Strategic Inflection Points

From Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company (Currency Doubleday, 1996).

The book is built around the “strategic inflection point”: a moment when one of the forces shaping a business changes by an order of magnitude, and the rules of competing in that business change with it. Grove’s running case is Intel’s 1985 exit from memory chips, which had become a commodity dominated by Japanese manufacturers, and the pivot to microprocessors. What “paranoid” means in his usage is the habit of taking weak signals seriously while they’re still weak. The book’s worry is that inflection points are easy to dismiss as ordinary noise until they aren’t, and by then the company has lost the room to react.