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That’s not too far off from how Intel Corporation’s CEO and President Andrew Grove defined inflection points in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career.
There’s wind and then there’s a typhoon; there are waves and then there’s a tsunami. There are competitive forces and then there are supercompetitive forces….An inflection point occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new, allowing business to ascend to new heights. However, if you don’t navigate your way through an inflection point, you go through a peak and after the peak the business declines. It is around such inflection points that managers puzzle and observe, “Things are different. Something has changed.”
When the winds change, a business or any organization stands to lose its competitive advantage if it’s slow to detect and respond to the change. Intel had its close call with a technological tsunami and survived. Kodak and Polaroid weren’t so lucky. These camera and film industry giants apparently didn’t pay attention to the tsunami generated by new, emerging digital technology and lost their competitive advantage. (In an earlier posting, we compared these events to fast breaks in basketball, where a team steals the ball from the other team and races unobstructed to its basket for a quick two points.)
