Exponential Organizations

Business Book of the Year 2014

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, 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 it is time to introduce the Exponential Organization leveraging openness, transparency and abundance in a new way. This is a new organizational model that is condusive 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.

In the first half of the book, we 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?

We are seeing a transformation in business that hasn’t been seen in the last hundred years – the future will be owned by this new breed of Exponential Organizations. How scalable is your organization? Is it an ExO? We have provided a complimentary diagnostic survey that will assign you an Exponential Quotient (ExQ) score based on answers about your business.