‘Snow melts from the edges. The changes that are going to fundamentally influence the future of your business are brewing on the periphery. To avoid being taken by surprise by an inflection point, you need to be exposed to what is happening at the edges.’

‘An inflection point happens when a 10X change alters the basic assumptions upon which a business is built.’

‘Start defining your arena by asking which pool of resources- typically revenues- your business currently relies on. What other players might be trying to grap those same resources, even if they don’t make or offer products and services similar to yours.’

‘Practices that displease or even enrage customers can create an opening for a disruptive player to come into your markets and cause customers to defect.’

‘Even when you see an inflection point on the horizon, it can take a lot longer than you think for it to actually arrive.’

‘Creating a plan for fast learning is something successful serial entrepreneurs do almost by instinct.’

‘Good ideas are … important, but the initial ideas that innovators pursue are seldom the ones that make it to market.’

‘We tend to imbue CEOs and senior leaders with supernatural powers when they succeed and with damning deficiencies when they fail.’

‘Internal friction and competition can undermine even the correct response to changing times. Managing politics is a key task for any would-be change agent.’

‘Big changes are often signaled by seemingly small and incremental shifts that nonetheless release a constraint in an existing model, opening it up to an inflection point.’

Source

Rita McGrath (2019). Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before they Happen