Dealing with Dilemmas

Western management culture encourages a bias toward quick solutions, immediate action, and the avoidance of problems. While today’s managers may appear to convey strength and good strategic decision making, Frank Buytendijk finds many of them to be “downright scary.” Recurring problems usually point to an underlying dilemma, a situation requiring one to choose between alternatives that are equally undesirable. Addressing dilemmas requires deeper thought and carefully crafted solutions. In Dealing with Dilemmas, Frank Buytendijk concludes that the key to an organization’s sustainable success lies in its ability to successfully deal with dilemmas. The need to move beyond constant analysis and to reconcile dilemmas has been recognized as crucial to high performance by many management experts, but discovering how to do so has either remained elusive or seemed overly complex.