Profitability or growth? Short term or long? Synergy or stand-alone unit performance? All companies struggle to reconcile these tensions

Of all the competing objectives every company faces, three pairs stand out: profitability versus growth, the short term versus the long term, and the whole organization versus the units. In each case, progress on one front usually comes at the expense of progress on the other.

The authors researched the performance of more than 1,000 companies worldwide over the past two decades and found that most struggle to succeed across the three tensions. From 1983 to 2003, for example, only 32% of these companies more often than not achieved positive profitability and revenue growth at the same time.

The problem, the authors discovered, is not so much that managers don’t recognize the tensions – those are all too familiar to anyone who has ever run a business. Rather, it is that managers frequently don’t focus on the tension that matters most to their company. Even when they do identify the right tension, they usually make the mistake of prioritizing a "lead" objective within it – for example, profitability over growth. As a result, companies often end up moving first in this direction, then in that, and then back again, never quite resolving the tension. The companies that performed best adopted a very different approach. Instead of setting a lead objective, they looked at how best to strengthen what the two sides of each tension have in common: For profitability and growth, the common bond is customer benefit; for the short term and the long, it is sustainable earnings; and for the whole and its parts, it is particular organizational resources and capabilities.

The authors describe how companies can select the right tension, what traps they may fall into when they focus on one side over the other, and how to escape these traps by managing to the bonds between objectives.