Beyond either/or: building organizations where efficiency and entrepreneurship happily co-exist
What are the competing priorities in your organization? Perhaps its scale versus flexibility, creativity versus discipline, or risk-taking versus prudence. Each of these trade-offs reflect a deeper paradox, the tension between exploit and explore. The evidence suggests that most large-scale organizations don't get this trade-off right. Every day, in a thousand ways, exploit wins at the expense of explore. Fifty years ago the penalties of clumsily managed trade-offs might have been tolerable, but not now—not when a business must be a paragon of penny-pinching efficiency on one hand and a champion of continuous creative destruction on the on the other. In today’s environment of hyper-competition and hyper-change, the winners will be the organizations that are capable of making subtle and perfectly timed trade-offs or, better yet, of redefining the frontiers of exploit and explore.
But what does this look like in practice? How do you escape the curse of either/or thinking? In this session, we’ll unpack the lessons from a diverse group of organizations that have learned how to transcend the toughest tradeoffs in management.