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If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an...
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Getting out of the memory business gave us the opportunity to assign the group of developers in Oregon, who were arguably the best at Intel at this time, to the task of adapting their manufacturing process to build faster, cheaper, better 386s.
Productive shift in resources!
There was a measure of relief that they no longer had to work on something that the company wasn’t fully committed to.
Again, get outside your ranks. Go to the managers, engineer, sales, etc. Your people on the ground know what's going on!
I learned that the word “point” in strategic inflection point is something of a misnomer. It’s not a point; it’s a long, torturous struggle.
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,
I also learned that strategic inflection points, painful as they are for all participants, provide an opportunity to break out of a plateau and catapult to a higher level of achievement.
looking for clever memory strategies and arguing among themselves, trying to figure out how to fight an unwinnable war,
men and women lower in the organization, unbeknownst to us, got us ready to execute the strategic turn that saved our necks and gave us a great future.
This is not unusual. People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early. Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does; financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change.
When is a change really a strategic inflection point?
Nevertheless, after studying the issue, the Intel technologists decided that x-ray techniques were fraught with problems and that they were not production-worthy. Most importantly, they felt that our current technology could evolve to achieve ever finer features well into the future.
Evaluated the potential threat, logical first response. I'd it actually a threat?
there is no surefire formula, every decision you make should be carefully scrutinized and reexamined as time passes.
we continued to watch it, looking to see if the threat grew, waned or stayed the same.
Intel visitors to Japan came back with the report that Japanese businessmen who had previously been very respectful of us now seemed to look at us with a newfound derision.
it’s different now,”
Ask these questions to attempt to distinguish signal from noise:
Is your key competitor about to change?
In an analogous fashion, you should ask, is your key complementer about to change?
Do people seem to be “losing it” around you?
there are people who are quick to recognize impending change and cry out an early warning.
even though it’s time-consuming, do your best to hear them out,
Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.
A danger in assessing the significance of changes lies in what I call the trap of the first version.
My point is that you can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version.
Consequently, you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology.
The most important tool in identifying a particular development as a strategic inflection point is a broad and intensive debate.
The debate should involve people outside the company, customers and partners who not only have different areas of expertise but also have different interests.
a business can succeed only if it serves the interests of outside parties as well.
It also takes a lot of guts; it takes courage to enter into a debate you may lose, in which weaknesses in your knowledge may be exposed and in which you may draw the disapproval of your coworkers for taking an unpopular viewpoint.
Take your time until the news you hear starts to repeat what you’ve already heard, and until a conviction builds up in your own gut.
Give your most considered opinion and give it clearly and forcefully; your criterion for involvement should be that you’re heard and understood.
Don’t think for a moment that at the end of such debates all participants will arrive at a unanimous point of view.
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.
It takes many years of consistent conduct to eliminate fear of punishment as an inhibitor of strategic discussion.
They were results-oriented and familiar with constructive confrontation; they understood how these help us collectively to make better decisions and come to better solutions.
It requires living this culture, promoting constant collaborative exchanges between the holders of knowledge power and the holders of organizational power to create the best solutions in the interest of both.
The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.
I call this phenomenon the inertia of success. It is extremely dangerous and it can reinforce denial.
When the environment changes in such a way as to render the old skills and strengths less relevant, we almost instinctively cling to our past.
we face another emotional hurdle: to admit to ourselves consciously and explicitly the magnitude of the problem we are struggling with.
strategic dissonance. It is one of the surest indications that a company is struggling with a strategic inflection point.
The process of adapting to change starts with employees who, through their daily work, adjust to the new outside forces.
Such questions usually represent sharp probing for the true intent behind the general answer I’ve just given.
But, on the other hand, they might be caused by a growing dissonance between my well-worn answer and a diverging reality.
When people in the company start asking questions like “But how can we say ‘X’ when we do?’?” more than anything else this is a tip-off that a strategic inflection point may very well be in the making.
Resolution of strategic dissonance does not come in the form of a figurative light bulb going on. It comes through experimentation.
The dilemma is that you can’t suddenly start experimenting when you realize you’re in trouble unless you’ve been experimenting all along.
By “early” I mean acting while the momentum of your existing business is strong, while the cash flow is there and while the organization is intact.
