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

by Salim Ismail

While maintaining permanent staff is likely to remain more important in certain equipment- and capital-intensive industries such as shipping, mining or construction, in any information-enabled business a large internal staff seems increasingly unnecessary, counterproductive and expensive. And the old argument that freelancers and contractors only increase the bureaucracy needed to manage them quickly falls away too: thanks to the Internet, the cost of finding and tracking outside staff drops almost to zero. In addition, due to the rapid rise in the number of Internet users, the volume and quality of freelancers has gone up dramatically in the last ten years.