Exponential Organizations
How Technology WILL Change Your Business
BY : SALIM ISMAIL , AUTHOR OF THE EXPONENTIAL ORGANIZATIONS
“ In business , performance is key . In performance , how you organize can be the key to growth .”
Salim Ismail , author of the book The Exponential Organization and one of the founders of Singularity
University , is one of the biggest proponents of the concept of an exponential organization ( ExO ). He is , in fact , one of the originators of the term . He defines an ExO as an organization that performs a minimum of ten times better than their competitors in the same space by leveraging the power of information and improvements in technology . In following with that , these companies have been able to use relatively few resources to cause major changes in many industries . It can be said , perhaps , that technology is the only true driver of change in the world .
Traditional companies not only do not perform at the levels that ExOs do , but they fail to understand the consequences of not adapting to changes in both information and technology .
As entrepreneur David Rose put it so eloquently , “ any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st .” He isn ’ t kidding . Over the last two decades , a number of leading companies have failed because of a lack of vision or a lack of adaptation . Kodak , once the leader in photographic technology , failed due to completely ignoring the move to digital .
The Law of Accelerating Returns
To begin determining how an ExO becomes an ExO , one should begin by looking at the Law of Accelerating Returns , as defined by futurist , Ray Kurtzweil . He states that the basic measure of information technology follows an exponential ( and predictable ) trajectory . Obviously this flies in the face of the idea that the future cannot be predicted . Many aspects of the business world ( and whether a given business will fail or succeed ) are still unpredictable , but through the prediction of the trajectory of information technology , a number of aspects can , in fact , be predicted .
Kurtzweil has made a name for himself as a futurist through a number of predictions he has made regarding the advancement of technology . One of these is that a computer would eventually be able to defeat a human in a game of chess . Another is that we would eventually have self-driving cars ( thanks , Google ). The genius of the
16 SPRING 2016