Rita McGrath
Appearances
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
idea behind a lot of this is it's a bit like the line from the old Hemingway novel, you know, the sun also rises or one character asks another, well, how did you go bankrupt? And the answer was, well, two ways, gradually and then suddenly. And in the gradual part of that curve, everything looks the same. Nothing looks as though it's changing.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And it's very hard for human beings to think about these exponential changes that can come out and really shift what's possible in the world.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yeah, they do. They do. And I think what's interesting is you kind of go from this will never happen to, hey, what's happening to, well, of course that happened. We're kind of like that when we think about change. I also think that there is a human tendency, if something's going to be very destabilizing to your business or your life, there's kind of a human tendency not to want to see it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yeah. So Antonio Perez grew Hewlett Packard's printer business from kind of nothing to, I think it was seven billion something business. And he lost out in his bid to become CEO at HP and Carly Fiorina was named instead. Now she's got a problem and he's got a problem. She's got to figure out what to do with him because he was very clearly a qualified heir apparent at that company.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And there were kind of two warring camps there. So she kind of let him carve out his own space around printing. So they forged a joint venture with Kodak, which went on for a few years. Perez wanted to buy Kodak. I don't think he got the board to buy into that. And eventually when the CEO rolled up and opened up a Kodak, he took that role.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And what he did in that role was he made the, what turned out to be pretty fatal decision to aim the whole company at printing just at that period when screens were getting so good that we didn't need to print. And I don't know this, but my belief and others observing the situation would agree that it was kind of ego-fueled.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
He was going to show the HP board and all the others how wrong they were to not have given him that role and was using Kodak as his vehicle to do that.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And we see that a lot, you know, that there is a time and a place for a particular strategy to be successful. And when the conditions change, you can't just rinse repeat.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yes. So Blockbuster is another one of those fascinating stories, because I think we get it wrong. You know, Blockbuster always gets told as, oh, you know, dumb old company, never saw the power of streaming. And that's not actually true. There was a very well-known turnaround, retail turnaround guy called John Antioco, who was put in the CEO role there. And the company was in trouble.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
There was a lot of competition. Their margins were getting squeezed. And they had two things that drove customers absolutely crazy. One was the late fees. And the other was that if you had a movie that came out that was really super popular, Blockbuster would only buy, you know, four or five to keep in the store at the time. So the hot new movies you often had to wait for.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And those were things that were irritating. So Antioco took a look at this and he said, well, what I think we need to do, I think we need to get rid of late fees. I think streaming is a thing. And he actually partnered with Enron, yes, that Enron, to build out a digital infrastructure that would make it possible to do that. But again, we're talking kind of before high-speed broadband.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
This was several years before even Netflix adopted streaming in a widespread way. So that was a little early technologically. But what happened in the back half of this was Antioco's moves were going to cost about $200 million apiece. So the streaming part and the late fees, which was a big part of their profit margin,
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And the parent company at the time was a company called Viacom, which just didn't have the appetite for that. So Viacom ended up floating an initial public offering with Blockbuster, who went to market kind of weakened. The turnaround had not yet taken place. And so a lot of investors were very skeptical.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Icon, who's a very famous activist investor, sees the opportunity, swoops in, buys the company, looks at Tioko's plans to do things and doesn't have any better feeling about it than the previous owner did. And so he cancels both of those things. The reality is, if you think about something that represents, I'll call it a time zero event. So the thing is here, you can take pictures of it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It's in the front page of the Wall Street Journal. We all know it's here. By the time you wait till then, it's definitely too late because now you're in reactive mode. And if there were any excess profits to be made, the early movers would have gotten them. But you also don't want to move too early.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And that's where I think a lot of these big, buzzy technologies that manage to attract a lot of venture capital money get themselves in trouble because there's a lot of ecosystem considerations that need to be taken into account. There's a lot of, can I get the talent that I need? Can I get the real estate that I need? Can I figure out how this is going to work?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So if you think about autonomous technology, autonomous vehicle technology, I don't know about you, but we were going to have autonomous technology in 2016. Remember that? And it's still kind of a promise to be gotten because I think the technology is hard enough.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But when you're talking about something that's going to affect the everyday lives of potentially hundreds of millions of people, there is risk you have to sort out. There's ownership regimes, what roads are safe for these things to go on. And so there's a whole social dimension that needs to happen in addition to just getting the tech right. And that's hard enough.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So in the beginning, people see the potential, right? So autonomous cars, right? Oh, my God, you know, wouldn't this be awesome? Older people won't have to lose their independence and, you know, we'll be able to have these regulated things in cities and it'll reduce pollution and it's going to be amazing. So there's a hype cycle.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Then what happens is the hype doesn't deliver to its expectations, at least in the short run. So the first... year or two, and then we have, you know, the AI winter sets in and everybody's disillusioned. And, oh, you know, we thought it was going to do everything from making Cocoa Pop still launching to the moon. And then everybody gets disillusioned.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But what happens is the survivors of that period have actually worked some cool stuff out now. So if you think about Dollar Shave Club, if you think about what came before the early internet, remember the late 90s and the dot-com crash, and everybody said, oh, this internet thing is never going to be a thing you know, we should all just forget it, forget it, right?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But out of that came Amazon, eBay, some of the early, really successful internet commerce platforms, programs which showed us that this could be useful in our lives. And so the next cycle is this sort of trough of disillusionment, but the weeding out of the stuff that isn't going to work till you find the stuff that works.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And then in the third stage, you have people saying, whoa, oh, now I get it. I could use that thing to do X, Y, Z. So what you see is this flowering of opportunities and this flowering of new applications. And that's the really exciting period, right? That's the period where You're now actually seeing real growth businesses built around that stuff.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And I'd say Dollar Shave Club would be a great example of that. And then you have the kind of, oh, yeah, this is just normal. This is like, what do you mean there was a time before high-speed broadband?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, the way I like to look at it is if you imagine this, as I said, a time zero event, and then you work backward, you just say, what would have to be true before this could actually happen? And what I like to do with companies is we'll make actually like a chart. I call it an early warnings signal model. And then we watch it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And then we say, wait a minute, if this happens and that happens and this other thing happens and, whoa, there's this other thing happening, maybe now's the time we need to really evaluate this for taking action now. So let me give an example. In 2020, 21, I was working with a pharmaceutical company.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And one of the big questions they had was, well, is the tech, you know, is online or some kind of tech involvement going to be the first patient port of call for access to healthcare? So if there's no doctors in offices, that's kind of a problem if you're a sales rep. So we looked at that and we said, well, what would have to be true for this to actually happen?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And there's a bunch of things that would have to be true. Medicare and Medicaid would have to figure out payment models for services that were not done in a facility, for services that were done either at home or mediated technologically. You probably would have to have legislative action which says, hey, drugs delivered electronically are as legitimate as drugs delivered any what way.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So we went back probably two and a half years later, and we looked at those early warnings that we had developed back in the day. And what you saw was yes, yes, yes, and yes. In fact, a bunch of the things that we'd anticipated were now starting to happen. When it came time to saying, hey, do we need to hire a data scientist? The answer was yes.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
When it came time to say, let's figure out what marketing looks like in a doctor-free environment. And there were a whole bunch of other things as well. For example, a lot of private physician practices were being sold to large players. You saw the disproportionate influence of the paying, the insurance companies, and, and, and, and. And so it caused them to take a real strategic shift.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And a very good one, you know, that it doesn't cost you anything to see what people are actually doing. So I'll never forget, I was some years back, probably in the late, right around 2000, I was doing some work with Nokia in a program called Choices, which was for the people that were in their new product development company. And at the time, I was working for a lot of telecom companies.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It was a very hot area. And so as I traveled around the world, I would always go to phone stores. So in the airport or on the street. And you'd watch what was going on in the physical phone store because it would tell you a lot about market share and who was hot and who was not and what were the salespeople pushing and all that kind of thing.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And what I started to see was the section of the store devoted to Nokia products was getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And so I was with this class and I said to people, well, tell me what you learn when you go visit a phone store. And the room went completely silent. And I said, well, nobody has any ideas. And they looked at me and they said, we don't visit phone stores.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I said, excuse me? They said, no, you know, R&D sends us the new phones with the new features to test out and we give them our feedback and we don't ever go to a phone store. And I was like, what?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And, you know, that's well-intentioned, but it's an example of the blind spots you can create when you create these special channels for your people that don't kind of put them in the position of the customer.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, what it tells you is there's – I'll use the language of Clay Christensen and Tony Ulwick here. There's a job to be done that whatever you're offering isn't doing. And the job to be done theory basically says don't think about customers buying your product or service. Think about them hiring your product or service to get a job done in their lives.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And if there's a missing job, it's not that you're – Employees don't admire and appreciate whatever you do, but whatever you're doing isn't covering something they need to get done. And so they're going to use an alternative. And that's valuable information.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Sure. So Gillette is one of the most successful consumer product companies in the world. They were founded in 1901 and they were one of the original safety razor manufacturers. So King C. Gillette, the actual man, founded this company. And before that, if you wanted to get a close shave, you pretty much had to go to a barbershop. So it was a huge breakthrough in mass market consumer products.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, I think to really understand Seidenberg's story, you actually have to start a little bit earlier with the breakup of AT&T. And this was Ma Bell. I mean, talk about the ultimate monopoly. There was a show in the 70s called Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In where there was a character that laughed. pretended to be an operator for the phone company.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So you have to kind of go all the way back to that. So a lot of telecom inherited this monopoly... guaranteed revenue, very profitable business, which you didn't have to work very hard. I mean, you had to deliver on your service. The regulators would ding you if you didn't provide reliable service and you didn't offer service to rural areas.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But in exchange for doing that, you kind of had the market to yourself. So what Seidenberg did, and he had an interesting story. He was the ultimate insider, wasn't a super educated man, worked his way up through the ranks, and kind of thought about And what comes after copper wires and what could happen in the future.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And I think probably the major incitement was to say, hey, a lot of these baby bells, as they called them, really had no idea how to compete like a regular commercial company. And he didn't want to end up like that. And so one of the things he did was he organized a merger of Bell Atlantic with GTE, which at the time was this kind of cool technology provider of the time.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And he thought that that company could teach what was called Bell Atlantic about the new technologies, the new things. And he was kind of blown away by that. So they renamed the company Verizon. And prompted to get out, actually, of these pretty profitable legacy businesses and start exploring some of these new technologies. So he did really controversial things like sell off physical phone books.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You know, he found ways of servicing them for less money. He eventually converted a lot of the sort of big pipes, not the copper pipes right to the home, but the big pipes to FIOSP.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yeah, you could still have a copper line in your house, but it would be connected to a fiber optic network. And then the fiber optic network would allow you to have broadband. It would allow you to compete with the cable companies, which he saw as a huge opportunity. And it was, if you remember back in the day, and again, I feel like I'm retelling ancient history, but it's not that long ago.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Before we had cable TV, you know, we had network TV and cable TV was seen as this huge advance because in the early, early days of cable, you didn't even, you didn't have ads, right? You could have ad-free television on demand, 500 channels, you know, it was, and those cable companies, again, they were protected as local monopolies in the early stages. They were considered to be natural monopolies.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And governments to provide them with the capital to build out these networks basically said, OK, Comcast, you have New Jersey. Spectrum, you've got New York. And you could guarantee that the customers that were interested in that product could buy the service there. So Verizon said, hey, wait a minute. I don't have to be a cable company, but I could compete using fiber optic lines.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And they were basically able to pull off the strategy unthinkable. They maintained a competitive advantage for literally decades. They were the dominant player.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So disengagement is the process of recognizing when something is just not going to be carrying your future forward. So, you know, mailing DVDs in the mail was, you know, most of Netflix's customers, I doubt, even have a DVD player anymore. So that was clearly going to be a business which was ending.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So I think there's a way of disengaging, which is respectful, you know, which said, hey, you know, the people that built this business have a lot to be commended, but it's not going to be a business for the future.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And so we have to figure out how to get resources and people and assets out of them, hopefully in a way that's not too painful so that we can repurpose those things to what the future is going to hold.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
They do have to work together. And I don't know about your workplace, but I think about my place. I mean, I work for a 250-year-old plus university. It's had a lot of time to collect cobwebs and stuff that's in the corners. And what's in those closets? Nobody's looked for 35 years. And so if you imagine a world where maybe every quarter you just announce a day or two of simplification.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
We're just going to stop doing stupid stuff that everybody knows doesn't really contribute to value. but that we're doing anyway. And that's kind of a really mini version of disengagement, but I think it's valuable and it's not expensive and it's something you could do wherever you are in your organization.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It is. It is. So can I tell you one of my favorite stories about this? This is a story of the Postal Service, which is an unlikely place to look for, you know, really interesting management innovations, but so be it. So I had a gentleman in my class who worked for the Postal Service and The branch that he was manager of had this giant analog machine.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It would sort and stack and people knew how to use it. And it sort of occupied the middle of the facility. And everybody that was in the place worked with this machine. And they decided that they needed to become more digital. And this big machine was going to get replaced by a bunch of smaller units that could do more specific things.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And it was going to cost less and it would be less vulnerable to breakdowns and everything. So the machine was supposed to be decommissioned over the course of a weekend. So you can imagine his surprise when Thursday night, a group of his people come to him and he said, boss, yeah, well, we want to talk to you about the machine. And he's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we spent months on this.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
We've talked, we've all agreed. You've all said it was good. And the people said to him, oh yeah, yeah, we get it. We're totally, we're ready to move on. It's just, you know, that machine has been a big part of our lives for a long period of time. A lot of us started working here when we were 18, you know, and that machine has been there every day.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
It's just, you know, and it's going to be a big change for us. And they said, well, we want to say goodbye. And he's like, you want to say goodbye to a machine? They said, yeah. So they decided they wanted to have an Irish wake.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, Mark has this interesting career where he buys stuff from one part of the world and sells it for a profit in another. And as you mentioned, he was trying to unload this set of decent quality, not exceptional, but decent quality razors that were made by a South Korean manufacturer.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
The next night, the next night. It was amazing. There were people giving speeches. There were people like screwing off little pieces of the machine to take home as keepsakes. But I've always thought that was a really lovely story because it represents both sides. You know, it represents the sadness of having to give up something that you've
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
that's been part of who you are for a long time, and the need to do that and move on.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yeah, so the thing was called Pure, if I remember properly. And the original concept for it was that there would be this huge market of providing safe drinking water in places which didn't have reliable access to it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But, you know, it's really hard, I think, if you've always lived your life in a developed country where you open the tap and safe drinking water comes out to really understand the day to day circumstances of people who don't have that luxury. And what they came to realize was that if they tried to do this thing as a commercial enterprise.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
That it was going to be very difficult for the people living in those areas to access it because safe water was just one of their problems, right? They were, you know, there's sanitation concerns, there's other health concerns, and they've got so little resources that to take what little they had and spend it on safe water, you know, maybe you'll just take the risk.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So it wasn't, they banged away at it for a while, but it just became clear that unless a government took an interest or an NGO took an interest, that it just wasn't going to be a commercial enterprise.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
But then I believe it was a series of natural disasters that they were able to basically go in as a charity and say, hey, look, we will donate this, you know, to keep people from getting terrible illnesses and whatnot. And that then did attract the attention of the NGO community, of the governmental community.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And it became, I wouldn't say a wildly profitable business for them, but at least a viable business for them.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Yes. Well, and, you know, if you're helping a government look after their people, they're going to be much more willing to have a conversation with you about what other products you might introduce in their country.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, I think when we innovate, right, we have a tendency to make up in our heads what the right solution is, right? So if I've got a problem with elderly people not able to drive, then autonomous cars is the solution. But instead, what I find with successful entrepreneurs and innovators, they tend to carve out a problem space for themselves that could be open to multiple solutions.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And I think we often forget that, that there's lots of ways of making something happen that don't necessarily involve a whiz-bang technology or whatever. And in fact, in many cases, you're better off not having that.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I think, you know, so much of the human journey, we don't like to think about this, but a lot of it is serendipity and chance. And did the right person speak up for you at the right time? And did you happen to live in the right zip code? You know, a lot of what we end up experiencing. doing in life has that flavor to it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And so I think the inflection points really come when, you know, big moments like you go off to school and there's a whole new group of people that you meet, or your family moves and there's another social setting that you're in, or you lose a job and it turns out maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, or you get a job and who expected that? And you prove to be really good at it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So I think in personal life, we have the opportunity to really think about inflection points. You want to think about these things as what I'll call options. An option is a relatively small investment you're making today that buys you the right, but not the obligation to make a bigger investment in the future. And we do this in real life all the time, right?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So we go to school, we invest in a skill building course, we agree to go to a training program. We do these things, not that we know exactly what's going to happen, but we think it'll create opportunities in the future.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So I think what you want to think to yourself is, is the cost of this, and I mean cost just in terms of effort and emotion and exhaustion and everything, is it got a big upside or a not so big upside?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, Mike Dubin at the time was kind of a failed entrepreneur. He found his way into marketing. He was doing a lot of video work. He tried to turn his life around. He applied to the Columbia Business School. I'm sad to say we rejected him, which is not so happy. But the two guys get to talking over what I presume is some adult beverages.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, I think when it comes to personal success, there's a bunch of really interesting research that's done about what makes people feel happy, you know, what motivates people. And Dan Pink talks about, you know, you want a sense of agency in your life. You want to know that You have the right to make choices and have control. You want to gain a sense of mastery.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And that could be many different things. For some people, mastery is woodworking. And then they go very happily to the rest of their formal job in an insurance company and fill out forms all day long. And that's fine with them. And then the last is a sense of purpose, a sense of motivation.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And I think a lot of research suggests that if you are in communities where you are of service to others and you feel that your life is has a greater purpose that you are, you tend to be more satisfied with that life. You tend to find greater fulfillment in it.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So when it comes to translating inflection points from the business world to the personal, I think one of the differences is that it's so much more associated with your values and what makes you feel that you've made a contribution and you're feeling fulfilled and you're doing well by other human beings.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And what they start thinking about is if you were going to try to sell razors in this day and age, in 2010, you know, we've had e-commerce for a while by then. We've had home delivery of just about everything. Why would you do it the way Gillette did it? Gillette's business model was basically you invest in high-end R&D. that allows you to charge higher prices for the great products that ensue.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And then you use your armies of marketing people to get these things in just the right places in the retail store. And in 1990, when they first introduced the sensor, this was revolutionary. The technology was patented. Nobody else could do it. By 2010, when this conversation happens, the world has changed completely.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Other companies had shown that direct-to-consumer could work, which is a company shipping stuff directly to your door and developing a personal relationship with you. Don't forget, Gillette's main relationships would be like with Walmart, right? They don't actually get all the way to the end customer. And so it gives those DTC, as we call them, companies a big advantage.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And he had quite a bit of experience with wholesaling, with retailing, and Dubin knew the power of the internet. So it was that kind of magical moment where the possibilities have really changed. And now you could see a niche in the market where you could actually create something that was entirely new.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
um gillette's position now you know as you said in the introduction um if you've had a smooth ship for a long time i mean if you're an executive at gillette at that time what are you thinking about you're thinking about two blades versus three blades three blades versus four you're thinking about how much ad placement do i place in television right because we hadn't yet realized television is kind of on the way out in terms of reaching lots of people especially young people um so your whole mental capacity is taken up with those kinds of questions you're not
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
looking for what's the hot new thing that might introduce a completely different variable into your sales process.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Oh, they loved it. This thing went completely viral on YouTube. And as you probably could hear, Mike's a very... personable guy. He's very approachable. And when you think about most of corporate America television ads, you know, they've been run through the PR department and legal and compliance.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And, you know, they're not really speaking directly to you, the customer, whereas Mike was a master of that and did so for a long time. So this was really his first introduction to the main stage of speaking directly to his target audience, which were younger men, Right. And Mike also realized that a lot of these young guys were very frustrated at the experience Gillette was offering.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You had to go to a store. Razors are expensive and they're small. So they're catnip for shoplifters. And so what do the stores do? They lock them up in razor fortresses. So you're standing around on a Saturday morning waiting for the friendly, helpful retail employee who's got the keys to come help you unleash this thing.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I mean, it's just a really horrible experience as opposed to the convenience of having them just show up on your doorstep.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
I get the sense from that ad that Gillette took itself more seriously than Dollar Shave Club, Rita.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Oh, absolutely. And so did many other incumbent firms at the time. As I said, you got legal, you got compliance. Everybody's saying if the ad is OK, people are worried about brand image. You know, the fact that Mike's video was literally filmed in his warehouse with him wandering around like. And it throws in lots of humorous elements, like a big stuffed teddy bear.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And he says, hey, you don't need to pay Roger Federer's salary if you buy from us. I mean, he was really poking Gillette in the nose on that. And yes, I think a lot of the big consumer product brands at the time, you know, celebrity endorsements, a big deal. I don't know how much they paid Federer, but I'm sure it was a lot of...
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Oh, the response was really negative. People felt it was finger pointing. People felt it was kind of accusatory. Instead of their historical positioning, which was the best a man can get, this is like the worst a man can be, right?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Better, better. They picked up many of the segments that found shopping in the stores to be irritating. There are some men who felt the quality of the shave was better using their traditional Gillette blades. And so they were able to kind of mount a rear guard there. But that's a defensive action. That's not really winning and taking the offensive. It really just stops the bleeding.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
When Procter & Gamble bought Gillette in 2005, they spent $57 billion for it. Dollar Shave Club got its going with like Dubin's life savings of $35,000. I mean, in the past, it would be inconceivable that a tiny little upstart literally running out of his apartment, sticking on labels on packages by hand could be... even a modest threat to Mighty Gillette.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So if you think about sort of intellectual deniability, why would you believe that could be true? But what had happened in the interval was some big changes in tech. So Dollar Shave Club could start up without servers, and they didn't have to hire programmers to build custom websites, and they didn't have to manufacture.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
You know, manufacturing razors is really hard, and they already had a supply because of Mark's efforts. So I think it was very difficult for the Gillette executives to realize this was real.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
And, you know, don't get me wrong, 50% share in a high-margin business like that is nothing to sneeze at. That's a really good business. It's just not as good as it was, right? And I have a lot of credit for the people at Procter & Gamble and Gillette. They really know their game, but the game changed.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, I define an inflection point as something that changes what is true about the rules around your business, typically by a factor of 10 or more. So 10 times faster, 10 times cheaper. In the case of Dollar Shave Club, 10 times more convenient or even more than that. And it can take incumbents by surprise, as we saw with Gillette. People forget that, right?
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
So these things seep into this whole world of reality. And then something comes along like internet, digital advertising, e-commerce, changes all those rules, and your system is still operating on the old ones.
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
Well, okay, back in 1995, the internet was very new. Computers at the time operated on, you know, things called floppy disks. And things were very primitive. Most of us got our access to the internet, if we were on at all, which most people weren't, by dial-up. You remember? You know, the modem dial-up. And...
Hidden Brain
When To Pivot
The visionaries among us were saying, oh, you know, the web is going to completely replace newspapers and novels and magazines. And Stoll was looking at the reality of 1995 and he was saying, let me get this straight. You're going to drag a computer to the beach to read your racy romance novel? I don't think so.