Lead and Disrupt by Charles A. O'Reilly III;Michael L. Tushman;

Author:Charles A. O'Reilly III;Michael L. Tushman; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-09-04T21:00:00+00:00

A second important commonality that characterizes our examples is the senior-level support each received. As we saw in the earlier chapters, there are often good reasons that new ventures are seen as distractions or threats to the existing business. The capital allocation to the explore businesses is invariably more uncertain than the returns that can be gained by reinvesting in the existing business. Without continuous top management support, exploratory units are often starved of resources (talent, technology, and capital). This was evident in the HP example, when senior management allocated $10 million for the portables unit but it was diverted to more short-term use in the flatbed business. In every one of our examples, it was only when there was senior management attention that the exploratory unit was able to consistently get the resources it needed. When that support waned, the exploratory unit often suffered. For example, when Glenn Bradley stepped down at Ciba Vision, his successor stopped all disruptive innovation and concentrated entirely on incremental improvements in existing products and technologies.

A second important role that senior management serves is to manage the interface between the new business and the mature one and to resolve the inevitable conflicts that occur. The added value of ambidexterity is that it allows valuable resources of the mature business to be applied to new ones. Without this leadership intervention, the business has standalone units and no chance to leverage the skills and learnings from one business to another. However, even with the best of intentions, there will be conflicts between the new unit and the old. Without senior management intervention, these disagreements will almost always end with the mature business dominating to the detriment of the start-up—at least until the new unit has demonstrated that it is a viable business. Nader Mikhail, the CEO of Elementum, was explicit in noting that without the Flextronics CEO’s oversight, the new unit would have failed—and, with a new CEO who was not supportive, Elementum was spun out of Flextronics.

A third important commonality across all examples was the importance of separating the exploratory unit from the larger organization. Although arguments can be made for the efficiency of using existing facilities, in all our cases the new unit was physically separated from the main organization. Leaders of these new businesses emphasized that this separation was critical to break free of the old structure and processes and provide a new beginning. Without this distance, the inertia of the old mind-set can undermine the focus and energy required to grow a new business. This was evident in the initial failures of the HP portable efforts when the teams were embedded in the larger flatbed business. The quasi-division was moved to a separate facility, which was also the case with Ciba Vision’s units and Elementum. T. J. Rodgers at Cypress is adamant that the new entrepreneurial businesses needed to move out of Cypress headquarters and focus on their new business without the distractions of the existing business. At USA Today, the online unit was on a separate floor of the building.

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