From Harvard B-School Publishing
In 2009, managers will realize that they are no longer dealing with a crisis; they are dealing with a condition. In the Great Disruption, companies simply can’t anticipate that today’s competitive advantage will last for more than a few years. Former Intel Chairman Andy Grove anticipated this more than a decade ago when he wrote, “Only the paranoid survive.”
While companies might want to return to the corporate equivalent of comfort food–cost-cutting and a focus on the core business–the Great Disruption won’t allow it.
This sounds like good advice for all of us in the business world:
# Placing a premium on progress. While more and more companies recognize the name of the game is transformation, the tolerance for blind experimentation has never been lower. Innovators will need to continue to find creative, cheap ways to bring their ideas forward. Fortunately, they can tap into a plethora of powerful tools to facilitate rapid learning.
# Mastering paradox. Leaders in most Fortune 500 companies grew up in an era where they could succeed largely by exploiting their existing business. Today’s leaders need to master both exploitation and exploration. They need to develop the ability to rely on precise data in their core business and intuition and judgment when they are creating new growth businesses. They have to live the old F. Scott Fitzgerald mantra, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the same mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
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