Book review: Lead and Disrupt: How to solve the Innovator’s Dilemma

Morais-Storz, Marta

doi:10.1108/tlo-05-2019-235

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Your linkage back to Tushman and O'Reilly is fitting for our readers. The previously mentioned special issue, Organizational Ambidexterity: two modes of learning, provides readers a book review of O'Reilly and Tushman's recent 2016 book Lead and disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma (Morais-Storz, 2019). This review summarizes the authors over two decades of collaborating on ambidexterity concepts and supports your comments about the differences between exploiting and exploring.…”

Section: The Rise Of the Ambidextrous Organizationmentioning

confidence: 70%

Extended book review and author interview: the rise of the ambidextrous organization: the secret revolution happening right under your nose

Reese

2021

TLO

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The ambidextrous organization is not a new concept to readers of The Learning Organization journal. Volume 26, issue 4, guest edited by Nhien Nguyen and Alf Steinar Saetre, provides readers a special issue on the topic. Turn to the further readings section for more details on the articles within that issue. Jacob Brix's article in that special issue, "Ambidexterity and organizational learning: revisiting and reconnecting the literatures," offers an integrated view of the two ambidextrous streams that he describes as previously coexisting and evolving in parallel. Brix's article offers a foundation to Eric Zabiegalski's book, The Rise of the Ambidextrous Organization: The Secret Revolution Happening Right Under Your Nose. Both Brix's article and Zabiegalski's book explain the context dependency of ambidexterity and learning. Both Brix and Zabiegalski emphasize the varying levels of ambidexterity across organizations, and both explain that certain situations may require more exploitation while others more exploration. The two opposing sides of the ambidexterity discussion. The balance between both is rarely 50:50. The balance shifts across the organization and with the external environment. Ambidextrous organizational and individual capacity, just as learning at the organization and individual levels, facilitates organizational success. Not only do both ambidexterity and learning facilitate maneuvering with change, Zabiegalski goes as far as saying, every ambidextrous organization is a learning organization, and every learning organization is ambidextrous. The two are interdependent.For this book review, Zabiegalski has agreed to provide an interview format in explaining his key points. His responses offer readers depth beyond what is covered in the book. But, as he emphasizes, the book contains much more breadth than the interview can offer.The book begins with an explanation of the countering exploration-to-exploitation forces. The paradox whereby, "organizational exploitation drives out exploration [. . .] as organizations exploit the marketplace by doing what they do best for profit and market share, they consequently stop exploring and looking for new ideas" (p. 1). From this foundation, Zabiegalski introduces his solutions.Zabiegalski divides his argument into three logical progressive sections. First, he discusses the ambidextrous organization touching on concepts such as culture, learning and structure. This section sets the theoretical groundwork. Then, he addresses complexity and ever-changing environmental influences upon the organization. Here, his focus changes to complexity science, emergence, chaos, structure and governance. The final section addresses TLO 28,6 554

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Section: The Rise Of the Ambidextrous Organizationmentioning

confidence: 70%

Extended book review and author interview: the rise of the ambidextrous organization: the secret revolution happening right under your nose

Reese

2021

TLO

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The practitioner’s approach to ambidexterity and organizational learning

Reese¹

2019

TLO

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Change is a continual element of the business environment. Leaders are often tasked with the discrete and paradoxical decision of exploring and learning new competencies or exploiting existing competencies as they drive business performance within the changing environment. The decisions for leaders habitually arise in the form of which of these finite buckets (learning to explore new or exploit existing) to place time, effort, and most importantly money. Converting the polarizing decision to a balanced or ambidextrous view is the theme of this issue of The Learning Organization. If you are leading an organization confronted with pressure to explore new arenas (customer, business models, etc.) and simultaneous exploit or optimize the benefits of the base, this special issue, "Organizational ambidexterity: Two modes of learning", offers ideas in how to overcome the conflicts and possibly explore and exploit simultaneously.March (1991) enlightened us to this exploration versus exploitation paradox in organizational learning almost three decades ago. Since the introduction of exploration and exploitation as a paradoxical arrangement, Tushman and O'Reilly (1996) introduced the concept of ambidexterity, or the ability to deftly manage or balance the countering views almost simultaneously. In this issue of The Learning Organization, the authors present compelling methods for leaders to consider as they balance the countering pulls of exploring or finding and nurturing the next new technology versus exploiting or sustaining the existing technology. In general, there are three methodologies presented across the papers to move an organization toward ambidexterity. As the authors cite, the general methods fall into three groups of structural, sequential or contextual.Before delving too deeply into the concepts, a good starting point in this issue is the book review because the book review itself provides a good practitioner overview of the concepts.Morais-Storz ( 2019) in her review of Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma (2016) presents O'Reilly and Tushman's view of the ambidexterity discussion. Within the review, Morais-Storz points to how O'Reilly and Tushman provide insight into 4 steps to answer "what it takes to become ambidextrous" (p. 174). Ideas for the practitioner are most lucid in the leadership practices that O'Reilly and Tushman propose in their definition of the consistently inconsistent leader. For more details on the overview of Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma turn to Morais-Storz's book review.Kakkar (2019) in The goblet and two faces: understanding transcendence and paradox from the perspective of Advaita Vendanta, approaches the ambidexterity topic from a contextual approach. As the author states, "the paper introduces the negative dialectic TLO 26,4

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Book review: Lead and Disrupt: How to solve the Innovator’s Dilemma

Cited by 2 publications

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Extended book review and author interview: the rise of the ambidextrous organization: the secret revolution happening right under your nose

Extended book review and author interview: the rise of the ambidextrous organization: the secret revolution happening right under your nose

The practitioner’s approach to ambidexterity and organizational learning

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