There are always decisions: Add and feature or improve performance, ship today or run more tests, buy or rent, do a coaching course or stick to the skills you have?Within decisions and paradoxes are tensions. Usually healthy, always pulling on us.
I am looking for those tensions in the peer-reveiwed literature, and coding them.
The commonest tension is a competition (for resources) to "explore" new opportunities or "exploit" existing investments. Firms must take the profits from their existing investments (short-term exploitation) and also innovate to avoid future obsolecence.
Most scholars cite
(March, 1991), but I prefer the later paper
(Levinthal & March, 1993). It too has a great summary of the problem of balancing the pursuit of new knowledge with exploiting things already known, plus it explains the mechanisms that create inertia and short-termism in organizations.
