Time's Up!

22Adoption Models

A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end.

—Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, 1996

Economic revolutions don't care what you think about them.

—Michael C. Munger, Tomorrow 3.0, 2018

Remember department stores? Perhaps you grew up with one in your town where you went to buy clothes, toys, and other goods. In 1960, there were 316 department stores throughout the United Sates, some small and others large, such as Macy's, Nordstrom, JCPenney, and of course the Amazon of its day, Sears. At one point, Sears was 1% of the USA's gross domestic product (GDP). Then an unknown little startup in Bentonville, Arkansas, was founded in 1962. Walmart was followed by other discount stores such as Kmart. As I write this, only eight of the original large department stores still exist, with one of the most successful being Dayton‐Hudson.

The late Harvard professor Clayton Christensen's Harvard Business School course, Disruptive Strategy, detailed this history of the department store industry. Our mutual Australian friend and colleague, Ric Payne, wrote up this case study on his blog, “The Six Business Trajectories,” explaining how Dayton's founder, John F. Geisse, responded to these low‐end disrupters:

In 1962, Dayton's ...