{"id":548,"date":"2019-09-25T10:04:13","date_gmt":"2019-09-25T10:04:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/?p=548"},"modified":"2019-09-25T10:04:13","modified_gmt":"2019-09-25T10:04:13","slug":"not-just-about-the-now-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/25\/not-just-about-the-now-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Not just about the now, is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have always been fascinated by people who could accomplish mundane chores with both hands. I still remember that eventful first day of eighth standard – our Math teacher left quite an impression on us when he solved a problem on the board while writing with both hands. As the students watched in awe, I couldn\u2019t help but wonder about all the advantages he had in life because of his ambidexterity!<\/span><\/p>\n

But what if I tell you that ambidexterity is not just an individual trait which comes handy in speed writing or a cricket game? It also exists in organisational set-ups and is increasingly becoming an important part of business culture. Organizational ambidexterity\u00a0refers to an organization’s ability to be efficient in its\u00a0management<\/a>\u00a0of today’s business and also adaptable for coping with tomorrow’s changing demand. Just as being\u00a0ambidextrous<\/a>\u00a0means being able to use both the left and right hand equally, organizational ambidexterity requires them to use both\u00a0exploration<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0exploitation<\/a>\u00a0techniques to be successful. This is achieved by balancing\u00a0exploration<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0exploitation<\/a>, which allows the organization to be\u00a0creative<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0adaptable<\/a>, while continuing to rely on comparitively traditional, proven methods of business.\u00a0Exploration<\/a> includes search, variation,\u00a0risk taking<\/a>,\u00a0experimentation<\/a>,\u00a0flexibility<\/a>, discovery or\u00a0innovation<\/a>, whereas exploitation includes refinement,\u00a0choice<\/a>,\u00a0production<\/a>,\u00a0efficiency<\/a>,\u00a0selection<\/a>,\u00a0implementation<\/a>, and\u00a0execution<\/a>.\u00a0Companies that focus only on exploration face the risk of wasting resources on ideas that may not prove useful or never be developed. On the other hand, companies that focus only on exploitation may become complacent with their current success and risk the possibility of becoming outdated or irrelevant in future. Thus, the whole game revolves around striking a healthy balance between the two.<\/span><\/p>\n

Unfortunately, most businesses excel in exploitating their present levels of growth but falter in adapting to new market changes and radical shifts in innovation in their fields. Some striking examples include Kodak and Nokia. Kodak excelled at analog photography but hasn\u2019t been able to make the leap to digital cameras. With the arrival of the Internet, other mobile companies started understanding how data, not voice, was the future of communication. Nokia didn\u2019t grasp the concept of software and kept focusing on hardware because the management feared alienation of current users by changing too much. Nokia\u2019s mistake was that they didn\u2019t want to lead the drastic change in user experience.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Organizational ambidexterity can be considered broadly from two angles. One is architectural or structural ambidexterity, which uses dual\u00a0organizational structures<\/a>\u00a0and strategies to differentiate efforts towards exploitation and exploration.\u00a0Structural<\/a>\u00a0ambidexterity includes dual parts, with one part focusing on exploitation and the other focusing on exploration. It’s also known as the spatial separation of the dual strategies\u2019 concepts outlined above. The other approach is contextual ambidexterity, which uses\u00a0behavioural<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0social<\/a>\u00a0means to integrate exploitation and exploration at the organizational unit level. Whichever angle the organisation chooses to focus on, the upper management and leaders play the most important role in achieving ambidexterity. A company\u2019s senior team must be committed to operating ambidextrously even if its members themselves aren\u2019t ambidextrous. Resistance at the top levels of an organization cannot be tolerated, which means that shifting to an ambidextrous organization model can be a wrenching experience.\u00a0Wrenching, but an absolutely necessary step in todays constantly evolving business atmosphere. How to achieve organisational ambidexterity is a discussion for another day, owing to length constraints. However, the reader must be warned that this concept has had its fair share of sceptical outlooks and criticism. Some consider it to be an impossible quest, saying that organisations after reaching a certain size and success, simply lack the flexibility to adapt. Some go as far as deeming it an unnecessary venture which only wastes resources without capitalising on returns.<\/span><\/p>\n

All things aside; I personally feel that continuous growth makes it all the more important for a business to think about the future as conversations are shifting to \u2018sustainability\u2019 in every field. You may not believe it, but then again, Yahoo didn\u2019t either! \ud83d\ude1b<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

– Atharv Dwivedi<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have always been fascinated by people who could accomplish mundane chores with both hands. I still remember that eventful first day of eighth standard – our Math teacher left quite an impression on us when he solved a problem on the board while writing with both hands. As the students watched in awe, I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[135],"class_list":["post-548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kaaryavarta","tag-businessculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":549,"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/548\/revisions\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nitk.acm.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}