Intel's Andy Grove talks about inflection points that force you to revisit your core strategy. The thing is, inflection points are very rare. What managers have done lately is assume that they are everywhere, that disruptive technologies are everywhere. Discontinuous change, in other words, is not as pervasive as we think. It's not that it doesn't exist.
Disruptive technologies do exist, and their threat has to be on everyone's mind.
For every time that a new technology is out there, there are 10 times that one is not. Let's look again at the Internet. In Fast Company two years ago, we would have read that the Internet was an incredibly disruptive technology, that industry after industry was going to be transformed. It's not an incredibly disruptive technology for all parts of the value chain. In many cases, Internet technology is actually complementary to traditional technologies.