Adam Brandenburger, J.P. Valles Professor and Vice Dean for Graduate Education
It is a fall day in Boston in 1996. I am sitting in my office working on my commentary for the Harvard Business Review on the just-published bestselling business book Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove, the legendary CEO of Intel Corporation. I am writing about my favorite idea in the book, which is Grove’s notion of a “strategic inflection point.” As Grove puts it: “[A] strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights.…