More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
When you’re caught in the turbulence of a strategic inflection point, the sad fact is that instinct and judgment are all you’ve got to guide you through.
And the more successful the players were in the earlier industry, the harder a time they had to change with it.
The first mover and only the first mover, the company that acts while the others dither, has a true opportunity to gain time over its competitors—and time advantage, in this business, is the surest way to gain market share.
Three, price for what the market will bear, price for volume, then work like the devil on your costs so that you can make money at that price.
Simply put, it’s harder to be the best of class in several fields than in just one.
As things changed, although many of his managers knew better, Jobs did not easily give up the conviction that had made him such a passionate and effective pioneer.
I think all these factors played a part, but the last one—the resistance to facing a painful new world—was the most important.
And from all the early bickering, we developed a style of ferociously arguing with one another while remaining friends (we call this “constructive confrontation”).
I suppose that even though our minds were made up about where we were going our emotions were still holding both of us back from full commitment to the new direction.
People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner.
If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity.
And while today, ten years later, they now seem compressed to one short and intense period, at the time, those three years were long and arduous—and wasteful. While we were fighting the inevitable, trying out all sorts of clever marketing approaches, looking for a niche that couldn’t possibly exist in a commodity market, we were wasting time, getting deeper into red ink and ultimately forcing ourselves to take harsher actions to right things when we finally got around to taking action at all.
People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early.
Although they can come from anywhere in the company, Cassandras are usually in middle management; often they work in the sales Organization.
Because they are on the front lines of the company, the Cassandras also feel more vulnerable to danger than do senior managers in their more or less bolstered corporate headquarters.
Yet I have learned to respect changes in the tone of messages from people in the field.
You don’t have to seek these Cassandras out; if you are in management, they will find you. Like somebody who sells a product that he is passionate about, they will “sell” their concern to you with a passion.
Gradually all parties can cut through the murkiness that surrounds their arguments, clearly understand the issues and each other’s point of view.
But data are about the past, and strategic inflection points are about the future.
The point is, when dealing with emerging trends, you may very well have to go against rational extrapolation of data and rely instead on anecdotal observations and your instincts.
Constructively debating tough issues and getting somewhere is only possible when people can speak their minds without fear of punishment.
The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace.
It is fear that gives me the will to listen to Cassandras when all I want to do is cry out, “Enough already, the sky isn’t falling,” and go home.
Simply put, fear can be the opposite of complacency.
That’s why in a way I think that we at Intel were fortunate to have gone through the terrible times in 1985 and 1986
How a company handles the process of getting through a strategic inflection point depends predominantly on a very “soft,” almost touchy-feely issue: how management reacts emotionally to the crisis.
your personal identity is inseparable from your lifework. So, when your business gets into serious difficulties, in spite of the best attempts of business schools and management training courses to make you a rational analyzer of data, objective analysis will take second seat to personal and emotional reactions almost every time.
because the early stages of a strategic inflection point are fraught with loss—loss of your company’s preeminence in the industry, of its identity, of a sense of control of your company’s destiny, of job security and, perhaps the most wrenching, the loss of being affiliated with a winner. However, unlike the accepted model of the sequence of emotions associated with grief (i.e., denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, ultimately, acceptance), in the case of a strategic inflection point, the sequence goes more as follows: denial, escape or diversion and, finally, acceptance and pertinent
...more
But the old order won’t give way to the new without a phase of experimentation and chaos in between.
This tendency is easy to see in others although we are prone to blindness when we do it ourselves.
We must discipline ourselves to overcome our tendency to do too little too late.
“Clarity of direction, which includes describing what we are going after as well as describing what we will not be going after, is exceedingly important at the late stage of a strategic Transformation.”
When I think about what it’s like to get through a strategic inflection point, I’m reminded of a classic scene in old western movies in which a bedraggled group of riders is traveling through a hostile landscape.
They don’t know exactly where they are going; they only know that they can’t turn back and must trust that they will eventually reach a place where things are better.
Getting this far took a lot of energy from you; you must now reach into whatever reservoir of energy you have left to motivate yourself and, most importantly, the people who depend on you so you can become healthy again.
I think of this hostile landscape through which you and your company must struggle—or else perish—as the valley of death. It is an inevitable part of every strategic inflection point. You can’t avoid it, nor can you make it less perilous, but you can do a better job of dealing with it.
You are trying to define what the company will be, yet that can only be done if you also undertake to define what the company will not be.
you need to have a strong leader setting a direction. And it doesn’t even have to be the best direction—just a strong, clear one.
statements in external forums (which are always given more credibility inside the company than what you say directly to your employees)—
Many companies have gone through strategic inflection points. They are alive, competing, even winning. They have survived the challenges of their valleys of death and have emerged stronger than when they went in.
I think anything that can affect industries whose total revenue base is many hundreds of billions of dollars is a big deal.
Are there any lessons from how corporations handle cataclysmic change that can be applied to individual careers?
In the case of a career inflection point, the Cassandras are likely to be concerned friends or family members who work in a different industry or competitive environment and deduce winds of change that you don’t sense yet.
Arriving at the clarity of direction through a dialogue with yourself and maintaining your conviction when you wake up in the middle of the night filled with doubts are both tough.
