This same thought pattern was picked up by the great historian Alfred Toynbee wherein he wrote about the successive rises and falls of the primary and secondary civilizations as an example of the same type of rhythm that moves towards a goal much as a wave moves toward the shoreline. In 1986 Arthur Schlesinger picked up the same rhythmic theme when focusing on American history. However, there’s one important (at least for us) point that Schlesinger made. Unlike the cycles of civilization that built upon each other’s understand to create forward movement (as Toynbee pointed out), Schlesinger’s waves of motion are merely repetitive. Schlesinger argues that there is a continuing shift “between public purpose and private interests.” As you’ll see in our arguments here, that theory fits the corporate wave-cycle like a glove. Roughly within the same time period that Schlesinger was writing about the cycles of American history and Paul Kennedy was writing the same thing about the rise and fall of great national powers, Ichak Adizes and Lawrence Miller were penning the same wave-form theories about organizations. A few years later, William Bridges added his material to the topic. Each author made this point in developing their materials – the leadership style of the organization is tied to the organization’s point in the growth cycle. And finally, at roughly the same time Geoffrey Moore was writing the bible for bringing technological products into different markets – which we’ll be using as an intrepreneurial guideline for our purposes. We’ll begin with Geoffrey Moore’s vision of the bell curve. In his Crossing the Chasm, he divides the bell curve into five main categories of organizational development; the innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.