“In an age when every idea has a correspondingly heavy downside, managers must try to balance polar opposites: ‘paradox management’, as it has been called. ‘Effectiveness is inherently paradoxical,’ says Paul Evans . . . ‘To be effective, an organisation must possess attributes that are contradictory, even mutually exclusive.’ To its proponents, managing paradox is not just a fancy way of sitting on the fence when you do not know the answer: it effectively nullifies the idea of ‘an answer’. Instead, it glories in the fact that business is riddled with paradoxes and creates a psychological reference point from contradiction. Success risks failure, warns Prof Evans. ‘Firms continue to perfect what made them successful until they reach dangerous extremes,’ he writes. Instead, it is better to ‘harness the tension’ inherent in paradox and recognise the merits of duality.”
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