ABSTRACT
Success in new product development requires balancing various paradoxes. Managers who promote projects effectively provide strong leadership for maintaining the power of concentration of the team and the schedule, and at the same time provide leadership that fosters the motivation and creativity of the team members. Moreover, as mentioned in Chapter 7, outstanding managers make frequent dynamic transitions as they synthesize various contradictions in regard to various conflicts and friction that arise between informal and formal organizations in the course of practice activities. Collaboration systems enable resolution of contradictions through such transitions and control and coordination of space-time.
As networks, informal organizations ensure creativity and flexibility in the externalization of the corporate vision in specific work duties. At the same time, formal organizations as bureaucracy guarantee efficiency and speed during the execution of work duties. To adapt to uncertainties in the environment, how skillfully practitioners alternately make use of bureaucracy and networks to flexibly and improvisationally change organizational structures according to circumstances holds the key to success in new product development. Therefore, it is important for managers to utilize collaboration systems to integrate formal organizations and informal organizations, create maximum synergies from the characteristics of both types of organizations, and achieve a balance between exploitation and exploration by creating complex adaptive systems that provide for the coexistence of networks and bureaucracy within the same company while remaining at the “edge of chaos.” This chapter will show that the use of collaboration systems supports and strengthens the organizational adaptive leadership (referred to as “holistic leadership” in this book) of managers.
