مدل های کسب و کار پیچیده : مدیریت پارادوکس های استراتژیک به طور همزمان

As our world becomes more global, fast paced and hypercompetitive, competitive advantage may increasingly depend on success in managing paradoxical strategies - strategies associated with contradictory, yet integrated tensions. We identify several types of complex business models organizations will need to adopt if they are to host such paradoxical strategies. Managing complex business models effectively depends on leadership that can make dynamic decisions, build commitment to both overarching visions and agenda specific goals, learn actively at multiple levels, and engage conflict. Leaders can engage these functions through team-centric or leader-centric structures.

By the late 1990's, USA Today was the highest circulating national newspaper in the United States.1 CEO Tom Curley and his senior executive team had created a new category of newspapers by negotiating distribution deals with hotels and businesses to provide national news to educated and high-income business travelers, a demographic that yielded excellent advertising revenues. When widening access to the Internet and the emergence of novel news content channels such as Yahoo! and AOL promised to put the newspaper's position under threat, USA Today moved quickly to enter this new online market by creating USAToday.com. Although sharing the same brand, this online ‘paper’ differed significantly from the print version, and involved competencies, practices and structures that challenged many of the existing newspaper industry's fundamental assumptions. In the print paper, journalists found news stories, wrote them up and turned them over to the editors before the printer ‘put the paper to bed’ each night. But in the online world, editors aggregated news from wire services (perhaps combined with print content), and posted them on-line. The traditional newspaper's organizational structure involved functional silos with limited interaction between them, whereas the dynamic, fast-paced nature of evolving online news stories demanded increased interdependence across previously separated functions. The uncertain economics of Internet advertising in the late 1990s heightened the challenge of introducing an online business. While the print paper was a cash cow, internet advertising was still a nascent industry that required many technical advances and mass penetration before it could convert itself into a reliable vehicle for advertisers - in fact, spending on internet advertising did not outstrip that on radio advertising until 2007.2 How could USAToday.com compete successfully with the print newspaper for financial, human and leadership resources, let alone threaten to take customers and market share from its older sibling? Tom Curley faced a contradiction between the print paper he had built so successfully and his commitment to nurturing the online news business that sought - eventually - to take both its readers and revenues.3 Many leaders face such inherent tensions within their firms' business models. Scholars have traditionally argued that organizational success depends on taking an ‘either/or’ approach to choosing between such paradoxical agendas: leaders assess the external environment, decide which agenda to favor, and then build a business model to implement this single, focused strategy. According to this view, success depends on proper alignment, both of the business model's internal aspects, and between it and the external environment.4 For example, Tom Curley at USA Today faced the tensions between his exploratory and exploitative strategies. Leaders in this position may chose to invest in both strategies simultaneously via different organizations – exploring in one organization and exploiting in another - or shift over time, exploiting until it is time to shift to exploring (or vice versa).5 According to this logic, Tom Curley could either separate out the online from the print paper - so the business leaders concerned do not have to manage the contradictory tensions themselves - or, alternatively, continue supporting the print paper until he was ready to change to online news, and then simply shift to the new business. We argue an ‘either/or’ approach to strategic tensions is inadequate. We argue that this ‘either/or’ approach to strategic tensions is inadequate. Senior executive teams like that at USA Today need to find organizational responses capable of meeting the challenge of increasingly complex competitive environments if they are to both exploit their existing businesses and explore new ones. We suggest that success over time is rooted in adopting this kind of ‘both/and’ approach, committing to paradoxical strategies and their associated product, market and organizational architectures. While these architectures will be internally consistent within each strategy, they may be inconsistent or contradictory across strategies. Hosting such paradoxical strategies demands complex business models that can manage the inherent tensions involved and enable contradictory agendas to thrive at the same time. Our research suggests that some leadership teams are capable of developing the kind of models required to embrace and support such paradoxes simultaneously. Using data from in-depth interviews and observations of 12 top management teams, we identify the functions and structures of teams that execute paradoxical strategies effectively. These processes include: • Dynamic decision making; • Building commitment to an overarching visions and agenda specific goals; • Actively learning about each agenda and the relationships between them; • Engaging conflict. We find that these processes enable senior leadership teams to both engage with and manage the inherent tensions created by their paradoxical strategies, either via a leader-centric approach – where the leader takes on the responsibility for managing the contradictions - or by that responsibility being exercised collectively by the senior team in a ‘team-centric’ style. The functions and team structures we describe enable senior leaders to support continued tensions, rather than seeking ‘resolutions’ that may, in fact, end up limiting the firm's long-term strategic opportunities. We suggest complex business models that can host contradictions in this way can lead organizations to develop dynamic, flexible and adaptive capabilities to succeed for the short as well as the longer term.

At USA Today, Tom Curley was ultimately able to grow the print newspaper, implement online news, and eventually add a television broadcast unit. These contrasting delivery channels involved distinct internal business models, all inconsistent with one another. Yet Curley built an overarching complex business model that successfully integrated across these multiple contradictory strategies. His ‘network strategy’ achieved synergies between the different channels by actively sharing common content. USA Today is now the only US daily newspaper with growing circulation.25 We have identified several types of complex business models that seek value by supporting paradoxical strategies, including ambidextrous organizations, social enterprises and learning organizations. Other business model architectures that fit into this overall class include franchise organizations that leverage global integration while seeking to address local demands,26 and business models that integrate high technology/high quality with low cost (see Williamson in this issue). We anticipate that new types of complex business model will emerge that, similarly, allow organizations to gain competitive advantage through managing strategic tensions successfully. As with others in this special issue (Doz and Kosonen, McGrath), we note the critical role of senior leaders in implementing these complex business models successfully. We observed that those leadership groups that were most successful in simultaneously supporting exploratory and exploitative strategies exhibited a dynamic pattern of decision-making, leading to frequent tradeoffs between the needs of the contrasting agendas. While these teams sometimes sought to use resources in creative ways that could integrate the needs of both the exploratory and exploitative business models, more often they shifted resources quickly in response to the unique needs of each agenda. To support this dynamic shifting, the top team articulated and committed to an overarching vision as well as to separate business-specific goals. They consistently raised questions to explore the needs of both agendas, recognized that these tensions would lead to conflicts between the two businesses, and explicitly raised them within the team. Although others have argued that interdependent top management teams are most effective in managing complex environments,27 we find successful examples of both leader- and team-centric teams. These leadership functions, structures, and decision patterns give us insight into the senior team characteristics necessary to attend to and deal with contradictory tensions, adding to our understanding about the processes of senior teams associated with exploration and exploitation,28 and about implementing strategic paradoxes more broadly.29 Our research focused on the strategic challenges of exploring and exploiting, but we believe that these functions and structures can also be adapted to managing other sets of tensions, an empirical question for future research. Traditionally, managers ask, ‘Should we implement A or B?’ Paradoxical strategies change this focus to: ‘How can we implement both A and B?’: this shift enables new business models to emerge. Our conceptualization of complex business models also has implications for managerial behaviors. Traditionally, managers have responded to strategic tensions between A and B by asking, ‘Should we implement A or B?’ or ‘Under what conditions should we choose to implement A or B?’ But paradoxical strategies change the managerial focus towards asking instead: ‘How can we implement both A and B?’, and this shift in strategic focus enables the emergence of new business models to build towards greater long-term organizational success. However, despite our reporting a clear set of characteristics that can assist top managers, supporting contradictory agendas remains particularly challenging. Half the teams in our research were unable to engage the tensions successfully, while Tom Curley ultimately had to replace two-thirds of his senior leadership team at USA Today to find leaders who could adopt both the integrative, overarching vision across the organization, as well as supporting the specific agendas associated with his organization's exploratory and exploitative strategies. This raises a number of questions for future research about the characteristics of individual leaders who are able to support complex business models. It has been argued that successful leaders in this context demonstrate both cognitive complexity - the ability to seek integration across seemingly contradictory tensions - as well as behavioral complexity - the ability to engage multiple leadership behaviors that may seem in conflict with one another.30 Can senior leaders learn and develop such complexity, or do organizations need to hire leaders who already possess these capabilities? Further questions arise about whether senior managers can effectively translate this contradictory complexity down to their middle managers, who must support and implement the strategies and business models, but who have no direct influence on deciding on them. A structurally ambidextrous organization focuses this complexity in the senior team, leaving middle managers free to focus on an aligned business, whereas a contextually ambidextrous organization will have a culture-set that can support these tensions, both among middle managers and throughout the organization. More research can explore the benefits of these two systems, and the processes each offer for engaging middle managers effectively. This ‘both/and’ approach of a complex business model is not new to managerial or academic literature. Both Peters and Waterman and Collins and Porras have concluded that building and managing such strategies makes for dynamic, sustainable organizations - and it is this complexity that drives success at such exemplary organizations as Toyota and Southwest Airlines.31 For these organizations, complex business models have become a source of competitive advantage and, in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world, they may become a pre-condition for success in more and more industries. If so, senior team processes and structures that enable them to thrive and build on internal contradictions and tensions may become an important differentiator of organizational excellence. … in an increasingly complicated world, complex business models have become a source of competitive advantage …. senior team processes that can build on internal contradictions and tensions may be an important differentiator of organizational excellence.