INFLECTION POINTS

It has certainly been a long hiatus since I last posted on the Blog. No I did not stop imagining or writing, I got busy making a significant change in my life and posting to the blog took lower priority. Thanks to friends who wrote to me during this time wondering why I stopped or turned less prolific.

This essay has little to do with my career or action at the current point in time but more so a rumination of everything thus far… the breakthroughs, the cruising phases, the downward spirals and all the rest. Nothing fascinates me more than looking back at past events to think about how I could have acted different? What would have happened if I made a different decision? Sort of like the movie Sliding Door, staring Gwyneth Paltrow and John Hannah.

What were fascinating to me were the inflection points in my career. These were clearly the defining moments to move my career where it is and what it could potentially be at some point. Years ago when I worked for Intel, Andy Grove published his second book Only the paranoid survive, which was based on how astute business leaders identify inflection points and the story of Intel’s evolution. I worried over it for months wondering how can I foresee these inflection points? How can I frame my career to capitalize from my understanding and foresight of these inflection points?

We have all studied basic economics at school and the classic price elasticity of demand, the exponential decay in demand as price increases. Real life curves are not as smooth as the classical ones in books but the jagged steps are the inflection points and opportunities we are face with. There are very few true inflection points where one gets the chance to ride the wave, most others are ones we create on our understanding of:
• Who we are?
• How did we get to be the way we are?
• What can we do to leverage who we are?
• What’s happening around us and how can we reframe who we are within the new world?

Consistence in action and focus can force one to think with more than just the brain and mind. I just put down another book I read, Radical chance, Radical results by Kate Ludeman, Eddie Erlandson a must read for some one who is not yet bought in on the concept of thinking with the bodymind.