A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail Introduction In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations whereRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Exponential Organizations according to Salim Ismail
In this episode Salim Ismail gives a deep dive of his book, Exponential Organizations where he shows you how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become exponential.
In his book, Ismail unveils years of research learning how organizations can accelerate growth through the use of technology. The goal of the book is to provide you with the knowledge to leverage assets such as big data, communities, algorithms, and new technology to achieve performance ten times better than your competition.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a guide for harnessing and strategizing the hyper growth of a company that feeds off of modern technology in the 21st century and beyond.
Because we focus on accelerating technologies and the future we identified an inflection point in how we build businesses that has never noticed before.
You can jump in as needed but I would suggest reading the first two chapters first because it lays the premise and basis of the book.
As we finish the book the core economic basis of these new exponential organizations kind of bubbled up. When you are building and running a business you are worried about money and cost of supply and worried about cost of demand. The internet allowed us to drop our cost of demand exponentially.
We open chapter one basically by saying the world is moving exponentially quicker. As we digitize things we hop onto what we call Moore’s Law and the pace of change moves very, very quickly at an accelerating pace. Where we saw computers move at this pace over the last 50 to 60 years based on Moore’s Law we’re not seeing six, seven or eight technologies hop onto that same curb. The first chapter is to give a hard reality check that the world is moving more quickly than we’ve ever seen it before and we give some specifics on how that works.
The second chapter talks about our organizational structures and the fact that how we organize ourselves is very linear and has been for a long time. All of our businesses have inherited a local and linear characteristic where if you had twice as big of a farm you need twice as many people to farm it. We are seeing today that an information based environment actually accelerates and doesn’t just stay linear. We are seeing new organizations that are scaling at an accelerating rate and not just as a multiplier. In this chapter we teach you how to make your organization adapt to this new accelerated pace.
Chapter three looks at the five externalities of these organizations and I open this chapter by saying all these exponential organizations have one single visionary mission statement characteristic. Each has what I call an MTP (Massive transformative purpose). Chapter three continues to describe five externalities and map onto the acronym SCALE. S stands for Staff on Demand. C stands for Community and Crowd. The A stands for Algorithms. The L stands for leveraged Assets. And the E stands for Engagement.
Chapter four dives into the five internal control mechanisms that these organizations are using to manage and track themselves. This maps on to the word IDEAS. The I stands for Interface Processes. The D stands for Dashboards. The E stands for Experimentation. The A stands for Autonomy. And the S stands for Social Technologies. What we found is if you implement four out of the 10 attributes that we described in chapter three and four you will get to the 10x level.
Chapter five summarizes all of it and explains the implications of this new model. This chapter goes through a whole set of implications about how to think about the future.
The second half of the book, chapter six to chapter ten, explains how to apply it. Chapter six is about how to apply this to a startup. And when you are starting a company from scratch what sequence to go in. This chapter will give you the specific steps to take to launch a startup with these principles in mind.
Chapter seven is about how to apply this to a midmarket company. There are a lot of midmarket family style businesses that have grown early on but have now plateaued and this is about taking that and blowing it open.
Chapter eight is about how to organize a big company because you can’t take a big organization and turn it in to one of these new animals, it’s too disruptive of a change. What you need to do is take a disruptive set of changes agents that exist in all organizations and build one of these exponential organizations off the edge of your own attacking in another marketplace.
Chapter nine is a set of nine success stories of what big companies are doing.
In the final chapter we talk about the role of the executive in the future.
“Any organization built for success in the 20th century is doomed for failure in the 21st century.” – David Ross
I am the founding executive director and currently global ambassador for Singularity University. Our mission statement at Singularity University is to create a new generation of leadership that can leverage accelerating technologies to solve major global problems. I have been doing this for about six years and was the head of innovation at Yahoo and Tech Entrepreneurship before that.
As we launched Singularity six years ago we noticed at the same time that a very different model has become of how we build organizations. We’ve learned how to scale technology really well but scaling the organization and building that is painfully incrementally and linear. In the last five years or so we are seeing a new breed of organizational structure that can scale in the same seamless way that we scale technology. I noticed that as a weak signal five years ago, started tracking it, and over the last three years we have found over 60 organizations that are scaling at an average 10 times better, faster and cheaper compared to their peers. We started documenting those 60 organizations and tracking them and decided to write a book on the model.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin
Buy Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail on Amazon today
Visit ExponentialOrgs.com take the diagnostic survey and learn more about the book
Visit SingularityU.org to learn more about Singularity University
Follow Salim Ismail on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization by Nathan Furr
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Innovator’s Method according to Nathan Furr: Introduction In this episode Nathan Furr gives a detailed summary of his book, The Innovator’sRead More
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]]>In this episode Nathan Furr gives a detailed summary of his book, The Innovator’s Method. This book provides the ideal process of an innovator’s phase: the insight, problem, solution, and business model. We acquire information by observing the glitches around us and present a solution. Digging deep will find us an explanation and creating a business model to market the proper need. Whether you are an entrepreneur launching a start-up or re-establishing a present one, this book is an excellent resource.
One thing is that we are trying to synthesize all these different perspectives. By synthesizing what is common across these methods we can get a richer and fuller view of the innovation process. The second thing is we did a bunch of research on how entrepreneurs and managers apply the innovators method. The third thing is it expresses the need to think seriously when we manage uncertainty.
I recommend you blow through it from beginning to end and then go back for reference.
The one principle that I would want the reader to take away is that if you are facing uncertainty you need to employ a different way to manage that uncertainty. The different way is to identify your unexamined assumptions, design a liable but low cost and rapid experiment to test that assumption and lastly you need to change when you discover what the answer is.
At the heart of this book there is an end to end process that is laid out and what we saw was common across the innovators we studied. We lay this process out as four steps before you start to scale up the business. These four steps are insight, problems, solutions and business model.
Insight is all about looking for surprises in the world around you. These surprises are the clues or symptoms of a deeper customer need.
Once you’ve got insight we then propose the need to understand the costumer problem or job to be done. Here we provide tools and test to help you figure out the need of your customers.
After you deeply understand the need you can then work on the solution to the need. In this section we talk about how you can leverage four hipper rapid prototypes to get a solution that delights customers and almost sales itself.
Lastly you want to align the business model by discovering the right go-to market strategy.
After you have taken these four steps you are now ready to scale the business.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 07:17
“Innovators innovate, customers validate.” – Nathan Furr
I earned my Ph.D. at Stanford University in the Stanford technology ventures program. I’ve worked in management consulting, I’ve been an entrepreneur, worked in venture capital and across those experiences I wanted to spend some time sharing some of the insights that I discovered along the way.
When I was at Stanford I used to hear disparaging comments about business schools and management and I wondered why I was hearing such negative things. As I started to dig into history I discovered something surprising and that was that management schools did not exist until the late industrial revolution. Business schools where founded to manage problems of relative certainty and what we left unanswered were how to manage uncertainty.
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
Buy The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr on Amazon today
Visit TheInnovatorsMethod.com to learn more about Nathan and his book
Follow Nathan Furr on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Inside The Box by Drew Boyd
The Seven Sins of Innovation by Dave Richards
The Myths of Creativity by David Burkus
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of The Innovator’s Method with Nathan Furr appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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