Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 16

Strategic Organization: Where Creative Strategy Ends (and Begins Again)

I am a great lover of these divisions and generalizations, they help me to speak and think.

Plato, Phaedrus

Throughout the course of this book, we have emphasized that creative strategy, through innovation, entrepreneurship, leadership and organization, requires an ability to switch between opposing mindsets. Organization is the medium through which an enterprise's particular switches can be either facilitated or prevented.

The virtuous ‘golden mean’ in strategic organization is not therefore some perfect compromise which irons out differences into a smooth consensus. As we described at the start of this book, this search for ‘one best way’ has been one of the limitations in management resulting in much unproductive conflict between opposing ‘schools’ of strategy in academic management and a destructive pursuit of alternating fads in management practice. This is the essence of Danny Miller's Icarus Paradox – too much of anything, even if we are flying high, will eventually cause us to crash and burn. Rather the organizational virtues we have described in the previous chapter depend upon an ability to switch in between organizational vices. To be ambidextrously focussed and loose, and thus strategically creative, our organizations must develop capabilities on both sides of a spectrum, not merge into a single model or attitude somewhere in the middle.

To give one example of a strategic organizational ...