Ideas worth spreading

Two reasons companies fail -- and how to avoid them

2,300,516 views |

Knut Haanaes |

TED@BCG London

• June 2015

Is it possible to run a company and reinvent it at the same time? For business strategist Knut Haanaes, the ability to innovate after becoming successful is the mark of a great organization. He shares insights on how to strike a balance between perfecting what we already know and exploring totally new ideas -- and lays out how to avoid two major strategy traps.

Is it possible to run a company and reinvent it at the same time? For business strategist Knut Haanaes, the ability to innovate after becoming successful is the mark of a great organization. He shares insights on how to strike a balance between perfecting what we already know and exploring totally new ideas -- and lays out how to avoid two major strategy traps.

About the speaker

Knut Haanaes

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Knut Haanaes believes that the secret to creating lasting, impactful companies is to find a balance between doing what you're good at and looking for new challenges to take on.

James G. March | Organization Science, 1991 | Article

Exploration and Exploitation in Organizational Learning, Organization Science

This is the foundational article spelling out the basic ideas of exploration and exploitation. This article essentially is the intellectual foundation which forms the basis of the exploration–exploitation journey and represented an academic turning point that shifted a lot of academic attention to this balance, which is (according to March) essentially a balance between the short and the long run.

Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes and Janmejaya Sinha | Harvard Business School Press, 2015 | Book

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy: How to Execute the Right Approach

In this book, we try to outline the different contexts for strategy, making the fundamental point that as uncertainty gets higher and as we increasingly see that companies in many cases need to shape their environments, the way we do strategy has to change. We also argue that firms need to build ambidexterity, or the ability to balance exploration and exploitation.

Boston Consulting Group | Explore

An Atlas of Strategy Traps

In interactive tool helps users learn to navigate the balance between exploration and exploitation by using the examples of famous explorers and inventors. We want to help identify the warning signs to avoid and the lighthouses (best practices) to look for. Guided by the experience of famous historical examples, the user can learn to make timely course corrections along their business's journey.

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About TED Institute

Every year, TED works with a group of select companies and foundations to identify internal ideators, inventors, connectors, and creators. Drawing on the same rigorous regimen that has prepared speakers for the TED main stage, TED Institute works closely with each partner, overseeing curation and providing intensive one-on-one talk development to sharpen and fine tune ideas. The culmination is an event produced, recorded, and hosted by TED, generating a growing library of valuable TED Talks that can spur innovation and transform organizations.

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