Person:

Raffaelli, Ryan

How do leaders with divergent visions for their organization come together to create a novel strategy? This paper employs paradox as a lens to investigate how leader-dyads can integrate opposing strategies to produce a new, generative approach. Drawing on a qualitative historical case study of Switzerland’s largest watch company during the quartz crisis in Swiss watchmaking, we induce a process model from the activities of two leaders whose relationship embodied the tensions and strategic contradictions of preserving the past and modernizing for the future. The model specifies a set of individual, relational, and structural mechanisms by which leaders productively engage with a preservation-modernization paradox to facilitate novel strategy in the wake of a discontinuity. We interpret our findings in terms of the demands of navigating the management and outcomes of strategic paradoxes. While tracing the theoretical and practical implications of our model and our findings, we address leadership conundrums characteristic of organizations confronting paradox.

Framing is critical for leaders who must build support for strategic renewal. While research has concentrated on renewal that replaces one set of capabilities with another, we explore a distinctive challenge: how leaders persuade stakeholders to endorse the reprioritization of resources toward a capability set that must coexist with an existing one. Moreover, while research has focused on how leaders build employee support for renewal, we examine how to persuade those overseeing resource allocation. Our study analyzes Director Robert Mueller's 12-year effort at the FBI—after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—to build up counterterrorism capabilities while maintaining existing law enforcement capabilities. We offer a novel distinction between outcome frames and process frames and discuss how each frame, sequenced properly, is relevant to strategic renewal.