PERSON
James G. March
The organizational theorist who revealed that exploitation destroys what it most needs—and that foolishness, properly understood, is the only technology organizations possess for discovering what they should do next.
Most organizational theories begin from the assumption that organizations are, or ought to be, rational. James March spent fifty years demonstrating that this assumption, however comforting, is wrong in the most consequential ways. Organizations do not have coherent, consistent preferences; they discover what they want through action. They do not choose among alternatives by evaluating them; they select from whatever alternatives happen to be present when a decision opportunity arrives. And they do not learn from experience in a way that reliably produces improvement; they learn in ways that are systematically biased toward the near, the certain, and the measurable—and are systematically blind to the distant, the uncertain, and the meaningful. His 1991 paper on
exploration and exploitation became one of the most cited works in management science because it named, with clinical precision, the mechanism by which intelligent organizations destroy themselves: they get too good at what they do. The
competency trap is not a failure of intelligence. It is intelligence applied so effectively to