“Managers must embrace rather than dodge the need to manage paradox.”

Organizational success in the years ahead will hinge on the ability of employees at all levels to manage seemingly irreconcilable trade-offs—between short-term earnings and long-term growth, competition and collaboration, structure and emergence, discipline and freedom. Traditional systems rely on crude, universal policies that favor certain goals at the expense of others. Tomorrow’s systems must encourage healthy competition between opposing objectives and enable frontline employees to dynamically optimize key trade-offs.