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PDAs could do to PCs what PCs were doing to mainframes, many said.
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.
This debate should involve technical discussions (for example, is RISC inherently “10X” faster?), marketing discussions (is it a fashion fling or is it a business?) and considerations of strategic repercussions
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.
Give your most considered opinion and give it clearly and forcefully; your criterion for involvement should be that you’re heard and understood.
what you may miss in perspective and breadth you make up in the depth of your hands-on experience.
Debates are like the process through which a photographer sharpens the contrast when developing a print.
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.
How do we cultivate fear of losing in our employees? We can only do that if we feel it ourselves. If we fear that someday, any day, some development somewhere
in our environment will change the rules of the game, our associates will sense and share that dread.
Once an environment of fear takes over, it will lead to paralysis throughout the organization and cut off the flow of bad news from the periphery.
From our inception on, we at Intel have worked very hard to break down the walls between those who possess knowledge power and those who possess organization power.
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
Getting through a strategic inflection point involves confusion, uncertainty and disorder, both on a personal level if you are in management and on a strategic level for the enterprise as a whole.
This is not surprising, 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.
Escape, or diversion, refers to the personal actions of the senior manager. When companies are facing major changes in their core business, they seem to plunge into what seem to be totally unrelated acquisitions and mergers.
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.
call this divergence between actions and statements strategic dissonance. It is one of the surest indications that a company is struggling with a strategic inflection point.
“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.
You know that something substantial is not right—something is different—but
but you don’t know what it is, you don’t know how significant it really is and you don’t know what to do about it.
Under the protection of this bubble you can make changes far more easily than when the vital signs of your business have all turned south.
“The organization can take just so much change; it’s not ready for more,” meaning really, “I’m not ready to lead the organization into the changes that it needs to face.”
have never made a tough change, whether it involved resource shifts or personnel moves, that I haven’t wished I had made a year or so earlier.
This tendency is easy to see in others although we are prone to blindness when we do it ourselves. The
Ideally, the fear of a new environment sneaking up on us should keep us on our toes.
These discussions will help get your organization ready for change.
Taking an organization through a strategic inflection point is a march through unknown territory.
Consequently, you and your associates lack a mental map of the new environment, and even the shape of your desired goal is not completely clear.
make it through the valley of death successfully, your first task is to form a mental image of what the company should look like when you get to the other side.
This image not only needs to be clear enough for you to visualize but it also has to be crisp enough
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.
But the danger of oversimplification pales in comparison with the danger of catering to the desire of every manager to be included in the simple description of the refocused business, therefore making that description so lofty and so inclusive as to be meaningless.
How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?
guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers,
Drucker suggests, the key activity that’s required in the course of transforming an organization is a wholesale shifting of resources from what was appropriate for the old idea of the business to what is appropriate for the new.
it’s perfectly respectable for a senior person with twenty years of experience to take some time, buckle down and learn a whole new set of skills.)
“Does this mean you no longer care about what we do?” I placated them as best I could, I reassigned tasks among other managers
But the inevitable counterpart is that you’re subtracting from someplace else. You’re taking something away: production
Assigning or reassigning resources in order to pursue a strategic goal is an
example of what I call strategic action.
Strategic plans are statements of what we intend to do. Strategic actions are steps we have already taken or are taking which suggest our longer-term intent.
strategic actions matter because they immediately
Strategic actions, however, take place in the present.
Your tendency will almost always be to wait too long. Yet the consequences of being early are less onerous than the consequences of being late.
Advance the pace of your actions and increase their magnitude. You’ll find that you’re more likely to be close to right.
