Sunday, February 12, 2006

Recognizing the Inflection Point

The task of management team is to recognize inflection points. There will be Business/Customer acquisition inflection points, There will be Operational Inflection Points , then there will be the People Management inflection points.

Recognizing these inflection points is half the battle won. Inflection points by nature will not be apparent until you have a management team that is capable of introspection. Customer inflection points are the easiest to recognize as the impact of that will be far reaching and has a true impact on the financial status of the company. Every start up gets that one customer that show cases or validates the capability - beyond which event - It is almost ( until the next inflection point) more of the same. So the management team should recognize that inflection point and invest substantially and heavily in more sales for that one kind of service. Afterall repeatable sales is what makes an organisation grow from a startup to a success.

Operational Inflection Points - are slightly more milder and harder to detect unless there is enough data that can be analysed. For an analytical management team - it will be easier to detect, This has got less to do with introspection and more to do with data analysis. An example for that might be "delivering flawlessly million transactions a month ". When yuo deliver consistently so many transactions - your intellectual property in operations management takes a life of its own and suddenly that elusive scalability seems all human and possible.

People Management Inflection Points - These are the most subtle and most difficult to detect and the ability to detect these separates the men from the boys. Providing consitent and complete feed back is the key to recognizing inflection points in growth and scalability of the people. At each success point in an organisation it is important to reward and recognize based on the company culture. If the company culture is to make heroes of individuals then the reward and recognition scheme should relate to that , if it is a team oriented culture then the recognition should be team centric and should not have any conflicting messages. The inflection point comes when there is disconnect between expectations and self evaluation vs peer view of contribution.
If more of the senior management finds a gap between self evaluation and peer view of contribution then the inflection point has come.