Do you ever get feedback about, well, are we just compromising and trying to meet halfway rather than actually being definitive in terms of the direction that we're going in? Like, what do you say to some of that where we're kind of pushing to we need to make a choice one way or the other rather than kind of meeting in the middle? Yeah.

I'm so glad you said that because a bland compromise is not a both and that leads to a better win-win possibility, right? A bland compromise is I'm giving up something, you're giving up something, neither of us are quite as happy.

And I like to use this example from one of my favorite scholars who wrote here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And like the 1920s, her name is Mary Parker Follett.

She's brilliant and amazing.

I don't know if you have come across her work or others on this listening to this podcast have come across her work.

I highly recommend it.

When we are going through the process of making decisions around strategy, how do you suggest people hold the tensions and the paradoxes so that you can actually move forward.

But, yeah

... operational success, going deeper, focusing on the core.

And March said, "Look, adaptive organizations can't do one or another.

They have to do both." Because most theory would say, "Look, it's so hard to innovate when you're doing really well in your core because the core holds you down and, and keeps you back." Inertia in the core.

And Mike Tushman and Charles O'Reilly said, "You know what? You can't choose between one or the other.

You have to constantly be exploring in or- to- while simultaneously exploiting, because otherwise the future comes so quickly and you're not ready for it.

So you've gotta be having all these little experimentations." And the question that, that they were asking, and the question that I then asked as a PhD student that...

Mm.

And

I'm a big fan of work by Mary Parker Follett.

She's brilliant.

She wrote in the early 1900s and she had this great image that tension or conflict or friction is what enables possibility.

So she talks about it's the tension between the bow and the violin that creates music.

It's the friction between the car tires and the road that enables the car to move forward.

And one of the greatest leaders that we had interviewed for our book was Paul Pullman, who talked about how valuable that he was the CEO of Unilever during the heyday of Unilever's sustainability advances from 2009 to 2019.

Or, or you're stuck.