A strategic inflection point is perhaps an engineer's description of what those who went to liberal arts school call a paradigm shift. It's a moment in time when circumstances shifted on you and you have a choice to make between two alternatives. At that moment two alternatives are very close to each other but in time they will take you very far apart, they will diverge. That moment in time is what I call a strategic inflection point. John Raftrey Engineers are trained to look at data, liberal arts majors may look to their gut.
Data is largely about the past.
Your gut has to come in to deal with things that are in the future about which we cannot have data, but it is up to your ability to merge past and future data and intuition in as analytical a way as you can. Well, I hope there were a few. But one that comes to mind is supporting the decision to start marketing to the end user community back at a time in the late '80s when that was not a very obvious thing to do at all. I think a wave is, in fact, a good analogy because depending on your sense of timing, you can ride it or you can bite it, and the difference between the two is very minimal. It all depends on your timing and your commitment and your skill.