By Naheem Charania
If you follow Miami’s intriguing tech ecosystem, then March 19, 2015 will not soon be forgotten. On that day, Salim Ismail, Founding Executive Director of Singularity University, partnered with Rokk3r Labs, The Knight Foundation and The Idea Center at Miami Dade College to present a workshop on Exponential Organizations. The audience of almost 200 people was a mix of industry professionals across startups, mid-market companies and enterprises. The goal of the workshop was to provide attendees with a vision and framework to help their companies survive a world where accelerating technologies are driving an unbelievable rate of innovation.
This rapid rise of innovation was a key focus of the workshop, and a pivotal point of the book Salim co-wrote called, Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations are Ten Times Better, Faster and Cheaper Than Yours (And What To Do About It). That the world is changing around us due to technology is a familiar concept. But what is often overlooked, is the sheer magnitude of change, the reasons, and how this change is impacting every industry. Salim was able to set the stage for the audience by identifying and contextualizing key facts about the progress of humanity and its effect on business. First, that performance and accessibility of key information technologies are skyrocketing, while their costs are plummeting. And second, these technologies are being connected and used together (think artificial intelligence and algorithms to analyze data) to uncover and achieve never-before-seen results.
What really moved the audience was Salim’s identification of an exponential organization, a type of organization that thrives in this world of accelerated innovation. Its impact is at least ten times that compared to its peers because it leverages accelerating technologies and uses new organizational techniques. It is driven by a ‘massive transformative purpose’, a higher aspirational calling, and contains common traits across a selection of ten specific attributes based on research of the top one hundred fastest growing startups worldwide in the last half-dozen years. Salim asked the audience to consider the hotel industry, something general and familiar, to see impact from the application of exponential organization principles. Hyatt Hotels Corporation (a traditional and ‘linear’ organization) with its limited number of properties was contrasted with AirBnB (an organization that embodies the exponential organization principles), which has accumulated 500,000+ listings in 33,000+ cities, owns no physical assets and is worth over $10 billion! This also helped to demonstrate the concept of traditional or ‘linear’ organizations built on the concept of scarcity, while exponential organizations such as AirBnB that evolved to instead manage the abundance.
Nabyl Charania, CEO of Rokk3r Labs, accentuated the workshop with an overview about how Rokk3r Labs partners with entrepreneurs and enterprises to build exponential organizations. Particularly, Nabyl spoke of various ways in which Rokk3r Labs is utilizing the principles of exponential organizations specifically geared towards enterprises, to help those large organizations manage and overcome their intrinsically risk-averse DNA that stops them from innovating. This was of specific interest to the audience who were able to comprehend the connections between exponential organization attributes even at the enterprise level, and not just for startup and mid-market size organizations. (Pictured are Ismail with Rokk3r's Nabyl Charania and German Montoya.)
To say that we are living in ‘the most exciting time in human history’ is not an overstatement. The rate of disruptive innovation as a result of exponential technologies impacts every single aspect of our lives and businesses, the world over. Every day we wake up to remarkable triumphs such as companies reaching billion dollar market caps in fractional time periods, the ten, hundred,
Insert Image and thousand-fold decreases in prices of industrial robots, 3D printers, and DNA sequencing, and persistent breakthroughs in autonomous vehicles, deep-learning algorithms, and neuro-feedback. Through Salim’s workshop on the Exponential Organization, Miami was able to have its first, collaborative look at the tools and frameworks that will help organizations survive a world where innovation and access is increasing at a pace that is hard to believe. The workshop ended with the exciting news of another workshop on Exponential Organizations led by Salim, who South Florida is lucky to now have as a resident. The workshop will be held in collaboration with Rokk3r Labs within the next few months. A specific date will be announced shortly.
For more information about Exponential Organizations, visit www.exponentialorgs.com.
Naheem Charania is a partner at Rokk3r Labs