Salim Ismail?is the lead author of the bestselling business book,?Exponential Organizations.?A renowned technology strategist and serial entrepreneur with ties to Yahoo!, Google, and Singularity University, he consults with governments and the world’s top Fortune 500 companies on innovation and growth. His work has been featured in premier media outlets like the?New York Times, Bloomberg Business Week, Fortune, Forbes, WIRED, Vogue, and the?BBC.
Salim founded ExO Works in 2016 to help transform global business by catapulting organizations into the world of exponential thinking. He travels extensively sharing a global perspective on the impact of breakthrough technologies and how organizations can leverage these disruptions to grow 10 times faster than their peers. He is co-founder and Chairman of OpenExO and an active Board Member of the XPRIZE Foundation.
Recently, on the Outthinkers podcast, he discussed how companies taking advantage of exponential technologies often stay one step ahead.
- Exponential organizations have a massive transformational purpose: Technology is scaling rapidly and causing a new breed of organization to emerge. Today, we are facing up to twenty society-altering Gutenberg moments at one time. What Salim calls "exponentials organizations" are responding to the challenge with their ability to scale the organization as fast as technology scales. One thing all of these exponential organizations have in common is a massive transformational purpose. This purpose serves as the guiding compass and the strategy provides the route to get there.
- Large, legacy companies need to solve an immune system problem: Large organizations are structured for efficiency and predictability. They inherently view disruptive innovation as an attack and therefore reject it. In order to solve the immune system problem, organizations can establish a few best practices to behave more like exponential organizations--an overarching purpose, lean startup mindsets, decentralized structures, OKRs, and more.
- Exponential organizations run experiments at the edges: In order to establish exponential transformation, you will need to train new mindsets around decentralization, lean startup thinking, and dashboards. Next, Salim recommends running multiple small experiments simultaneously to test the market. Establish a sprint period to break from the current company immune system--assign one group to look for adjacencies and new opportunities at the edges and one group to search for ways to accelerate internal processes. Finally, move the disruptive thinkers to the edge to experiment. If an experiment starts to succeed, pursue it, but resist the urge to pull it back into the larger organization because doing so can deter innovation efforts.
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- Learn more about ExO Works.
