Embracing paradox

Appreciating Paradox – John L. Ward

There are full of challenges in lives, also in organizations. The author John L. Ward states that managers are facing problems such as should they focus on experiment or efficiency, personal success or team corporation, costs or quality. Moreover these questions can be problems or paradoxes. As defined by Ward, “A problem has a better or worse solution and requires decisive leadership”. To solve problems or paradoxes, managers play a very important role that leads the organization whether get access to success or loss.

This article suggest five methods that to make more excellent decisions, which are suspend judgment, understand the difference, address paradoxes proactively, seek win-win resolution and create a culture of trust and long-term orientation. The first suggestion from Ward hopes that managers do not rush to develop solutions which may lose the chance. If the manager rushes to develop solutions, the organization will not be able to find the truth about the other side of paradox. Although it is a great temptation of developing a perfect solution but it is also risky, the organizations would expect more on the steady mentality of managers. After the first stage, the author proposes that the leader need to verify if the difficulty is a paradox or a problem needs to quick solving. Within an exchange example, the author expounds that managers’ understanding of differences is a important aspect that to solve these difficulties. Address paradoxes proactively is the core section in this article that explains how the managers give actions efficiently and correctly. Managers need to ensure advantages and disadvantages of each viewpoint. Then advocate that who can play the advantages of each viewpoint with management behavior. Lastly to identify the early signs of each points that back to disadvantages. The fourth method suggests managers to seek a win-win solution which leads personal and organizational success. The last method, Ward expects that managers can help company to develop trust and to build organizational culture which establishing a stable structure and to reduce paradoxes.

Embracing paradox: Innovation Leadership in Large corporations – Gary M. Einhaus

This article introduces that innovation leadership provides company the new blood to bring the company creative products. Einhaus(2000) argues that “innovation leadership requires that paradoxes are treated as inclusive ‘and’ statements rather than ‘or’ alternatives”. This article focuses on how creative leadership gets success in corporations and also discusses benefits and impacts of it brings. Within a example of Eastman Kodak, Einhaus describes that the innovations leadership bring them business growth.

This article states that whether traditional or emerging companies, after twenty first century they all have to face to the bottleneck which is innovation. Innovation includes science and technology development, economic trends, exploring in the new fields of business and importantly in the article, the leadership innovation. Einhaus explains that a company must draw on all its constituent parts to identify innovative opportunities, it may nevertheless require a dedicated group to address specific issues and build the necessary capabilities to operationalize the innovation. Managers or leaders in this innovation team, they must assume responsibility of decision making, business judgment and stress adjustment. Large companies are easy to be caught in the whirlpool if they lose the control of the direction of the market. Therefore the innovation team would help a lot with market directing and achieving the technology changing. For instance in this article, Eastman Kodak established a multidisciplinary team, they dedicated to driving business growth through ‘breakthrough’ innovation in products and services. And also Einhaus discusses that the merits of developing breakthrough innovations in