About “It’s Not an Either/Or”
We are on a mission to offer novel solutions to the toughest leadership and individual challenges.
We spent the last 25 years as academics studying leadership, learning and decision-making. Here’s what we’ve learned….
Our standard approach to navigating challenges is either/or thinking, which helps in the short term but leads to long-term detrimental traps and vicious cycles. Thankfully, we’ve found an alternative that unlocks the power of paradox through both/and thinking.
In this monthly newsletter, we offer digestible insights, compelling stories, and intriguing tidbits to help you notice the either/or, engage the both/and, and embrace the power of paradox.
About Wendy and Marianne
Wendy and Marianne met in 2001. Marianne was a professor at the University of Cincinnati. She just published a groundbreaking paper about paradox that won the paper of the year award in our top field’s top journal. Wendy, then a doctoral student at Harvard Business School, read the paper and was blown away by the ideas. She emailed Marianne. They met at the Academy of Management conference that year.
We have been working together ever since - a perfect yin/yang.
Over the last 25 years, we have separately and together applied the power of paradox to leadership and organizations. We have each been named Highly Cited Researcher multiple years in a row for being among the top 1% of scholars in their field. We won the award for writing the decade’s most-cited paper in our top journal. More importantly, we have worked with tremendous colleagues to build a community of scholars advancing insights about the power of paradox.
In 2022, our book Both/And Thinking: Embracing Creative Tensions to Solve Your Toughest Problems (Harvard Business Review Press) burst onto the scene to much acclaim - #1 Amazon release in multiple categories, finalist for The Next Big Idea Club, Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books. We are honored to win the Thinkers50 2023 Breakthrough Idea Award.
Most of all, we are honored to share these ideas with all of you - learning with and from you - to be better human beings and live in a more sustainable, collaborative and thriving world. Thanks for being on this mission with us!
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