Charles A. O'Reilly > Quotes

“And here is the rub: the alignment that makes a mature organization successful can kill an emerging business. And in the same way, the alignment that makes an emerging business work can make a mature business inefficient.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“A third important commonality across all examples was the importance of separating the exploratory unit from the larger organization.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Profits are to business as breathing is to life. Breathing is essential to life, but is not the purpose for living. Similarly, profits are essential for the existence of the corporation, but they are not the reason for its existence.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“The reason that Omega was reluctant to embrace the electronic watch is as understandable as it was wrong. Mechanical engineering was the core capability of the Swiss watchmaking industry. Swiss watchmakers successfully sold high-end timepieces to a largely upmarket customer, usually through jewelry stores. Margins were high and volumes comparatively low. Brand was important. In contrast, electronic watches were a high-volume, low-margin product sold through a variety of retail outlets, including drugstores, often under little-known brand names. The core capabilities for the new product were about electronics and manufacturing, not precision engineering. Faced with a low-end product, senior managers balked and missed the opportunity that ultimately destroyed them. Could they have embraced both exploring and exploiting? Of course! This is what ultimately happened. But to do this would have required them to be ambidextrous and to run an organization with different alignments. In terms of the congruence model, it would have meant a different strategy, different key success factors, different people and skills, and a different organizational structure and culture—a radical shift that was seen as too much effort for what was expected to be a low-margin product. To”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Oman then promoted a culture of faster decision making, more entrepreneurial risk taking, and a greater tolerance of imperfection in product design”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“The sad fact seems to be that when a business is successful, the inexorable tendency of managers is to protect that success and incrementally improve existing operations, not to “waste” resources on experiments in small, lower-margin businesses.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“the basic problem confronting an organization is to engage in sufficient exploitation to ensure its current viability and, at the same time, devote enough energy to exploration to ensure its future viability.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“How can we both exploit existing assets and capabilities by getting more efficient and provide for sufficient exploration so that we are not rendered irrelevant by changes in markets and technologies? Seminal”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“The added value of ambidexterity is that it allows valuable resources of the mature business to be applied to new ones.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Leadership is more about providing and communicating a compelling vision, inspiring and motivating people, and, when necessary, helping the organization change by reallocating resources and changing the systems and structures. Management is ensuring that the trains run on time; leadership is about ensuring that they are headed to the right destination. Management is about execution; leadership is about strategy and change.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Their annual report emphasizes that the key to future success requires both “maximizing the value of their current business” through operational excellence and “expanding into new products and capabilities” by leveraging technological expertise—exploring and exploiting.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Management is ensuring that the trains run on time; leadership is about ensuring that they are headed to the right destination. Management is about execution; leadership is about strategy and change.”
― Charles O’Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“These units were encouraged to adopt alignments (people, structure, and culture) appropriate for their key success factors and were headed by leaders chosen for their skills and willingness to challenge the status quo. He ensured further high-level integration by having the heads of the exploratory units attend his senior staff meetings. Bradley also crafted an overarching strategic intent (“Healthy Eyes for Life”) that legitimated the pursuit of the mature as well as the exploratory businesses.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“ambidexterity is to become an organizational capability, it needs to be repeatable and not a one-off event. What is potentially worrisome about several of our examples is that they reflect the efforts of a single individual rather than a process.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Komori notes that a good enterprise is able to adapt to external changes, but “the best enterprise is a company that creates change on its own.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“It requires leaders to design organizations that can succeed in mature businesses where success comes from incremental improvement, close attention to customers, and rigorous execution and to simultaneously compete in emerging businesses where success requires speed, flexibility, and a tolerance for mistakes. We refer to this capability as ambidexterity—the ability to do both. If leaders are the linchpin to success, then ambidexterity is the weapon with which they must do battle. We believe ambidexterity is the key to solving the innovator’s dilemma. How leaders and companies can do this is the story we tell here.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“First, if firms are to be capable of exploiting existing business models and reconfiguring existing assets in ways that allow them to explore into the future, leadership is critical. As we will see in subsequent chapters, this ability needs to be nurtured; if it is not protected, it can easily be lost. A second important theme deserving of our attention is that of organizational alignment and how the capabilities needed to explore and exploit are fundamentally different. What it takes for a firm to win in mature markets is almost the opposite of what is required for new markets and technologies. Worse, success at exploitation almost always makes it harder for firms to succeed at exploration. We quickly summarize these lessons before offering a more formal framework in Chapter 8.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“Bezos’s philosophy, which is still true today, has always been that Amazon doesn’t make money when it sells things; it makes money when it helps customers make purchasing decisions.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“the most important commonality to flag among these examples is how the exploratory units were able to leverage assets from the larger organization to give them a competitive advantage.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma

“an obsessive focus on short-term results, careful attention to major customers and markets, and an emphasis on improving profitability that contributed to the firm’s ability to exploit mature markets but made it difficult to explore new spaces.”
― Charles A. O'Reilly, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma