Point two: When they tried digital imaging, as Kodak and Polaroid did, they tried to push their existing organizations to execute a discontinuous innovation. The second error was not separating the future from the past. The biggest mistake I see in senior teams is their inability to deal with contradiction and so they default to one or the other. The biggest problem they have is answering: Who are we, and what do we do? Senior leaders often do not attend to this identity question.
Ball Corporation was able to move from a wooden bucket company to a glass jar company to a metal can company to a plastic bottle company.
Without an overarching identity, the reality of today trumps the future. In my work with organizations, probably the most challenging piece of work is to help leaders articulate a strategy with this notion of different kinds of innovation, to help them grapple with who they are and what they do.
Tushman : Organizations get trapped by their existing skills and capabilities. The challenge for the senior team is to get new skills. You get new skills by acquisition and training. The leadership team has to build an organization to host multiple, often inconsistent, skills simultaneously. The challenge for our leaders is not to negate the skills from the past, but to be proud of that, celebrate it, and build these new skills that will help the organization get to the future.
Tushman : Yes. At the end of the day, this is a book about leadership. These ambidextrous organizations celebrate the past and create the future. This is a leadership book about leaders who can walk into paradox and be able to thrive in contexts that are seemingly inconsistent. Every senior team I work with has to do strategy. Rarely do teams take seriously this issue of identity. This identity thing is a bit more important than strategy. Once you get the identity, then you can be strategically flexible.
Gerdeman : Organizationally, how should a company go about both exploiting current assets and exploring new ones? Tushman : The explore unit has to be physically separated, culturally separated, and staffed and rewarded separately from the exploit side. At USA Today , when the dotcom business got to be successful with customers, had a viable strategy, and was making money, then they integrated the explore with the exploit. As soon as the exploit side codes the explore side as complementary, rather than a substitute, this works very well.
So you keep them separate until you can develop a plan for integrating the two. Once you do that, it is then possible to host internally inconsistent organizational architectures to explore and exploit and to build linking mechanisms that help the firm leverage common capabilities.
In terms of the pragmatics of doing this, the senior teams need to talk. The secret sauce is dialogue: Articulate the vision and the strategy and talk about the challenges in doing it. He takes the statistics team to task instead of accepting any personal responsibility or attributing the failure to the drug itself.
Extrapunitive responses are all too common in the business world. Interestingly, long before they found themselves in the hot seat, both Hayward and Fuld were faulted for other instances of mismanaging blame.
HBR tried to reach Hayward and Fuld to give them the opportunity to respond but received no reply. The chief statistician, George, a Bold type, was impunitive, denying that he and his team had anything to do with the bad outcome.
When the HP board suggested that she delegate greater authority to her team and more power to the heads of key business units, she refused and was subsequently dismissed. Though less common than extrapunitive and impunitive personality types, people with intropunitive tendencies can also be problematic.
The researcher Wendy, a Diligent type, exhibited this behavior by taking on excessive blame. This may have been due in part to her gender: Because of their socialization and other cultural influences, women are more likely than men to be intropunitive. The underlying theme of our research is that many managers perceive and react to failure inappropriately and therefore have trouble learning from it—leading to more failures down the road.
Many of us have at some point assigned or avoided blame in a self-serving way, only to suffer negative fallout; on the flip side, we may take self-criticism too far, resulting in paralysis and stagnation. To foster and thrive in a productive work environment, we need to recognize and overcome these tendencies. Fortunately, managers at all levels of organizations, and at any stage of their careers, can fix their flawed responses to failure. Here are some key steps you should take:.
Several personality tests can help you assess your interaction style. Although the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is probably the best known, others have more empirical support. It does a good job of illuminating how you deal with failure in yourself and others. Or you might score high on the anger subfactor of neuroticism, suggesting a tendency to disproportionately fault others for minor errors and to exaggerate their gravity.
Another useful exercise is to reflect on challenging events or jobs in your career, considering how you handled them and what you could have done better.
You might ask trusted colleagues, mentors, or coaches to evaluate your reactions to and explanations for failures. Pay close attention to the subtleties of how people respond to you in common workplace situations, and ask for formal or informal degree feedback; you may be surprised at what you discover.
During an executive-coaching process he learned that his employees perceived him as extrapunitive. He realized that they had a more hierarchical worldview than he did and that he had underestimated how criticism from him—the boss—might affect them.
He also came to accept that small mistakes should be treated differently from big ones, and that feedback on them should be balanced with encouragement. Self-awareness is also helpful for people in the other two categories. Although not everyone has the time, inclination, or resources to get the kind of coaching or counseling necessary to surface and address deep psychological issues with respect to failure and blame, everyone can undertake and benefit from this sort of reflection.
As the media industry CEO learned, you must know your audience and recognize that each situation is different. Behavior that was appropriate in the past might be perceived as extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive in a new role or company. It requires that you know how your organization defines, explains, assigns responsibility for, and attempts to remedy failure. Take the case of a COO who had recently joined a health care nonprofit.
As part of a large-scale change effort, he was asked to lead a task force that would identify inefficient processes and make recommendations for improvements. Other members of the executive team were assigned to lead other groups. Because he was very busy with his day-to-day work, the COO and his task force fell behind.
Fortunately, the CEO was not a blaming type. After the meeting he privately told the COO that although falling behind schedule might have been unavoidable, he had to take responsibility for the delay. In his previous jobs, leaders were expected to hide their shortcomings, not acknowledge them as a means of showing their commitment to improving. The COO had to learn how to criticize himself, appropriately and publicly, in order to succeed in his new job.
Political awareness involves finding the right way to approach failure within your specific organization, department, and role. An intropunitive person might be effective at a small, highly collegial company but have to change his ways at a larger, more competitive one, where rivals might take advantage.
An extrapunitive boss who only slightly softened her criticisms when independently running a sales department might have to tone them down further when coleading a cross-divisional team. The strategies needed can work for any of the dysfunctional types.
The first is to listen and communicate. It sounds obvious, but most of us forget to gather enough feedback or sufficiently explain our actions and intentions. Especially when it comes to credit and blame, never assume that you know what others are thinking or that they understand where you are coming from. The second is to reflect on both the situation and the people.
At the end of each project or performance cycle, think about things that might have pushed you or others into extrapunitive, impunitive, or intropunitive reactions.
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