Polarities And Polarity Management

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Polarities and Polarity Management For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it’s wrong. – Anonymous Leaders spend millions of dollars each year on books, trainings, and consultants to help them discover the best ways to identify and solve the problems in their organizations. It seems that there is always a theory or approach, that is deemed as the final answer or all that a leader truly needs to know. Major efforts are taken to implement these new approaches and show old ways are obsolete. Yet, the problems never really go away. When examined closer, the problems are unsolvable. Polarity Management is just that, problems that cannot be resolved or are unsolvable, unsolvable because they exist within a polarity. In the book Polarity Management, Johnson distinguishes between what he calls problems to solve and polarities to manage. Problems to solve, according to Johnson, are those that present clear cut, either/or choices within know, limited time horizon. The choices are mutually exclusive and do not interpenetrate in any way. Polarities to manage are found in those circumstances where both options, although opposite in character, contribute to an inseparable whole (Johnson 1996). In our market simulation a polarity we will need to manage is how we plan to grow our business and whether or not we are going to be product-driven or market-driven. What makes this difficult is that either focus without the other will not lead to success for our company. Based upon this information I will show a polarity map that outlines the upside and downside of each using four quadrants of the Product-Driven and the Market-Driven polarity. The Polarity Map The Polarity Map is represented by two poles. The left half represents one pole, which in this case is the Product-Driven pole. The right half represents the other
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