If You have ever watched a tightrope walker, You have probably noticed that he never stands still. His body keeps making small movements: a little to the left, a little to the right, the pole in his hands sways, his knees spring. From the outside it looks as if he walks straight. In fact he is constantly falling and constantly catching himself. Balance is not a state but a process.
For many years this picture has helped me explain what management is. Newcomers to management look for the right setting: the right process, the right methodology, the right structure that can be set once and forgotten. Then they wonder why everything is lopsided six months later. It is lopsided because the world does not stand still, and any balance not sustained by movement turns into a fall.
The incompatible has to be combined
Running a company consists almost entirely of pairs that pull in opposite directions. Order and creativity. Speed and quality. Control and trust. Today's money and tomorrow's experiments. Work and family. In a textbook each of these pairs looks like an "either-or" choice, but in real life it always turns out to be "both-and", in a proportion that changes every week.
Too much order kills living thought. I have seen teams where there were rules for everything, including the approval procedure for a button colour, and in those teams people stopped thinking. Why think if there is an instruction? When the instructions run out, and reality always arrives with a task the instructions do not cover, such a team simply freezes. Like an army that marches beautifully on parade and has no idea what to do when the enemy does not show up on schedule.
Too much chaos destroys deadlines and money. A creative team without boundaries can spend a year building a brilliant product that no client ever sees. I am an architect myself and I know this temptation from the inside: there is always the urge to improve a bit more, to redo a module more elegantly, to try a new technology. If nobody says "stop, we ship", there will be no shipping.
Switching modes instead of the golden mean
The most common mistake I see is trying to find the golden mean and live there permanently. A bit of order, a bit of freedom, a little of everything. The result is lukewarm water: it neither burns nor refreshes. The team works at half strength in every mode at once.
What works much better is not the middle but deliberate switching. There are periods that need maximum creativity: exploring a new market, designing the architecture, searching for a solution to a hard problem. Then the boundaries loosen, mistakes are allowed, meetings are kept to a minimum. And there are periods that need strict discipline: a release, delivery of a stage, a production data migration. Then there are no experiments, only checklists, clear roles and double checks.
It is like a sailing yacht going against the wind. It cannot sail straight to the goal, so it tacks: left, then right, and on each tack it commits fully to one direction. If You try to hold the average, the yacht simply turns its nose into the wind and drifts in place. A manager's job is not to hold the middle but to call the turn at the right time.
Balance is not a point where You stand but a rhythm in which You move. Look not for the middle but for the moment to switch.
How I combine the incompatible at Ingello
In our company this conflict is built right into the structure. Ingello Systems is an engineering bureau that earns money on client projects. It needs predictability, deadlines, estimates, contracts, reports. The company's mission, the reason it all started, requires free research, long experiments and work on things that will not pay off this year or next. If You throw these two worlds into one pot, both suffer: client projects begin to suffer from experiments, and experiments suffocate under reporting.
So we separate them but do not isolate them. Systems earns, the rest spends, and each direction has its own working mode. At the same time, technologies born in research, such as our Fractal generator, eventually come into commercial projects and make them faster and cheaper. And commercial projects give research real problems, without which any science quickly turns into a glass bead game. That is what combining the incompatible means: not a compromise in the middle but two honest modes that feed each other.
Personal balance is architecture too
A separate word about work-life balance, because people usually talk about it either with pathos or with cynicism. I do not believe in a perfect separation where at six in the evening You switch off the entrepreneur in your head and switch on the parent. The head does not work that way. But I do believe in an architecture of boundaries: that a day, a week and a year should have zones work does not enter, just as in a good system modules have interfaces that do not let You reach into a neighbour's internals.
A tightrope walker cannot take a break in the middle of the rope. An entrepreneur can and must. Otherwise one day he will make too big a movement to one side and will not manage to catch himself.
What to do tomorrow
Write down the three pairs of contradictions You feel most strongly in your company right now. For example, speed and quality, control and team autonomy, current sales and a new product. For each pair answer honestly: which mode are You in now, and which one should You be in for the coming month. If the answer is "somewhere in the middle", that is most likely exactly where it hurts. Choose the mode deliberately, announce it to the team and set a date when You will revisit the decision.
