Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, September. 2019, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. Available from Amazon here.

The first prescriptive, innovative guide to seeing inflection points before they happen—and how to harness these disruptive influences to give your company a strategic advantage.

Paradigmatic shifts in the business landscape, known as inflection points, can either create new, entrepreneurial opportunities (see Amazon and Netflix) or they can lead to devastating consequences (e.g., Blockbuster and Toys R Us). Only those leaders who can “see around corners”–that is, spot the disruptive inflection points developing before they hit–are poised to succeed in this market.

Columbia Business School Professor and corporate consultant Rita McGrath contends that inflection points, though they may seem sudden, are not random. Every seemingly overnight shift is the final stage of a process that has been subtly building for some time. Armed with the right strategies and tools, smart businesses can see these inflection points coming and use them to gain a competitive advantage. Seeing Around Corners is the first hands-on guide to anticipating, understanding, and capitalizing on the inflection points shaping the marketplace. 

Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen, September. 2019, reviewed

McGrath has chosen a challenging, difficult, but interesting topic to write about. The subtitle “How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen” illustrates the complexity of what she is aiming to address. Afterall hindsight is always 20/20 and if everyone had this ability then we would have no stories like Kodak, Nokia, Blockbusters and all the other infamous anecdotes of businesses that failed to see the trends that would usher their own demise.

This does make ‘Seeing Around Corners’ an interesting book to read. Fortunately the case studies such as Satya Nadella’s seemingly successful turnaround of Microsoft’s fortunes make for compelling and insightful reading. These case studies ensure that the book successfully grapples with the books desired topic, and does reward the reader for selecting this book. Naturally getting Clayton Christiansen, the godfather of disruption studies to write the foreword is always a good validation of the value of the ideas within the book too.

The final chapter also tackles the challenges of applying a similar mindset to our own lives too which is never any harm in terms of considering where we are at in our own lives. We enjoyed reading this book, and it is short enough and to the point that it is time well spent to read it and analyse the insights it is offering.

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