plastic. That’s all. To make it more interesting, you have to do it in the dark, because it’s photosensitive.

I remember saying that I thought we should be the best commercial printer in the world. Because instead of 18 coatings, we’re going to use six inks. Instead of plastic, we’re going to use paper, which is a much nicer recipient. And we’re going to switch on the lights. We had a lot of the technology in color management, and sure enough, we now have a $3.6 billion business growing 9 percent in the last quarter and doing very well. So there’s a lot of the past that can be applicable.

K.M.: What made you think Kodak had a business to save?

A.P.: They had the patents. The portfolio that we have in digital capture is second to none, in my opinion. There is no company in the world that can take a digital picture without somehow having a relationship with us.

K.M.: Do you think cell-phone cameras are going to replace digital cameras?

A.P.: They will certainly take many of the low-end cameras away. For your birthday, when you have 20 people in the house, you most likely will have a full-function digital camera with you. But most of the memories in life, you don’t know when they’re going to come. So you’re going to take a lot of good pictures with your cell phone. I think they will both survive.

K.M.: What kind of company are you trying to build?

A.P.: We’re finished with the restructuring—no more layoffs. Now we’re going to grow our properties as fast as we can. I want Kodak to be, and I think Kodak will be, the leading imaging company in the world. We are right in the intersection of material science and digital imaging. That’s the space where we have more of the intellectual property and where the brand is the strongest. It’s a company that’s going to help you in your personal life and in your businesses with things that are related to imaging—whether it’s capture, manipulation, storage, printing, or all those things.

K.M.: There have been rumors that H.P. might buy Kodak.

A.P.: I don’t have any comments about that. All those rumors—there are many other rumors too. We’re buying this, we’re buying that. I wouldn’t pay much attention.

K.M.: You grew up in northwestern Spain, and your father had a fish business.

A.P.: Yes, in Vigo. As soon as I was 15, he would wake me up at 5 in the morning and take me with him to do the auctions.

K.M.: Did you learn anything from that?

A.P.: I learned only one thing: I didn’t like that business. It was cold and wet, and there were mean people.

K.M.: Any business lessons you live by?

A.P.: There is no such thing as a data-driven decision. You get real data only after the fact. I love one of the phrases from Goethe, the German philosopher-poet. He said something like the moment you make a decision, a lot of things come to help you that you could have never seen before you made the decision. So without taking that leap of faith, you can never know if you’re going to make it. The other thing—I like car racing.

K.M.: As in you racing cars?

A.P.: Well, I have a Ford GT that I love. I don’t do it in the streets. Mario Andretti said, “If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.” So there is something about taking risks and the fact that you will never have the data that you want to have before you make that decision.