WHEN PLAN B IS A BEAUTY

Somewhere between a hockey-stick growth curve and a hit-the-wall failure lives “the pivot.” A deceptively sunny term, the pivot typically involves equal parts bug-eyed fear, rapid rereading of the market, hardnosed assessment of resources, and the torturous trick of killing the idea that captured your heart in the first place. “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth,” pigeon-keeper-turned-pugilist Mike Tyson once said. And while Tyson wasn’t addressing business startups, he could have been. Here, five cases in which companies that were on the ropes used quick-and-desperate strategic overhauls to become champions.

BY BILL SHAPIRO

TWITTER: Sometimes, Employees Know Best Podcasting is white-hot. But 15 years ago, when Ev Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass started Odeo as a podcasting platform, they were ahead of the curve. Way too far ahead. In 2005, Odeo had 14 employees banging away when, suddenly, the earth buckled: A little company named Apple announced it would be including a podcasting platform in the bazillions of iPods it sold. Williams quickly grasped that Odeo was poised for a Wile E. Coyote free fall, and he didn’t have a Plan B. What he did have was something that almost maybe sort of could have been called a strategy: a series of now-what? employee hackathons. It was in one of these that Glass and a web designer named Jack Dorsey developed a wildly…

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Inc. (Digital) - 1 Issue, May/June 2020

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