MANAGING TENSION

MANAGING TENSION

The key to being a winner, then, is to do a good job in managing the tension that exists among agility, discipline and focus. Your aim should be some kind of balance, or proportionality. You should set up harmonious relations among these traits based on a creative tension. If you can establish such a balance your company will be much better off, not only now but in the future. If it thrives in more than one of these domains simultaneously, its horizon will stretch; it will expand from the present where discipline is needed to be profitable today, to the near future where focus is essential for growth, to a more distant time when your company can feed off its ability to identify new niches and occupy them quickly.
You do not achieve long-term success by building these traits separately. You much combine them into larger wholes so that your success is ensured both now and afterward.
The trade offs you will have to make cannot be trivialized, however, they are hard ones. On the one hand, you have to move swiftly to the sweet spots. On the other hand, you have to be steadfast in protecting the positions you currently occupy.
Consider the following:
Moving to a sweet spot depends on a new product concepts and imaginative marketing methods. Autonomy and risk taking are the driving forces. Bureaucratic obstacles have to be cleared away so that the new concepts can be brought to the market rapidly. An innovative niche must be grasped and occupied before a competitor discovers and inhabits it. Getting to this type of niche, however, might necessitate rule infringement, which cannot be tolerated easily in a disciplined and focused organisation.
Employees in agile companies are likely to rebel against the time, budget, and other constraints found in disciplined and focused organisations. Making products again and again in a flawless way for established markets rests on different temperaments and skill sets than people in an agile organisation generally have.
Standardisation, reliability, and rigid adherence to procedure are what people in disciplined organisations generally do best. In a disciplined and focused firm, the goals are likely to be zero defects and minimum variation. These goals conflict with the agile firm’s forbearance for error. In the disciplined firm, the acceptance of
mistakes must be suppressed. Disciplined and focused companies primarily recruit and retain reliable, stable, and methodical people who are capable of adhering to this regime, while they are likely to view the employees hired by agile firms as unsteady and impractical.
To be a big winner, you must cultivate attributes that will allow you to operate at both ends of this spectrum, however contradictory they might be. Being a big winner means finding the right balance between agility on the one hand and discipline and focus on the other. You have to be innovative but also execute without a glitch.
Persistent winning rests on mastering traits that represent opposing qualities. Momentum will be on your side if you are able to do so. You will not have just a few strokes of good luck but many years of sustained accomplishment.
Big losers manage the tension poorly. Something gets out of whack; Negative trait is layered upon negative trait. Big winners manage the tension well. Positive traits build on each other. They cohere into something greater than the sum of their parts.
Exploration for new niches is not necessarily incompatible with the exploitation of existing niches. You have to aggressively expand yet aggressively protect what you already enjoy. Being in a sweet spot and having the agility to get there requires creativity, the generation of new ideas, and innovation, while the discipline and focus rest on conformity to current rules and standards, efficiency, and scrupulous attention to detail. You must cultivate and master all these traits at the same time to assure your long-term success.
A Diagnostic: Knowing your level
Your aim should be to achieve a balance between agility, discipline, and focus. However, most firms are somewhere in the middle. They are not big winners or big losers. They have some things going for them and some things going against them. They must figure out what their pluses and minuses are and how to get better. Usually, they do not have much time to do so. They have to act quickly against the state of partial unbalance in which they find themselves. For instance, they might be inept even though they are currently in a sweet spot and have mastered focus and agility. In this instance, they are unlikely to hold on to sweet spot they occupy for long. Their ineptness will be their undoing.
Other firms might be diffuse even though they are in a sweep spot and have discipline and agility. In this instance, it is unlikely they will be able to take full advantage of the good position they occupy.
Still other firms might be rigid even though they are in a sweet spot and have discipline and focus. In this instance, they are sacrificing the future for the present. They are not destined to go beyond what they currently do well. Their superior performance will soon come to an end.
There are many partial and in-between states. A company can be considered relatively lucky if it only has a single weakness, or negative trait it must fix. Many firms have multiple flaws -- more than a single weak trait that they manifest at the same time. For instance, a company is rigid at the same time it is in a sour spot; although it is disciplined and focused, these qualities do it no good. Its rigidity prevents it from engaging in the movement that it must have to escape from a sour position.

BIG WINNERS & BIG LOSERS ALFRED A MARCUS
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