The Right Tension

A couple of issues ago (December 2006), the Harvard Business Review published a very interesting article (Managing the Right Tension) by Dominic Dodd and Ken Favaro, who argue that many of the trade-offs and decisions of usual managerial practice fail to take into account that a company does often need to balance opposed concepts. So it is not that much about making a trade-off between short-term and long-term as it is about finding the right tension between short-term and long-term perspectives by integrating those seemingly opposed imperatives by asking a "simple" question: "how do we achieve sustainable revenues and earnings?" Although the approach may seem simplistic and I bet some people will even go as far as to say that it encourages managers not to make hard decisions, I do believe there is considerable value in shifting the perspective of managers from an "either / or" mindset to one of integration that takes several dimensions into account in an attempt to find the right balance for a company. It's a much more holistic way of managing a business and I think it's really worth considering. In fact, the article of Dodd and Favaro gave me a couple of interesting inspirations for one of my customers who is facing explosive growth and is required to seriously manage growth and profitability, another of those strange pairs of business concepts.