Productive Tensions: How Every Leader Can Tackle Innovation's Toughest Trade-Offs
- 2h 59m
- Christopher B. Bingham, Rory M. McDonald
- The MIT Press
- 2022
How leaders can recast innovation's toughest trade-offs—efficiency vs. flexibility, consistency vs. change, product vs purpose—as productive tensions.
Why is leading innovation in today's dynamic business environment so distressingly hit-or-miss? More than 90 percent of high-potential ventures don't reach their projected targets. Surveys show that 80 percent of executives consider innovation crucial to their growth strategy, but only 6 percent are satisfied with their innovation performance. Should leaders aim for Steve Jobs-level genius, shower their projects with resources, or lean in to luck and embrace uncertainty? None of the above, say Christopher Bingham and Rory McDonald.
Drawing on cutting-edge research and probing interviews with hundreds of leaders across three continents, Bingham and McDonald find in Productive Tensions that the most effective leaders and successful innovators embrace the tensions that arise from competing aims: efficiency or flexibility? consistency or change? product or purpose? Bingham and McDonald spotlight eight critical tensions that every innovator must master, and they spell out, with dozens of detailed examples of both success and failure, how to navigate them. How do you excite customers about a product they've never imagined? When is it wise to accept what the data is telling you, and when should you ignore the data and plow forward anyway? How can you maintain stakeholders' trust and support during radical unforeseen course corrections? Bingham and McDonald guide readers through innovation's thorniest tensions, using examples drawn from the experience of organizations as varied as P&G, Instagram, the US military, Honda, In-N-Out Burger, Slack, Under Armour, and the snowboarding company Burton.
About the Author
Christopher B. Bingham is the Phillip Hettleman Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Area Chair of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina.
Rory M. McDonald is Thai-Hi T. Lee Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
In this Book
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Management on the Cutting Edge series
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Series Foreword
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Introduction
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The Opportunity Paradox: How Can Organizations Capture New Opportunities Most Effectively?
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Parallel Play: Why the Usual Rules of Competition and Strategy Don’t Apply in Emerging Industries and Product Categories
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Defer to or Ignore the Data? How Setting Aside Data (Selectively) Can Enable Pathbreaking Innovations
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Crowd Sequencing: How to Accelerate Innovation and Address Uncertainty
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Rational Heuristics: The “Simple Rules” That Leaders Use to Simplify Complexity
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Framing Innovations Effectively: Making the New Familiar, Then Novel
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Product versus Purpose: A Productive Tension on the Path to Building Brand Advantage
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When It’s Time to Pivot, What’s Your Story? How to Sell Stakeholders on a New Strategy
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Conclusion—From Impossible Trade-Offs to Productive Tensions
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On Theory and Methodology
