Synopsis – One of the world’s most successful CEO’s tells us about how to handle the most important points in a business’s journey.
Key Takeaways
Page 4 – Strategic inflection are full scale changes
Page 5 – Strategic inflection points are about fundamental change in any business
Page 5 – In technology whatever can be done will be done
Page 5 – Strategic inflection points are similar whether you’re dealing with a company or your own career
Page 6 – It is your responsibility to guide your company out of harms way and to place it in a position where it can prosper in new world order. Nobody else can do this but you
Page 6 – Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself
Page 22 – “Well that guy is always the last to know”, He, like most CEOs, is in the centre of a fortified palace, and news from the outside must percolate through layers of people from the periphery where the action is. Our IT manager is the periphery. Our marketing manager also experiences the skirmishes out there.
Page 23 – Turn the tables and ask them some questions; about competitors, trends in the industry and what they think we should be most concerned with. As we throw ourselves into raw action, our senses and instincts will rapidly be honed again
Page 30 – There’s wind and then there’s a typhoon. 10X forces can change your destiny, things happen to your business that didn’t before.
Page 31 – The business responds differently to managerial actions than it did before
Page 31 – Only the beginning and the end are clear; the transition in between is gradual and puzzling
Page 32 – What such a transition does to a business is profound and how the business manages this transition determines its future. I like to describe this phenomenon as an inflection point
Page 33 – Put another way, a strategic inflection point is when the balance of forces shifts from the old structure, from the old ways of doing business and the old ways of competing, to the new.
Page 34 – Ideas about the right direction will split people in the same team
Page 35 – You can’t wait until you know; timing is everything
Page 35 – Your ongoing business forms a protective bubble in which you can experiment with the new ways of doing business
Page 35 – When you are caught in the turbulence of strategic inflection point, the sad fact is that instinct and judgement are all you’ve got to guide you through
Page 35 – The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up and listen
Page 51 – Horizontal industries live and die by mass production and mass marketing. They have their own rules
Page 51 – One, differentiate without a difference. Don’t introduce improvement whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage
Page 51 – Two, when a technology break or other fundamental change comes your way. Grab it.
Page 51 – Time advantage, in this business, is the surest way to gain market share
Page 52 – 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
Page 55 – When Wal-Mart moves into a small town the environment changes for every retailer in that town. A 10X factor has arrived
Page 65 – The resistance to facing a painful new world – was the most important
Page 65 – Customers were drifting away from their former buying habits may provide the most subtle and insidious because it takes place slowly
Page 68 – The person who is the star of a previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to the logic of a strategic inflection point and tend to fall harder than most
Page 93 – If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adapt an outsiders intellectual objectivity
Page 96 – One last lesson, and this is a key one, while intel business changed and management was 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.
Page 101 – How do you know what a certain set of changes represents? Put in another way, how can you tell the “signal” from the “noise”
Page 102 – There simply is no sure-fire formula by which you can decide if something is signal or noise. But because there is no sure-fire formula, every decision you make should be scrutinized and re-examined as time passes
Page 103 – Therefore, you must pay eternal attention to developments that could become a “10X” factor in your business
Page 104 – Compatibility of a product was – and still is – a big factor in making it popular; therefore the idea that we would come up with an incompatible chip was not an appealing one
Page 107 – If you had just one bullet in a figurative pistol, whom among your many competitors would you save it for?
Page 110 – 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
Page 111 – 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
Page 113 – You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version
Page 114 – As you consider this or any new device, your answer may be that, even if it were “10X” better, it wouldn’t interest you as a consumer. You must discipline yourself to think through things, to the long term potential
Page 114 – The most important tool in identifying a particular development as a strategic inflection point is a broad and intensive debate
Page 115 – If you are in senior management don’t feel you’re being a wimp for taking the time to solicit views, convictions and passion of the experts. 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
Page 115 – If you are in middle management, don’t be a whimp. Don’t sit on the sidelines waiting for the senior people to decide so that later on you can criticize them over a beer. Give you most considered opinion
Page 117 – But data are about the past and strategic inflection points are about the future. The point is, when dealing with the merging trends, you may very well have to go against rational extrapolation of data and rely instead on anecdotal observations and your instincts
Page 117 – Fear can be the opposite of complacency. Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful
Page 119 – Cassandras call you attention to strategic inflection points, so under no circumstances should you ever “shoot the messenger”
Page 120 – 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
Page 124 – In the case of strategic inflection points, the sequence goes more as follows: denial, escape or diversion and finally pertinent action
Page 127 – The replacement of corporate heads is far mor 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
Page 127 – 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. “Just give us a bit more time”
Page 130 – Ideally, you should have experimented with new products, technologies, channels, promotions, and new customers all along
Page 135 – You must force yourself to commit your thoughts to paper
Page 140 – 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
Page 144 – As Drucker suggests, the key activity that’s required while 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
Page 146 – Strategic change doesn’t just start at the top. It starts with your calendar
Page 146 – Assigning or reassigning resources in order to pursue a strategic goal is an example of what I call strategic action
Page 147 – Strategic action matter because they immediately affect people’s lives
Page 148 – There is a period in between that provides the best compromise when you have invested enough in the old business that is has momentum to get you through the period of transition while you deploy your resources to the new target area. Your tendency will almost always be to wait too long
Page 151 – “put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET”
Page 151 – If competition is chasing, you only get out of the valley of death by outrunning the people who are after you
Page 152 – Yet you must commit yourself to a certain course and a certain pace, otherwise you will run out of water and energy before long
Page 152 – When the management staff is demoralized, nothing works: Every employee feels paralysed. This is exactly when 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.
Page 155 – When you must reach large numbers of people, you can’t possibly overcommunicate and over clarify. Give a lot of speeches to your employees, go to their workplaces, get them together and explain over and over what you’re trying to achieve.
Page 157 – Communicating strategic change in an interactive, exposed fashion is not easy. But it is necessary
Final Thoughts
Strategic inflection points in business and in life require you to pivot if you want to survive and thrive. Life is change and this book provides great points on how to navigate that change; search out answers, be direct, communicate and listen to the periphery. 8/10
Stranger in Sydney 