A psychological study of American football players once revealed an interesting difference between defensive and offensive players: 
Offensive players' lockers were neater and more orderly than defensive players' lockers. The most obvious inference is probably right: Offensive players get ahead by following well-crafted plans, executed flawlessly. Timing, position, and order are everything to them. But defensive players succeed by wreaking havoc with others' plans. They are more at home with disorder, chaos, and unpredictability.
A similar dichotomy plagues business when it comes to managing both efficiency and innovation. Efficient operations require order, routine, and invariability. Innovation and the creativity that fuels it involve disorder, randomness, experimentation, and failure. Few companies have resolved this inherent conflict successfully. There are a number of studies of this problem and how to solve it, but Businessweek once did a very interesting story on how 3M's Six Sigma efforts a few years ago did damage to its innovation efforts. And Martha Rogers and I analyze the 3M case as well as a number of others in our recent book Rules to Break & Laws to Follow (see Chapter 11: "Order and Chaos").
What should be clear, however, is that as the pace of change continues to accelerate, it will be increasingly important to navigate frequently between the close-ordered drill of efficient production and the chaotic experimentation of creative innovation.