Book
The Ambidextrous Organization
Exploring the New While Exploiting the Now
Jens Maier
With examples from Nespresso, Daimler Benz, Zurich Financial, Intel, and industries such as packaging, pharmaceuticals, and telecoms, this book identifies key challenges around: organizational perspectives, individual leaders, internal processes, and culture at both the organizational and individual level. The second part provides solutions including linking corporate and individual development, external scouting, purposeful convergence engineering, and creating appropriate partnerships and approaches to managing risk. It provides the ultimate guide for becoming an ambidextrous organization.
Palgrave Macmillan July 2015
Endorsements: What people say about the book:
1) Jens does a masterful job of defining the ambidextrous organization that can manage the paradoxes of individual competencies and organization capabilities, managing culture as shared mindset and personal behavior, leadership as personal abilities and organization capabilities. The book offers ideas with impact and can be useful in defining organizations as bundles of capabilities more than structure.
Dave Ulrich
Rensis Likert Professor of Business University of Michigan
Partner, The RBL Group
2) "I have worked alongside Jens Maier in a variety of companies and conditions. He has shown me that the most successful companies—and successful leaders—live in the reality and successes of today while embracing the inevitability and uncertainties of tomorrow. In this book he lays out many of the organizational and human dynamics that likely confound you each day, and suggests powerful mindsets and behaviors that will make you and your organization significantly more effective."
Jeff Semenchuk
Chief Innovation Officer
Hyatt Hotels Corporation
3) “Jens Maier’s erudite and entertaining book explains how companies – and individuals – can use “both hands” to exploit existing competitive advantages and explore new ones. It is a commendable blueprint for tomorrow’s corporate world.”
Prof. Eric Cornuel, Director General and CEO, EFMD
4) ‘Executives around the world and across industries are challenged to make innovation decisions in an environment often characterized as ‘digitization’. This book offers practical insights for executives on how to frame the challenges and to develop solutions for both their organizations and their own leadership careers.’
Zeger Degraeve, Dean of Melbourne Business School
5) In this book Jens Maier is providing practical guidance and examples on how both organizations and individual leaders can develop complex solutions on a global scale. This book provides a solid foundation for current and aspiring leaders to understand their current level of ambidextrousness and how to develop to the next levels.
ir. Mia Vanstraelen, Director Human Resources, IBM
6) For sustainable success, we need innovation. Jens Maier shows us in this impressive and comprehensible book how we as an organization can generate
new ideas whilst simultaneously optimizing our core business.
Barbara Vollert; Vice President Sales Network Management and Development;
Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG
7) "Dr. Jens Maier’s book presents a terrific collection of cases gained through years of impressive experience. He clearly addresses a new approach for succeeding using both hands effectively and equally. This is enormously useful, not only for the CEOs of the big firms, but also for the new technopreneurs."
Supawan Tantayanon, Professor of Chemistry, Faculty of Science and Founding Director of Technopreneurship and Innovation Management Programme, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand
8) “Today one of the critical characteristics required for success is the ability to adapt to our rapidly changing world. The Ambidextrous Organization is an essential tool for organizations that want to enhance their capability to adapt. It is a must read for every leader/manager in a modern enterprise.”
David Gensler, Ex-CEO Gensler
