Management training rightly stresses the resolution of tensions and conflicts. But there are some organizational tensions and conflicts that managers shouldn’t try to resolve. For example, a necessary tug of war exists between how companies generate knowledge in practice versus how they implement it through process. The tension reflects the countervailing forces that, on the one hand, spark invention, and on the other, introduce the structure that transforms those inventions into marketable products. In isolation, these forces can destroy a company, but conjointly they produce creativity and growth.New knowledge, vital for growth, frequently emerges from small communities of practice. In other words, research groups often develop a common set of habits, customs, priorities and approaches that both produce new insights and enable them to flow with little attention to how they might be transferred to outsiders.During the early days of Fairchild Semiconductor (the company that spawned Intel and just about every major Silicon Valley chip developer), the founders worked in overlapping groups on a variety of tasks, all of which came together to produce successful semiconductors.
