by Rita McGrath
Step 1: Create Your Lifeline
Get a big piece of flip chart paper. Beginning with your birth, draw your own “lifeline,” or picture of the important events in your life from your birth to the present. Try to include key events, relationships, successes, failures, accomplishments, and disappointments. What you are doing is creating the raw material to help you understand the critical events and experiences that have influenced your current beliefs and behaviors.
For each of the key events, note how it affected you. Did it shape your values and what you believe to be important in some meaningful way? Are there lessons you took from the experience that continue to have an influence on you? Do these experiences reinforce one another?
Step 2: Identify Your Own Building Blocks
As you are preparing your lifeline, note any common themes that seem to occur again and again, particularly with respect to the building blocks for resilience in the face of inflection points. For instance, one participant noted a common theme of always persevering in the face of adverse events, leading to a firm belief in the power of hard work and persistence. Capture these key values, and note some of the stories that reflect them in your own life experiences.
It is also worthwhile to be clear about where your boundaries are, given your experiences. Are there practices or beliefs that you would stick with, even in the face of temptation? My friend the famous management scholar Clayton Christensen has observed that as he attended successive Harvard Business School graduations, he discovered that many of his classmates were living lives that none of them had intended to live—divorced, alienated from their children and families, stuck in roles that had become stale, or even, as in the case of Enron’s Jeff Skilling, in jail. As Christensen said in 2012, “It became clear that a lot of my classmates implemented a strategy that they never planned to!” That same year, he encouraged all of us to, “in a deliberate way, articulate the kind of people we want to become. We can articulate the culture that we would want to exist in our family, and you can then, as the rest of life happens to you, you can utilize those things to help you become the kind of person you want to be.”
Step 3: Start Creating Your Own Story Up to This Point
With your lifeline and key themes documented, you’re ready to reflect on what this journey has taught you. Imagine if you were assigned the task of writing about your story as though it were someone else interviewing you. Make it as authentic as you can. Use lots of examples and specifics—that will help keep it vivid in your mind. Remember, the purpose of this is to keep you connected with the forces that have been meaningful in your life by reflecting on them.
Step 4: Write an Article About Yourself from the Future
This is an exercise that my colleague Ian MacMillan and I developed for executives studying in Columbia’s Advanced Management Program (AMP), a several-weeks-long immersion in personal and executive development. Here’s how it goes.
Imagine it is fifteen years from now, and you are writing an article about yourself in a popular magazine or newspaper, such as Fortune. The article will say that five years before, you launched a set of activities that led to a significant and positive change in your personal trajectory. As a result of this strategic accomplishment, you achieved a massively fulfilling role that would have been inconceivable to you before you got started. Describe the program that you undertook to create such a positive trajectory.
Now think about your key stakeholders. What do the people you interact with appreciate most about the change that you made? How has the positive change you made for yourself resulted in a positive change for them? Describe this in your article.
The bulk of the article should reflect, with admiration, on your personal style. How do you spend your time—literally, what is on your agenda? How do you make decisions? What activities do you put your time and attention into? What kind of people do you have around you? What kind of people have you elected not to have around you anymore, and why?
The last part of the article should talk about the accomplishments of your family while all this was going on. What can you say about them?
Step 5: Get Feedback on Your Article
As with the stakeholder-centered feedback process described earlier in this chapter, getting input from others can help you strengthen and sharpen your article. It can also be useful, as those stakeholders can often help you bring the life described in your article into being! Reflect on and review your article every so often, especially when you have a big decision to make that could represent a personal inflection point.
The Impact an Article from the Future Can Have
This excerpt from an article that appeared in the Wharton Magazine describes how completing your article can become a catalyst for your life, as one participant in their version of the AMP discovered.
It was the middle of a night in 2009—at the very end of a five-week Advanced Management Program . . . when Olivier Bottrie turned a brief nightmare into the foundation of his life’s dream.
Bottrie, a leading executive at the New York–based cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, had fallen asleep for only about a half-hour when he bolted upright in a bit of a panic at 1 a.m.—suddenly remembering one last homework assignment for the program. He was supposed to write a mock Fortune magazine profile of himself, set 15 years in the future, spelling out his accomplishments and how he’d reached his cherished goals. Barely awake, Bottrie wrote quickly.
“So I spoke of my career, of course, brilliant,” he says, “and after two-and-a-half pages of job and profession and career, I started something else.”
He wrote that in 2011, which was two years away, he would launch a foundation that would be called The Brain Train. It would attract funding from billionaire Bill Gates, open its first school in Haiti—his wife’s native country—in 2013 and be educating 150,000 students worldwide by 2025.
Six years later—spurred on by the tragedy of Haiti’s deadly 2010 earthquake—Bottrie is farther along in reality than he could possibly have imagined on that sleepless night. It was actually October 2011 when he and his philanthropic partners opened the doors to Lycée Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, a nonprofit school in Saint Marc, Haiti, an isolated community with a high rate of poverty and few education options. He credits the exercise of self-reflection with crystallizing what had been a vague sense of “doing something for children” into a much more specific and actionable plan.
Take the time for a bit of self-reflection. You never know where it might lead you. Remember, you’re looking to hone and sharpen your ability to see around the corner in terms of your own personal career. These exercises—which force you to look back and see where you have been—are a terrific and novel way to help prepare yourself to achieve a much more precise view of where you want to go—and whether you are on the right track.
The Next Step in the Journey
Louis Pasteur is often quoted as saying “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” My hope is that this journey through the world of strategic inflection points has been illuminating and perhaps inspiring for you. As you have seen, there are specific and predictable things that you can do to see around the corners of the next major shift.
The first part of seeing around corners is creating a vantage point. Inflection points don’t happen instantly—they take a while to take hold. Since snow melts from the edges, it’s vital to be curious and open to what is going on out there, long before it’s obvious what actions should be taken. Picking up on and interpreting weak signals is another skill that you can use to determine when to make a move. Thinking in terms of total arenas, rather than artificially created topics such as “industries,” can help broaden what you are looking for and at. And you can never go wrong with an external focus, paying attention to customers rather than assuming the world will operate in a way that you most prefer.
Moving on to taking action, you can contain the risk and exposure of leaping on a looming inflection point too early by using a discovery-driven approach. Lear
n from little bets, try early experiments, and question your own assumptions—they can be your worst enemy.
Then you have the challenge of bringing a critical mass of people along with you as the organization starts to respond to new inflection points. I’ve suggested that getting people focused on leading indicators of future success can be very helpful.
The organization, too, needs to be different after the inflection passes over it. Building innovation proficiency can be enormously helpful in making sure it doesn’t collapse or get overrun by competitors with a better grasp of things.
Finally, inflection points can be very personal. They have an impact on how you need to lead, particularly in “wartime.” They also can serve as opportunities for you to thrive in an entirely different way than you might have been expecting, leading to a life of outcomes that you genuinely desire.
The good news is that inflection points always represent opportunities for someone. There is no reason that shouldn’t be you.
Key Takeaways
Recognizing inflection points early on can lead to positive personal outcomes.
Look at changes in the arenas that you or your organization depend on to acquire insights into how these changes might offer opportunities or create risks.
Expanding your network beyond the usual suspects you spend time with can help you see things you couldn’t otherwise.
Deliberately getting feedback (and listening to it) can help you avoid blind spots you aren’t aware of.
Getting out of the building by finding and investing in different perspectives can give you great ideas.
You can easily build scenarios and weak signal detection mechanisms for yourself.
Often the most successful career path is one that builds diverse skills. It may be windy, but that can be surprisingly effective.
Skills can come together in unexpected ways to create great value.
You can use the principles of options and design thinking to plan your next set of moves.
Reflecting on your goals, life lessons, and journey thus far can be enormously powerful if you take the time to write down the key moments.
Acknowledgments
* * *
This is so daunting. I thought it would be nice to go beyond the Oscars-style thank-yous and shout-outs to all the people involved in this book and in my life and to give my readers a little glimpse into the story behind the book.
Personal Thanks
Books are awkward to live with—or, more precisely, book authors in the midst of producing one are awkward to live with. My husband, John, refers to my “hedgehog” periods—when a deadline approaches or a submission gets rejected, and it’s back to the drawing board. He went so far as to buy me a delightful little stuffed hedgehog (fortunately one without sharp quills). When it makes it to the corner of my desk at home, well, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
John was more of an advocate for the book than I was at times. “How is the book?” he would ask when I appeared to be getting distracted by yet another appealing-looking project or side activity. “You can’t let this slide,” he would remind me. Or when we were debating how I should be spending my time, he’d ask, “How will that affect the book?” Every author should have such an ardent book champion on their side.
The rest of my family is well used to the book process, and they have perfected the fine art of being distantly curious (lest too specific a set of questions send the author into a deadline-induced panic) while still maintaining a level of normalcy that is deeply comforting. Our children, Matt and Anne, gave me some very interesting insights that never would have emerged had I just lumbered along on my own. Anne, who was working on her MBA as the book moved along, made important observations about the intersection between personal motivations and business decisions that proved influential. Matt had some great ideas about including examples of companies that got things wrong (and why). Both of them serve as reminders that the world they were born into is a different place than the one I grew up in.
My dad, Wolfgang Gunther, had a front-row seat to observe the collapse of Kodak and the eventual irrelevancy of Xerox. He delights in sending me stories of business muddleheadedness that provide a lot of grist for the mill. Although my mom, Helge-Liane Gunther, passed away before the book was published, she was very encouraging as it got started. Both my parents provided examples of how to take some smart risks in the face of major inflection points and how to create pockets of safety, even while stretching out beyond what is comfortable.
Keeping the wheels on the bus while I was in book mode fell to my team. Marion Reinson brought much-needed marketing savvy into the mix and moved critical projects along. Pam Ryan is a genius—she truly earns her “virtual ringmaster” moniker and makes keeping everything going smoothly look easy. If there were Nobel Prizes for travel magic, Josette Carrizzo should receive one. And now we have Theresa Braun, Christine Andrewes, and Missy Pirrera to help bring this book into the world.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t tip a hat to our “Forge family.” Forge is a boutique local gym founded by Jack Molesko with partner coaches Ryan Carsia and Rebecca Swan. My good friend Eileen thought John and I would like working with them, and we do! We are there three or more times per week, and the coaches and the other members have been following the twists and turns in the book’s progress. It’s a great break from being hunched over a desk.
My wonderful colleagues at Columbia Business School provided lots of encouragement, good cheer, and support. It has been an honor to have been part of the institution for so many years now. The dialogues and discussions with our Executive Education clients enriched the examples in the book considerably. A special thanks to Trish Gorman, who delights in sparring about all things strategy and who emphasized the importance of the “right time” for making strategy choices.
The Story of This Book
Seeing Around Corners follows on my first solo book, The End of Competitive Advantage: How to Keep Your Strategy Moving as Fast as Your Business. That book made the argument that if you can’t count on competitive advantages lasting for long periods of time, you need to be able to continuously create new advantages and withdraw from exhausted ones on an ongoing basis. It was a bit of a challenge to strategy orthodoxy, but many people said that they found it a better fit for the world they were actually confronting than what they found in strategy textbooks.
Back in early 2016, my editor at Harvard Business Review, Melinda Merino, provided the initial impetus for this fifth book. She suggested that while a whole host of characters were circling around a new way to think about strategy and innovation, it was all still rather confusing and disjointed. As she said, “We have all this talk about ecosystems, platforms, digital, lean, agile, and so on, but it still feels as though people really don’t know what to do . . . There is some recognition that the environment has totally changed, and we need some way of making sense of it all.” Perhaps, she suggested, the follow-on to The End of Competitive Advantage could tackle some of this.
So I did a lot of reading, which is referenced in the main text. Still, having the seeds of an idea for a book is a rather long way from formulating a compelling proposal that can carry it. The core concept of inflection points crystallized in my mind when Martin Weil, our financial planner and a good friend, happened to send me an article called “When You Change the World and No One Notices.” The article describes how it took over three years for the New York Times to even mention the Wright brothers’ first flight, and nearly five years for the importance of their accomplishment to be more generally recognized. Wow, I thought. If you combine the idea that it takes a long time for the world to actually change with Andy Grove’s notion of strategic inflection points, that could be a very interesting jumping-off point. Inflection points happen—to quote Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises—“Gradually, then suddenly.” That’s the opportunity for those who see them early enough.
I spent most of the rest of 2016 pulling togeth
er assorted notes and trying to shape them into something, but it wasn’t really gelling. Meanwhile, back in the rest of my life, I’d developed a very nice working relationship with the team at the speakers bureau Leading Authorities. Mark French, Matt Jones, and Rainey Foster couldn’t have been better partners in helping to get the word out about the previous book. When Matt said that they were partnering with Ross Yoon, a literary agency, I thought it would be a good idea to reach out to them, which we did in January of 2017. Howard Yoon, a literary agent and principal at Ross Yoon, and I clicked immediately, and we agreed to start working together. I was a little concerned that my “stuff” at that stage was in assorted piles and heaps, but he assured me that a “data dump” was the best thing to send him.
Howard is amazing. Smart, blunt, honest, and candid, he has an uncanny ability to figure out where the bright threads are in the writing and help you ditch the rest. (Oh, the mess on my personal cutting-room floor . . .) One of the big turning points for this project came when he asked me to do the whole book as a PowerPoint presentation. (I think he was a little fed up with wading through my prose—one of the downsides of being a really fast typist.) The requirement to boil everything down into short presentation snippets was incredibly powerful. We got into a rhythm in which he would give me “assignments” and I would do my best to complete them, and eventually after more than a year, we had something he felt comfortable moving forward with.
Next came the arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and working closely with my editor, Rick Wolff. What I appreciate very much about Rick is that he is such a staunch advocate for our readers. Like Howard, his feedback is blunt but inevitably helpful. There was one chapter that I wasn’t sure either of us would be able to wrestle to the ground, but ultimately we landed on content that both of us were comfortable with. Rick, I can’t thank you enough.