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. According to Christophe Lecuyer’s history of Fairchild in “The Silicon Valley Edge: A Habitat for Innovation and Entrepreneurship,” Jay Last worked with Gene Kleiner on a step-and-repeat camera and with Robert Noyce on photographic emulsions. Meanwhile, Gordon Moore developed the aluminum process and joined Jean Hoerni and Noyce... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this and all MIT Sloan Managmeent Review articles.
Buy this article. Purchase one or more copies of this article in PDF form.
Become a premium subscriber today to read this article and the entire archive of MIT SMR articles.
Upgrade your existing subscription to premium
Sign in if you are a premium subscriber.
Do you subscribe the MIT Sloan Management Review in print? Enter the email address and password you used when ordering. Don't remember? Lookup your subscription account information
- Register for free access to recent articles and the current issue of MIT Sloan Management Review.
- Subscribe and read articles from the past three years online.
- Premium subscription give you access to the entire archive of articles.
