Exponential Organizations: New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About It)

This book is a must-read guide to learn how to deal with the new technologies that are disrupting the world and, what it's even more important, to take advantage of the new opportunities that come with it.Nowadays, we often witness how organizations and companies such as Google, Facebook or Airbnb, are capable of increasing their staff from only a handful of employees to hundreds of thousands all over the world and, from not producing any revenue (or only a very limited one) to earning millions, or even billions, of dollars with profit margins never heard before. And all this in just a few years (or even months). What’s more, these organizations are able to transform whole industries and to completely change the market game rules.This book attempts to explain why this type of organizations are emerging at this current time of History (and not before), and how current corporations and organizations must act, or even how to create one of them or become one of them.Technologies as the Internet, mobile phones, digital coins, drones, 3D printers, biotechnology, nanotechnology and artificial intelligence will revolutionize the world as we know it today during the next years. These technologies and their use evolve in an exponential way, that is, each year they double their power with regards to the previous year; that is why these technologies are called “exponential technologies” or “accelerating technologies”.However, people’s thinking follows a lineal path and makes difficult for us to anticipate when exponential technologies (accelerating technologies) will transform our industry and jeopardize our organization. If it were easy to predict and act in consequence, companies like Kodak would have not succumbed to the technological change. The issue is that, at the very beginning, these exponential technologies always cause certain disappointment in the market, as a result of the over-expectations created. However, there is always a specific time in which exponential improvements make these technologies overcome any previous prediction. As the picture below shows, this is the result of the gap between the linear expectations we naturally have and the exponential evolution that actually happens. A good example is virtual-reality technology, which created inflated expectations towards the end of the 90s, but finally came to nothing, until nowadays, when it is starting to be a great market trend. A proof of this fact is the recent acquisition by Facebook of the virtual-reality company Oculus VR for two billion dollars.I really recommend this book to CxO, Directors, Managers and every single employee from any organization. It's actually compelling not only to big enterprises but also to startups.

I think I must have recommended this book to at least 15 people, and that's only in the last few days. I can't remember the last time I did that for any book.I used to work at Yahoo! during Salim's tenure at Brickhouse (I ran the internal innovation group, shepherding ideas from employees to product or patent ) and in this book, he and his co-authors hit the nail on the head. Even though they don't say that this is a blueprint to envisioning, developing and launching an exponential organization like Uber, AirBnB it may as well be one.This is a powerful book. I read it non-stop on a flight to from Dublin - I could not put it down and it left me motivated with tons of ideas on building my own exponential startup - and helping others to do the same.One of the best things about this book is that it crystallized a lot of the thinking that I've been doing lately about those kinds of organizations that seemed to grow huge and super profitable overnight, and what were their key attributes, and those attributes were validated here.For example, for a while I was thinking that individually, things like crowdification (utilizing customers for everything from new product definition, to development, to funding, to support and more) and platformization (realizing the potential of leveraging companies as platforms opening up new sales channels which never existed before) were key to the growth of these firms. In this book, the key initial aspect is crowdification. Once the business reaches a certain inflection point, it introduces itself as a platform, and IMHO eventually, moves down in the stack, allowing others to be the last mile to the customer.The only aspect which I've talked about which is not given as much consideration (which is what Uber does very well), is seamlessness, creating seamless, magical experiences by intersecting big data, the internet of things and automation. IMHO, this is coming sooner than you think.A must read. If you are interested in building an exponential organization, whether you're a startup, mid-size company or large enterprise, this book is for you.