Do any of these questions sound familiar:
- Should you sell older inventory or bring in new products?
- Should you expand your sales team or focus on reducing costs?
- Should you prioritize efficiency or leave room for innovation?
If so, you’re facing a challenge that most leaders encounter, and one that can quietly limit your company’s potential.
I was reminded of this while reading a chief executive article on managing paradoxes (“The CEO’s Greatest Challenge: Managing Paradoxes for Sustained Competitive Advantage”). The core idea stuck with me: the strongest companies don’t solve “either/or” problems. They learn to operate within them. Making that shift fundamentally changes how you’re able to lead.
You Don’t Have to Choose Between Experience and Innovation
I know how easy it is to feel like you have to pick a side in hard decisions:
You’re in a room, looking at a decision that matters. One side of the table is leaning on what’s worked before. The other is pushing for something new.
Lean on experience … or push for new ideas.
Protect what works … or disrupt it.
The lesson I’ve learned is this: you don’t have to sacrifice one strength to access another. Often, the advantage lies in how well you can hold both.
At Gro Alliance, we’ve built a business with more than 85 years of legacy in the seed industry. At the same time, we’ve intentionally worked to operate with the mindset of a startup. Our leadership team brings decades of experience, yet we’re constantly pushing ourselves to think differently and challenge assumptions. That creates tension. It’s not always comfortable, but it’s also where the best opportunities tend to live.
Growth Doesn’t Have to Come at the Expense of Focus
I can still remember the conversations we had in 2016. We were debating whether to expand into more diverse crops. On one hand, the opportunity was clear. On the other, so was the risk.
If we expand, do we dilute our core business?
That question can stall a lot of companies, because it assumes the only way forward is to trade one priority for another.
We decided to approach it differently. Instead of choosing between focus and growth, we asked what it would take to support both. That meant investing in the team, systems, and infrastructure before we scaled. Over time, we expanded into soybeans, alfalfa, canola, sunflowers, peas, organic soybeans, millet, sweet corn, popcorn and sesame, with more still in development. Through all of that, seed corn remained our core.
Rather than shifting away from what mattered, we expanded our ability to do more than one thing well. If you’ve faced a similar decision, that’s the opportunity in front of you. Growth doesn’t have to weaken your foundation, but it does require intentional design.
The Real Constraint Is the Question You’re Asking
My biggest take-away after reading the chief executive article and thinking about our company is that asking the right questions is critical. Companies often struggle because they see every problem as an either/or decision. “Do we expand sales or focus on margin?”, for example. But often the question asked is only about the tactics and not the strategy. The strategic question would focus on how to best leverage the company’s core competencies and customer relationships, no matter what that might look like. Taking the question down that path opens more balanced decision-making options than doing one thing at the expense of the other. “How do we leverage our core strengths and customer relationships to achieve both?”
The shift from ‘choosing’ to ‘designing’ opens up far better options. When you stop forcing a decision between competing priorities and start building the capacity to handle both, you unlock a more durable kind of advantage. That’s where better strategy lives.
