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Exploitation & exploration The best companies keep them in balance, writes Jens Maier
My book The Ambidextrous Organization – Exploring the New, While Exploiting the Now was published in 2015. How much progress have we made? Are leaders and organizations better at ambidexterity than they were four years ago, when I was writing? Ambidextrous organizations need ambidextrous leaders; that is, organizations need to build organizational capabilities (e.g. processes supporting exploration) and leaders need to develop their individual competencies to embrace exploration opportunities. Dialogue Q1 2019
In my experience, exploitation is not the challenging side of the equation. Most businesses are built around processes to get existing products and services out of the door and most leaders are rewarded for doing the same. But without balancing capabilities to create the new while conducting ‘business as usual’, businesses are destined to fail at some point. There are three important aspects that organizations trying to embrace ambidexterity need to address.