Understanding Exponential Organizations

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Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, and Mike Malone-have researched and documented ten characteristics of Exponential Organizations. In their book, they walk the reader through how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become an ExO, streamline its performance, and grow to the next level.

Our environment is changing exponentially, mainly driven by exponential technologies and globalization. As a result, the world is becoming increasingly open and transparent and we are slowly moving from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance.

However, most of our organizations are still linear: hierarchical, centralized, closed, top down and focusing on ownership due to scarcity of people, resources, assets and platforms. They evolved one hundred years ago for an era of economies of scale and relative stability and predictability.

Now, according to Salim Ismail,  it is time to introduce the Exponential Organization leveraging openness, transparency and abundance in a new way.

"Exponential Organizations should be required reading for anyone interested in the ways exponential technologies are reinventing best practices in business," says tech visionary and a Director of Engineering at Google, Ray Kurzweil.

In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company—the Exponential Organization—that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology. An ExO can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers.

This is the discussion of the new book, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)co-written with Michael S. Malone and Yuri Van Geest.

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The book looks at a new organizational model that is conducive to an exponential age. It closes the gap between the linear organization and its exponential environment. It is at least 10x more effective, efficient and/or faster relative to its linear peers in the same market.

According to Ismail, "Exponential organizations are the future of commerce, non-profits and even government.  It is the only model that can keep up—and take advantage of—the ever-accelerating pace of technology-driven change that defines our time. My goal with this book is to not only show start-ups how to achieve exponential growth, but even show established companies how they can implement exponential principles."  

To determine our new framework for Exponential Organizations - applicable to start-ups, mid market companies and corporations - the authors implemented the following methodology:

1. Read all the important books on Innovation and Technology of the last 25 years (Hamel, Johansson, Collins, Prahalad, Porras, Hagel, Seely Brown, Christensen, Cusumano, Kim, Hoffman)
2. Brainstormed about our own future organizational model based on our experiences as a team 
3. Interviewed 70 world class entrepreneurs, thinkers and visionaries about innovation and entrepreneurship (Forbes, Huffington, Andreessen, Anderson, Rosedale, Milken)
4. Researched around 100 exponential startups, mid market companies and corporates across the world and look for patterns in their data
5. Leveraged foundational startup research like Aileen Lee on Unicorns - billion dollar software startups in the last 10 years
6. Ratified our framework twice with the executive team members of different Fortune 50 companies during the I.P.P.
7. Involved key core faculty of Singularity University for technological domain expertise and future projections

In the first half of the book, the authors examine these revolutionary structures and detail the ten characteristics and attributes of ExOs - five external elements and five internal organizational strategies.

The second half of the book is a how-to guide: How can you build a startup with these principles? How could you apply them to a mid-market company? How can you retrofit these ideas into large organizations?

Salim Ismail is a speaker, strategist and entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. He travels extensively addressing topics including breakthrough technologies and their impact on a variety of industries. He's spent the last four years building Singularity University. Before that, he built and ran Brickhouse, Yahoo's internal idea incubator. His last company, Angstro, was sold to Google in 2010.

Michael S. Malone has covered Silicon Valley for more than thirty years as a reporter, editor, columnist and television host. He is the award-winning author of more than a dozen books, including The Virtual Corporation and The Future Arrived Yesterday, and an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.

Yuri van Geest has twenty years of professional experience in emerging, exponential and disruptive technological innovation. He is Managing Director of the Singularity University Summit Europe and an international keynote speaker.

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