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?