Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

For the first three decades of my life, there was a set of clear rules about how business worked. Dozens of very large companies dominated the economy, and each had a specialty. Exxon and BP invested in oil rigs and drew oil from the ground, selling it at a market price that was above the price of extraction. General Motors and Ford assembled raw materials and components, stitched them together and sold them for a profit. Successful companies grew bigger, by dint of better products or keener pricing. They might benefit from economies of scale – as they got bigger, their costs, relatively speaking, went down. But these companies also encountered forces that held them back. As they became bigger, they might become too complex to manage. The flows of information between bosses, managers and employees might get entangled. Headquarters might lose track of what the front line worker was doing. If you have ever worked at a very large company, you’ll be familiar with how bureaucracy creeps in and slows everything down.