Two centuries ago Eli Whitney envisioned a system for transforming gunmaking—then a craft of skilled artisans—into a process performed by unskilled workers. He decided to do business in a way that existed nowhere else. His system of interchangeable parts radically altered manufacturing, allowing it scale in a way no one had ever imagined.
Today’s managers often get caught up in incremental change. What we learn from Whitney is that when a business is at a crossroads, its leaders sometimes need to risk everything, even before the solution or outcome is fully understood. In management parlance, Whitney “pivoted” from making cotton gins to mass-producing guns. More recent business history holds examples of similar dramatic pivots:
Polaroid founder Edwin Land abandoned his plan for creating polarized (thus the name) windshields and headlights to produce the first instant camera—to keep his investors from losing their money.
And in the 1980s, when Intel was getting crushed in memory chips, Andy Grove “pivoted” out of his company’s main business and switched to microprocessors. Eli Whitney would be proud.
—V.H.