The Ambidextrous Organization

Exploring the New While Exploiting the Now

Jens Maier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137488145
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

How can businesses balance the demands of both exploiting and exploring? Companies and their leaders have to use both hands: on the one hand making next quarter's targets through existing business, whilst simultaneously exploring new opportunities. This is the first book to explain how to use this approach to encourage innovation.

Part I

Challenges

Introduction to Part I

Why is this Important for You and Your Organization?

In Part I we will investigate the challenges around ambidexterity at both the individual and the organizational level. Therefore, in four separate chapters we will discuss:

1) The strategic challenges; challenges at the organizational level.

2) The leadership challenges; the focus being on the individual leader.

3) The process challenges; these are challenges at the organizational level.

4) The mindset challenges; the influence of the “dominant logic” on both the organization and the individual.

At the end of Part I we will have built the foundation upon which we can then discuss possible solutions in Part II.

In this introduction, we will first highlight the generic challenges for individuals in organizations by discussing the concept of the roles of managers and leaders.

Then we will focus on the challenges for organizations based on discussions with global learning and development (L&D) experts from large organizations and leading business schools.

The Individual Perspective: The Roles of Manager and Leader

Organizations have their strategic plans, their processes for innovation. These have to be implemented by individuals, real people. Implementation of a plan cannot be achieved with a spreadsheet, it requires real people who drive the plans and the ideas forward.

These real people will have their own personal agendas and goals. The intersection between these two perspectives is clear. Organizations can provide certain formal “roles,” like Head of Corporate Development, Head of Research, and so on. These formal roles go along with formal descriptions of the role, including the responsibilities entailed. Individuals have the option to apply for these formal roles.

Now, having a formal role provides clarity for both the organization and the individual. However, just having a formal role and an individual in that role will not lead to any action by itself. It is the actual interpretation of that role that leads to action.

In this section two concepts around roles of individuals are being presented, the formal role as well as the project/change role. The objective is first to provide two different perspectives from which an individual can look at the ambidextrous business, and then to create the clarity to enable them to see clearly.

We will first look at how this fits in with the formal day-to-day role of manager and leader, and then we will examine the view from the project/change perspective.

The formal perspective

As Head of Corporate Development or as Head of Research, you will have a clear job description around your role and responsibilities. In addition, you will have agreed clear goals and deliverables with your boss for the next 12 months.

TABLE I.1 Roles of Managers and Leaders

Leader	Manager
• Create	• Implement
• Innovate for entire organization	• Administer within a sub-system
• Develop	• Maintain
• Think long term	• Think short term
• Ask what and why	• Ask how and when
• Challenge the status quo	• Accept the status quo
• Create vision and meaning	• Act within established culture
• Induce change in people	• Induce compliance in people
• Do the right things	• Do things right

Source: Bennis (1989); Conger/Kanungo (1998).

Now, how these agreements are interpreted is a question of choice for the individual. A useful differentiation is the idea of spelling out the potential differences between the roles of “managers” and “leaders.”

The following messages are important here:

These are not two different people; these are two different roles.

This is not dependent on hierarchy; the leadership literature is quite clear: We need leadership at all levels.

How is this related to ambidexterity?

For exploitation projects, such as continuous improvement, you can achieve a lot if you take the perspective of the role of “manager.” For exploration projects however, it is imperative you take the “leader” perspective. In exploration projects you have to challenge the status quo.

Peter Drucker put it so elegantly:

Managers do things right.

Leaders do the right things.

As an ambidextrous leader you have to know when and how to use one hand (manager/exploitation) and when and how to use the other (leader/exploration).

The project perspective

Formal roles apply for the running of the “normal” business. Innovation and change however, are much more influenced by a project mindset. This means that the organization has identified a specific challenge that the normal organizational structure is not able to handle. In terms of innovation, the trigger can be either from a pro-active opportunity or through a defensive, reactive response to protect existing territory.

In both situations requiring a project mindset, you can find yourself in potentially three different roles:

Architect.

Project leader.

Implementer.

Architect

In the role of the architect you are responsible for creating the whole architecture around innovation for the organization. This implies you have to assign roles and responsibilities for both exploitation and exploration projects. Most importantly, you are also responsible for the design of the different processes for exploitation and exploration projects.

The key elements of the architect’s role are:

Strategizing – to purposefully identify opportunities and possible threats.

Unfreezing – generating a sense of urgency for the organization to change.

Creating a leadership coalition.

Building an alliance of key stakeholders to address the challenge.

Focusing on goals, values, and business results.

Project Leader

You may find yourself in the role of change implementer. In this role you will be formally assigned leader of an innovation/change project. Here you are in a project mindset; you are the translator of the architect’s vision and need to see all the implications of that vision at the division and/or department level.

The project leader’s role entails:

Coordinating the internal resources required for success.

Delivering on expectations.

Overcoming resistance and creating the necessary buy-in from various constituencies.

Focusing on moving the organization.

Implementer

You may find yourself at the receiving end of an innovation/change initiative. The architect and project leader have already delivered on their responsibilities. This is no longer the time to question, or to re-open, old discussions. The simple task is to get it done locally.

Therefore, this role is about institutionalizing the new way of doing things. At the local level, the implementer role is about:

Winning hearts and minds for innovation/change.

Identifying and communicating the personal benefits to the local stakeholders.

Refreezing – anchoring the innovation/change process into the “new normal” of day-to-day business locally.

The Organizational Perspective

Many organizations seem to face the challenges of ambidexterity. Therefore, it is not a surprise that this topic is also high on the agenda of the European Foundation of Management Development (EFMD). The EFMD provides a forum for leading business schools and organizations to address the common professional challenges in management development.

A recent EFMD conference at the University of St. Gallen addressed the topic of ambidexterity,¹ attracting participants from business schools, corporate partners, and educational suppliers from four continents. The focus of the discussion was very much on how to best link a strategic issue, building an ambidextrous organization, to the issue of developing individual leaders. The participants were asked:

What do you observe in your organization/client organizations? On a spectrum:

1) Topic ignored.

2) Background noise – one of those trends.

3) Individual ambassadors, like Head of Strategy, Head of Learning and Development.

4) Top team agenda.

5) Call to action: top team – strategy – learning and development.

The most frequent score was 3, “individual ambassadors.” Here we are talking about people in functions such as business development, Head of Strategy and Head of Learning and Development. In these roles individuals have to look to the future with a time horizon well beyond the current budget year. This result was confirmation of observations made during client discussions over the previous few months.

The next most frequent score was 2, the category of backg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables, Figures, and Boxes
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction – The Case for Ambidextrous Organizations and Ambidextrous Leaders
• Part I: Challenges
• Part II: Solutions
• Conclusion
• References
• Further Reading
• Index