Strategic Inflection Point - Dr S. Grove. (2003).

Firstly, it is important to take cognizance of the fact that there may be a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap. Therefore if your Business Life Cycle is going into decline, and you need to find a way to resuscitate your business, be very circumspect before you venture into a disruptive market, look for a nondisruptive market with a brand new innovation. This is becoming more possible in 4.0 or Digital Business Transformation, such as AI, IoT, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology ( which is the building block of the "internet of value," and enables recording of interactions and transfers "value" peer-to-peer, without a need for a centrally coordinating entity), Digitization, Machine Learning, Robotics, and so on. Remember that your skills-set is vital - the concept might sound great, but are there the relevant resources, in particular skills and funding.

DBT in fact embraces "serious" change management which in this case can be massive, and "shifts" to create exponential value, estimate future customer needs (predictive analytics - that makes predictions about future outcomes using historical data and big data combined with statistical modeling, data mining techniques and machine learning), and leverage ecosystems so that "partners" are no longer forced into silos. So this change also embraces risk, and is not a sought after strategy for those who are risk-averse, however there is no choice, and the great-reset is already here. The Great Reset Initiative was an economic recovery plan drawn up by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.?Industry 4.0 or DBT is the fusion of the real world with the virtual world. This digital revolution is marked by technology that takes advantage of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to nurture automatic learning systems, and this is a science and an art.

The inflection point is not necessarily a single point in time, but is usually accompanied by a particularly noticeable period of unrest within your organisation. In the case of DBT the elements are initiated by changes in the external environment, such as the Macro environment (socio-economic and technology taken from PESTLE), and the C-suite of management thus need to be doing continual environmental scanning. So rethink and reposition very quickly. Use the "brand equity" framework ( Kevin Lane Keller: 2021) if necessary, such as crowdsourcing and collaboration. Areas of collaboration embrace closer economic and industrial integration in strategic value chains.

Leaders have to be alert to major change - a 10x major change (Andy Grove - former CEO of Intel) thus states that the organisation requires a fundamental change in strategy. The change can take the organisation to new heights or send it spiraling down into oblivion. Thus the important thing is for leaders to discern between expected change and profound change, when the balance of forces shifts from old to new. Success in change does not simply rely on scanning the environment, but also making sense of the incoming information/data.

Forecasting the future from the past ignores the fact that the future holds different possibilities as yet unseen. If you only see white swans, you might assume that all swans are white. So apply soft computing which is called "fuzzy logic". Nassim Taleb used the metaphor of a black swan (found in Australia) to discuss major scientific discoveries and historical events. These black swan events combine low predictability and high impact. (Stock market crash of 1987 for example).

So leaders should scrutinize any misalignment between the organisations strategy statements and its strategy actions and monitor inflection points. Actions are driven by the stark reality of having to win business in the marketplace against competition (using competitive value adding propositions/isolating mechanisms and not comparative pricing competition.) An organisations front-line personnel/line managers are likely to see and adapt to a new reality first. So use a bottoms-up democratic style of management, and then look at agility, scale and lean management for example. "Lean" is widely used as one of the ways of implementing kaizen. The acronym stands for the four steps (Plan, Do, Check/Study and Act).

With regards to electricity and maintenance: there are in fact a number of maintenance strategies deployed:

• Run-to-failure;
• Scheduled maintenance;
• Preventive maintenance;
• Predictive maintenance;
• Corrective maintenance;
• Condition-based maintenance;
• Predetermined maintenance;
• Reactive maintenance and
• The 4IR method is predictive maintenance. So transformers are directly monitored during regular operation to anticipate failure. This is part of deep learning, which in an important part of the 4IR. Deep learning (DL), is a branch of machine learning (ML) and of course artificial intelligence (AI) and which is nowadays considered as a core technology of today’s Fourth Industrial Revolution. Due to its learning capabilities from data, DL technology originated from artificial neural networks (ANN), and AI-based predictive maintenance can boost availability by up to 20% while reducing inspection costs by 25% and annual maintenance fees by up to 10% (at the moment).

"AI is at an inflection point as generative AI has started a new wave of opportunities driving a step function increase in inference workloads"?(Jensen Huang: 2023).

In closing, ?an inflection point, in general, is a decisive moment in the course of some entity, event or situation that marks the start of significant change, and in this case it is 4.0 - Digital Business Transformation. Businesses are seeing the value add proposition through investing in Industry 4.0 technology applications and digital business models. The pandemic (Covid) reinforced the value of industry 4.0, but it also exposed the limitations of today's implementation and has set a higher bar for success. So think of the "change train" pulling into the station. You can stay on the platform, get on the change train, or stand in front of it, either way it is going to leave the station. So get on board now (yesterday), or be crushed into insignificance or left behind. Avoid the edge of chaos and ultimate decline as highlighted in Dr S Groves Model above highlighting inflection points. So by identifying whether you are nearing an inflection point will help you pivot in the right direction to continue on your path of success, and this is aligned to a pivot strategy. A Pivot can be seen as a reaction to encountering a Strategic Inflection Point. Pivots also happen in search of the correct strategy, product market fit ( product-market fit describes a scenario in which a company's target customers are buying, using, and telling others about the company's product in numbers large enough to sustain that product's growth and profitability, and in fact the Product Life Cycle), which makes them more active, and Eric Ries' structured approach to identifying the need for a pivot strategy seems to be exactly what Grove is looking for.

Prof Rory Dunn.