“A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to”. So wrote Andrew Grove, Intel’s then executive in his 1996 book titled “Only the Paranoid Survive”. He emphasized that those companies who are not paranoid would find themselves decoupled soon from what really matters, lose their relevance and competitive edge. Twenty-five years later, we find that the speed at which technological transformations happen, the intensity of competition and the disruptions in the way business is done have only further accelerated, making the message of this book more relevant in the current times.
Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does. Financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change. How to know when the changes are just transitory (noise) and when they represent the beginning of a new era (signal)? How to raise our awareness and how to use the opportunities these inflections offer to break out to a higher level of achievement? This business strategy book helps with that and provides a framework to deal with them.
For those who want to trace how the semiconductor and computing industry evolved through many strategic inflections, this is one of the books to learn from. Though this industry has significantly changed since this book was first published in 1996, it sets a stage to understand how things worked in the 1980’s & 90’s and we can clearly see that inflections are happening in a similar fashion now as well but at a larger scale and more frequently. Since the framework to understand inflections and responding to them remains the same, this well-written book helps us understand the industry we serve better.
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