Exponential Organizations

Context

Humanity has been busy with productivity since time immemorial. Production provided people with scarce resources that were / are worth a lot due to their scarcity. In the last decade, the Internet has come to the forefront, including the concept of “Creative Destruction” and “disruptive technology”. The big companies usually thought about the Internet 15 years ago as “something that is a phenomenon of time”. Nowadays, after an explanation about exponential organizations, they realize that the internet is a phenomenon that is the beginning of everything.

But what are they, those “Exponential organizations”?

It is usually small organizations that make use of the latest technology to come up with new solutions for market demands, for which solutions sometimes already exist. Through the new application they conquer the market in a very short time, in an exponential way. Examples include smartphones and tablets, which have given the photography and the paper newspaper world a problem.

The “nice thing” about this phenomenon is that because technology has become common good, an adolescent in a garage can do an invention that can turn the world of a gigantic company with thousands of employees upside down in a very short time.

That is why it is important that all organizations transform themselves into exponential organizations and tackle themselves disruptively. Because if they do not do it themselves, someone else will. Hence disruption as a means to do risk management and business continuity.

In the book, which is the result of a study by SU (Singularity University), the authors give a number of points of interest. These are given by the mnemonics MTP, SCALE and IDEAS.

Very important is that in contrast to large monoliths the small ExOs are very Lean and Mean organized. The book does not go very deep on this, but large monoliths can also benefit from their advantages by collaborating with existing ExOs or by creating ExOs at the borders of their organization.