Andy Grove, the talented and legendary Intel leader, defined the term, “Strategic Inflection Points.” All leaders must embrace his recommendation to pay keen attention to such times in a company’s life. React too late, and your business will not catch up. In his words, strategic inflection points capture “what happens to a business when a significant change takes place in its competitive environment. A major change due to introduction of new technologies. A major change due to the introduction of a different regulatory environment. The major change can be simply a change in the customers’ values, a change in what customers prefer. Almost always, it hits the corporation in such a way that those of us in senior management are among the last ones to notice. What is common to all of them and what is key is that they require a fundamental…
How do customers experience your business models?
My only experience with AT&T is as a customer. But even as an outsider I can tell that the company has huge organizational silos (albeit with a workforce that finally understands customer-friendliness). Every transaction for each of my multiple AT&T services appears to require interfacing with a completely separate information system and likely business unit that often has no record of what’s happening in the other accounts. For examples: I get three bills. When I ask for one bill I am told, “All your services have different cycles and that would be a mess.” After moving to a new residence, I returned the U-verse device (which enables TV, wireless internet and the land line connection) from my former address to the AT&T wireless store, where I was told, “We don’t accept U-verse returns here. You have to go to the UPS store.” In…