Industry Magazine Grand General Agency Fall 2016 | Page 16

Exponential
Organizations
How Technology WILL Change
Your Business
Teachings from Salim Ismail, Author
of The Exponential Organizations

“In business, performance
is key. In performance,
how you organize can
be the key to growth.”
FALL
FALL 2016
2016

SALIM Ismail, author of the book The
Exponential Organization and one of
the founders of Singularity University,
is one of the biggest proponents of the
concept of an exponential organization
(ExO). He is, in fact, one of the originators
of the term. He defines an ExO as an
organization that performs a minimum of
ten times better than their competitors
in the same space by leveraging the
power of information and improvements
in technology. In following with that,
these companies have been able to use
relatively few resources to cause major
changes in many industries. It can be said,
perhaps, that technology is the only true
driver of change in the world.
Traditional companies not only do
not perform at the levels that ExOs
do, but they fail to understand the
consequences of not adapting to changes
in both information and technology.
As entrepreneur David Rose put it so
eloquently, “any company designed for
success in the 20th century is doomed to
failure in the 21st.” He isn’t kidding. Over
the last two decades, a number of leading
companies have failed because of a lack of
vision or a lack of adaptation. Kodak, once
the leader in photographic technology,
failed due to completely ignoring the
move to digital.

The Law of Accelerating Returns
To begin determining how an ExO

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