Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)

by Salim Ismail

Congratulations on the successes that got you to this point in your career, but let me forewarn you that those skills are already out of date. The

one whose curriculum was constantly being updated. For that reason SU was never accredited—not because we didn’t care, but because the curriculum was changing too fast. SU would focus only on the exponentially growing (or accelerating technologies) that were riding on the back of Moore’s Law. Areas

speech calling for this new university to focus on addressing the world’s biggest problems: “I now have a very simple metric I use: Are you working on something that can change the world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.99999 percent of people is ‘no.’ I think we need to be training people on how to change the world. Obviously, technologies are the way to do that. That’s what we’ve seen in the past; that’s what’s driven all the change.”

Today the only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing. Your competition is no longer the multinational corporation overseas, it’s now the guy or gal in the Silicon Valley or Bandra (Mumbai) garage using the latest online tools to design and cloud print their latest innovation.

In time, humanity domesticated beasts of burden, including the horse and ox, and output increased further. But the equation was still linear. Double the beasts, double the output. As market capitalism came into existence and the industrial age dawned, output took a huge leap. Now a single individual could operate machinery that did the work of 10 horses or 100 laborers. The speed of transport, and thus distribution, doubled, and then, for the first time in human history, tripled. Increased output brought prosperity to many and, ultimately, a manifold jump in the standard of living. Starting at the end of the eighteenth century and continuing through the present—and largely the result of the intersection of the Industrial Revolution and the modern scientific research laboratory—mankind has witnessed a doubling

Although a workable system, it is far from an optimal one. Too much money and valuable talent is locked up in decade-long projects whose likelihood of success can’t be measured almost until the moment they fail. All of which adds up to enormous waste, not least in terms of lost potential to pursue other ideas and opportunities that could benefit mankind.

When Ray Kurzweil was asked his perspective, however, his view of the “impending disaster” was quite different. “1 percent,” he said. “That means we’re halfway done.”