Exponential Organizations Quotes

While exponential growth is a remarkable manifestation of our extraordinary accomplishments as a species, built into it are the potential seeds of our demise and the portent of big troubles just around the next corner.

Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is; your fate is to be either the disrupter or the disrupted. There is no middle ground.

in the future, the defining metric for organizations won’t be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).

The great differentiator going forward, the next frontier for exponential growth, the place where individuals and organizations will find a new and sustainable competitive edge, resides in the area of human connectivity.

The ultimate objective is what the Gartner Group calls a zero latency enterprise—that is, a company in which the time between idea, acceptance and implementation all but disappears—and implementing

Most [organizations] think the key to growth is developing new technologies and products. But often this is not so. To unlock the next wave of growth, companies must embed these innovations in a disruptive new business model.

As Eric Ries explains, “The modern rule of competition is whoever learns fastest, wins.

when you move from point A to point B, you can then see point C. But you can’t see point C from point A. Iteration/experimentation is the only way.

The late maverick economist Kenneth Boulding perhaps best summed it up when testifying before the U.S. Congress, declaring that “anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Martin Seligman, a leading expert on positive psychology, differentiates between three states of happiness: the pleasurable life (hedonistic, superficial), the good life (family and friends) and the meaningful life (finding purpose, transcending ego, working toward a higher good). Research shows that Millennials—those born between 1984 and 2002—are showing an orientation towards seeking meaning and purpose in their lives.

In general, if an organization needs to do something that uses computation, and that task is too expensive today, it probably won’t be too expensive in a couple of years.

In an ExO world, purpose trumps strategy and execution overrides planning.

as data becomes the new oil, many business models will be transformed from hardware to software to services.

McKinsey & Company advised AT&T not to enter the mobile telephone business, predicting there would be fewer than one million cellular phones in use by 2000. In fact, by 2000, there were one hundred million mobile phones.

An Exponential Organization (ExO) is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large—at least 10x larger—compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies.

If you really want to know what an organization or a team values, just study their culture.

According to noted hotelier Chip Conley, “Culture is what happens when the boss leaves.

When failure is not an option, you end up with safe, incremental innovation, with no radical breakthroughs or disruptive innovations.

You have to be self-aware and look for that startup idea and purpose that is a perfect fit with you—with you as a person, not as a business[person].

The biggest risk is not taking any risk.

Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.

as technology brings us a world of abundance, access will triumph over ownership.

Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is;

It is our opinion that in the future, the defining metric for organizations won’t be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).

In 2013, Reddit, which has just fifty-one employees, most of whom manage the platform, saw 731 million unique visitors cast 6.7 billion votes on 41 million stories.

The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects,

6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize. Any technology that

In fact, the best definition we’ve found for a startup comes from Ries: “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

To demonstrate, consider the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350

Jerry Michalski notes that in the past, scarcity meant value. That is, without scarcity, you didn’t have a business. Now that notion has been upended. Dave Blakely of IDEO thinks about ExOs in the following way: “These new organizations are exponential because they took something scarce and made it abundant.” Nokia bought Navteq, trying to buy, own and control scarcity, only to be leapfrogged by Waze, which managed to harness abundance.

In all of these areas, the human brain is asked to do and handle more than ever before. We are dealing with several fields of knowledge constantly intersecting with our own, and all of this chaos is exponentially increased by the information available through technology. What this means is that all of us must possess different forms of knowledge and an array of skills in different fields, and have minds that are capable of organizing large amounts of information. The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. And the process of learning skills, no matter how virtual, remains the same. In the future, the great division will be between those who have trained themselves to handle these complexities and those who are overwhelmed by them—those who can acquire skills and discipline their minds and those who are irrevocably distracted by all the media around them and can never focus enough to learn. The Apprenticeship Phase is more relevant and important than ever, and those who discount this notion will almost certainly be left behind. Finally, we live in a culture that generally values intellect and reasoning with words. We tend to think of working with the hands, of building something physical, as degraded skills for those who are less intelligent. This is an extremely counterproductive cultural value. The human brain evolved in intimate conjunction with the hand. Many of our earliest survival skills depended on elaborate hand-eye coordination. To this day, a large portion of our brain is devoted to this relationship. When we work with our hands and build something, we learn how to sequence our actions and how to organize our thoughts. In taking anything apart in order to fix it, we learn problem-solving skills that have wider applications. Even if it is only as a side activity, you should find a way to work with your hands, or to learn more about the inner workings of the machines and pieces of technology around you. Many Masters

Many organizations and militaries use VUCA as an acronym to describe the disruptive state of the world, given its Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. UN-VICE is an updated way of capturing the state and velocity of the world, with our acronym for UNknown, Volatile, Intersecting, Complex, and Exponential: - UNknown: Recognizing that you can’t know anything perfectly, and that many of our decisions are based on assumptions. Increased uncertainty lowers the value of ad-vice and requires increased self-reliance. - Volatile: Our world, and change itself, is evolving faster than ever before. Volatility is not inherently good or bad; it is simply impactful. In volatility we see shifting speed, texture, and magnitude of the changing environment. - Intersecting: The broader our filters, the more we realize that what we observe overlaps with other things. Boundaries are disappearing, connecting new areas through combinations. - Complex: These more-than-complicated systems have unreliable input-output relationships and cannot be summarized or modeled without losing their essence. Unpredictable situations with unknown unknowns. - Exponential: A nonlinear type of change that increases in its growth rate. To an observer, this change may happen gradually, then suddenly. Rapid acceleration of seemingly-small shifts.

many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)

Think of ownership design like organizing dinner for a group of friends. The task gets exponentially harder as the crowd grows. He’s vegan; she’s gluten free; they eat only sushi; this one’s on a juice cleanse; and the other is only free on Tuesdays. If everyone gets a dinner veto, no one dines together. The Senate works this way, with every senator able to filibuster the chamber into gridlock on most issues; similarly, the United Nations is often paralyzed, with the five permanent members of the Security Council—China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—each able by design to veto the others’ agendas.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one’s own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate. The trick is to find sustenance in (Hawthorne again) “the communications of a solitary mind with itself.” The secret is to find sustenance in people like Hawthorne, in the wisdom of the brilliant deceased.

I know that the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can’t manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data “highways,” abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer. How can we affect national policy—or even make intelligent decisions in our own lives—if we don’t grasp the underlying issues? As I write, Congress is dissolving its own Office of Technology Assessment—the only organization specifically tasked to provide advice to the House and Senate on science and technology. Its competence and integrity over the years have been exemplary. Of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress, rarely in the twentieth century have as many as one percent had any significant background in science. The last scientifically literate President may have been Thomas Jefferson.* So how do Americans decide these matters? How do they instruct their representatives? Who in fact makes these decisions, and on what basis? —

Now I’m not trying to sound big-headed or anything but my sensuality has benefited a lot of people in more ways than I can quantify. It has served people not only in romantic relationships but in businesses, organizations and professional lives as well. (People got big promotions at work and major business deals). This was brought to my attention recently by a very close friend of mine in a conversation we had while we were sitting in a coffee shop. She said, “Lebo, have you noticed how so many people who got close to you either through work or relationship have had major transformations in their personal lives within the shortest space of time, that includes myself?” I paused for a moment and remembered the same words being said by one ex of mine, another lady I helped on her project not so long ago echoed the same notion. To some of you this might seem like... c’mon Lebo, anything could have led to any of those transformations. To even associate it with my sensuality seems utterly absurd, it’s like I’m trying to bolster my significance, but I know better now. I know the value I’m bringing into people’s lives whether they acknowledge it or not. Our conversation also made me recall how I had been exploited by others who saw value in me which I, at the time, was still oblivious of. The thing about human beings is that, usually they won’t show you your true value from which they’re secretly benefiting because they know that once you wake up and start realizing it, you won’t supply it for free anymore. So after I had woken up to my true value I decided to start making my sensuality EXCLUSIVE. Now when you make your sensuality exclusive it automatically makes your company highly priced. Consequently, it makes you highly sought after BY PEOPLE WHO SEEK TRUE VALUE AND KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. When you make your sensuality exclusive, it increases your value exponentially as well as your desirability, not to everyone, but only TO THE RIGHT PEOPLE. You become the catch. Now I’m saying this to show you the hidden power of the world of sensuality that most people aren’t aware of. Almost every successful luxury industry in the world essentially thrives on sensual principles whether they’re aware of it or not.

Every company that was designed to have success in the twentieth century is designed to fail in the twenty- first century.” Salim Ismail, author of Exponential Organizations, said

call the 6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize.

Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Every word and every language is a model. All maps and statistics, books and databases, equations and computer programs are models. So are the ways I picture the world in my head—my mental models. None of these is or ever will be the real world. Our models usually have a strong congruence with the world. That is why we are such a successful species in the biosphere. Especially complex and sophisticated are the mental models we develop from direct, intimate experience of nature, people, and organizations immediately around us. However, and conversely, our models fall far short of representing the world fully. That is why we make mistakes and why we are regularly surprised. In our heads, we can keep track of only a few variables at one time. We often draw illogical conclusions from accurate assumptions, or logical conclusions from inaccurate assumptions. Most of us, for instance, are surprised by the amount of growth an exponential process can generate. Few of us can intuit how to damp oscillations in a complex system.

We must remember that SYSTEMS are duplicatable and PEOPLE are not. I cannot hope to build an army of followers if they must be like me. On the other hand, if they have a simple method to follow or a third-party tool to wield, then the chances of duplication and growth in your organization goes up exponentially.

The word “exponential” signifies not just a theory but also a warning: the business world is beginning to move so quickly and so purposefully that if you’re not already changing your business model and thinking differently (and way bigger), you are going to be fatally left behind. ExO: Second Generation The original Exponential Organizations book was published in 2014.

PayPal’s big challenge was to get new customers. They tried advertising. It was too expensive. They tried BD [business development] deals with big banks. Bureaucratic hilarity ensued. … the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth. They needed to give people money. So that’s what they did. New customers got $10 for signing up, and existing ones got $10 for referrals. Growth went exponential, and PayPal wound up paying $20 for each new customer. It felt like things were working and not working at the same time; 7 to 10 percent daily growth and 100 million users was good. No revenues and an exponentially growing cost structure were not. Things felt a little unstable. PayPal needed buzz so it could raise more capital and continue on. (Ultimately, this worked out. That does not mean it’s the best way to run a company. Indeed, it probably isn’t.)2

The Great Resignation was big. Millions of people around the world quit their jobs rather than returning to the status quo of their working lives before the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting global lockdown. The pandemic only accelerated trends that had been building for most of the century. Over the last four decades, the half-life of learned skills has dropped from 30 years to fewer than four, in large part because of the accelerating pace of change driven by the tech revolution. According to noted business visionary John Seely, this trend will continue to accelerate in the years ahead. While employees were forced to work at home, the reason they could work at home was thanks to technological breakthroughs like Zoom, smartphones, ultra-high-speed broadband, and more.

For organizational behavior expert Charles Handy, the S-curve is the essential form of how businesses, social organizations and political systems develop over time, “it is the line of all things human.”7 Tech analyst Paul Saffo advises to “look for the S-curve,” noting that the uptake of new technologies—from personal robots to driverless cars—is destined to follow its shape.8 Scholars have used the sigmoid curve to describe the rise and fall of ancient civilizations like the Roman Empire, but also to predict modern-day shifts, such as the decline of the United States as a global superpower.9 In the field of systems thinking, the authors of the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth put the S-curve at the heart of their analysis.10 More recently, economist Kate Raworth has shown that mainstream economics assumes that GDP growth follows an “exponential curve left hanging in mid-air,” when the reality is that it is far more likely to level off into the shape of the S-curve.

Doing anything significant, big, and bold requires a TON of hard work. It also involves countless risks, setbacks, and restarts. While some people are lucky, most success stories require recovering one more time, facing the challenge, and beginning again. Over and over.

Hirsch notes that Paul’s use of master builder “is loaded with notions of design, innovation and strategic craftsmanship.” God’s house is neither a Craftsman prefabricated home ordered from of the Sears catalogue, nor a flat-packed vision to build an Ikea church. Paul learned from experience that each church plant would incarnate Christ differently depending on the gift matrix of the community in which he planted it. What many call vision is actually the strategic organization of the gifts of God’s people.

As Peter likes to say, “The world’s biggest problems are the world’s biggest business opportunities,” and “If you want to become a billionaire, help a billion people.

Between 1820 and 2015, the proportion of humanity living in extreme poverty plummeted from 90% to 10%. Between 1800 and 2016, the global literacy rate increased from 15% to more than 80%. Between 1800 and 2017, the global child mortality rate plummeted from 42% to under 5%. Between 1779 and 2019, average global life expectancy skyrocketed from 30 to more than 75 years.

Riaz Shah, the Global Head of Learning at Ernst and Young, trains 100,000 new hires annually. The following image from Riaz is his take on the immune system: Too many people who have worked for a business—especially a large enterprise—are familiar with corporate immune systems.

The next billion-dollar startup will only have three employees.” The culture of that startup would be “AI first,” and it would use autonomous AI agents to get work done. All marketing and sales would be automated via AI bots, and the three employees would be: The CEO, who would handle vision and purpose and lead public-facing marketing. She would also code and be involved in engineering. The Product Lead, who would interface with customers and team to manage the product roadmap and drive development The Operations Lead, who would be responsible for the outcome of the AI bots and handle finance and legal and smooth operations. We

Exponential Organizations are founded by innovative owners who value speed and early adoption of innovation. Think Tesla/SpaceX and Elon Musk, Amazon and Jeff Bezos, Apple and Steve Jobs. In these companies, the visionary tech founder has the ability to dictate speed and direction. From inception, these company cultures are oriented toward rapid Experimentation and data-driven decision-making rather than the comfort of humans living in the status quo.

Waze’s triumph and Navteq’s decline should be the model for every budding ExO. Ask yourself, “Which of my products or services can I digitize and dematerialize?” and “How can I use the Six Ds to leapfrog my biggest linear competitors? How can I use them to demonetize and democratize my products and/or services?

An ExO is a purpose-driven, agile, and scalable organization that uses accelerating technologies to digitize, dematerialize, democratize, and demonetize its products and services, resulting in a 10x performance increase over its non-ExO peers.

The first stands alone: Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP). As the name suggests, MTP is the ExO’s core reason for existing. MTP is the foundation upon which all company actions take place. It establishes a long-term goal for the company so sweeping and profound that it is always within reach yet always unreachable. It sets a moral foundation for all company interactions between all stakeholders. It keeps the company disciplined and on target. It inspires employees and customers. And it galvanizes employee morale and retention.

Don Reinertsen has written extensively on the need for people in a system to have “slack time” in software development. The wait time for a service (such as a functional expert working on a job) increases exponentially as their utilization goes up. For instance, the wait time is nine times longer when that resource is 90% utilized versus 50% utilized. (For the curious reader, this is a property of queues such as those at supermarket checkouts and customer service calls, known formally as M/M/∞ queues.)

With crypto, we now have a debt-free engine that, combined with Web3, smart contracts, and gamification, provides a new, truly democratic, financial and regulatory regime that will dominate human engagement over the next decades.

Only one facet of the atomic bomb was still missing: Criticality. “Criticality” is a term used to describe the ideal conditions for a chain reaction. A row of dominoes is “critical: if each domino that falls knocks over one other. Fermi assembled a “critical mass” of uranium in his reactor, and he achieved a linear chain reaction. Each atom that fissioned caused one other atom to fission. Theoretically, that sort of reaction can go on forever (given infinite atoms), but it’s not getting any bigger. A bomb, however, requires something more explosive: a chain reaction that grows exponentially. A bomb requires a super critical mass. Imagine an area the size of an empty basketball court and a pile of dominoes. To make a super critical mass, line up the dominoes so that each one that falls will knock over two more dominoes. And each one of those knocks two more over, and so on… This is essentially what happens inside the core of an atomic bomb. The reactive material — uranium or plutonium — is packed together so tightly that when one atom fissions the released neutrons can’t help but hit two more atoms, causing them to fission as well. In other words, once a super-critical mass is assembled, an exponential chain reaction is practically inevitable. Variations on this kind of super-critical mass happen often in nature. Avalanches. Epidemics. But it’s a lot harder for humans to re-create these sorts of complex systems. A super-critical reaction requires an astounding amount of work and organization just to get all the necessary pieces arranged in the right order. All this work, whether it’s lining up dominoes or enriching uranium, builds toward one single moment: the moment when what was once impossible becomes unavoidable. In that moment the logic of the chain reaction takes over. The fire will only stop when there is nothing left to burn. The Trinity test was that moment. Once construction had finished on the factories, the laboratories, and the test sites… once the nation’s brightest minds had demonstrated the potential power of nuclear fission… and, finally, once the military had organized these many parts into a coherent plan to test a bomb… a chain reaction was about to be set in motion, making certain outcomes inevitable. With all that momentum, if a bomb could indeed be built, was there any justification to not build it? And once a workable bomb was built, was there really any chance that it wouldn’t be used?

We like to think that thirty or forty years into the Information Revolution we are well along in terms of its development. But according to this metric, we’re just 1 percent of the way down the road. Not only is most of that growth still ahead of us, all of it is.

Ray Kurzweil says: “An invention needs to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.

So, of the three major risk areas, execution risk remains the only real issue in building a company. How will the enterprise organize itself to maximize performance from its founders and management team? How will it leverage technology and information to create a unique and sustainable advantage and business model? Answering these questions correctly is the key to building a successful Exponential Organization. For this reason, we need to look more closely at each of the steps in building a powerful and effective team.

There is a fundamental DNA path dependency here. Are you primarily a community or are you primarily a company? The reason you have to ask yourself this is because sooner or later the two will come in conflict. We [DIY Drones] are primarily a community. Every day, we make decisions that disadvantage the company to bring advantage to the community.

the fantastic power and ultimate absurdity of unchecked exponential growth.

IdeaScale, eYeka, Spigit, InnoCentive, SolutionXchange, Crowdtap and Brightidea. Validation is achieved by obtaining measurable

Change the game: 1. Adjust the arena. 2. Re-rig the rules. 3. Attack the plan. Change the story: 1. Describe the alternative. 2. Organize in narratives. 3. Make your fight a fable. Change the equation: 1. Act exponentially. 2. Act reciprocally. 3. Perform your power.

History and common sense make clear that you cannot radically transform every part of an organization—and accelerate the underlying clock of that enterprise to hyper-speed—without fundamentally changing the nature of that organization.

We wrote Shift Ahead to document how the smartest companies and organizations shift their strategies in order to stay relevant in the face of swift and exponential changes in everything from technology to the forces of globalization, from politics and culture, from consumer tastes to human behavior. We wanted to find out how they shift ahead – how they stayed ahead of the curve, the competition, and the evolving requirements of their customers – given the barrage of evolving challenges.

Rather than using armies of people or large physical plants, Exponential Organizations are built upon information technologies that take what was once physical in nature and dematerialize it into the digital, on-demand world.

The physical world is still there, of course, but our relationship to it is changing fundamentally.

If you build communities and you do things in public,” he says, “you don’t have to find the right people, they find you.

Thus have computational improvements in weather forecasting delivered a body blow to an industry as seemingly immune to technology advances as Buenos Aires car wash operators.

Large numbers of bottom-up ideas, properly filtered, always trump top-down thinking, no matter the industry or organization.

Trust Beats Control and Open Beats Closed

How quickly can you convert exponential growth into the critical mass needed to become a platform? Once that happens there is no practical limit. It’s one big coral reef.

PayPal’s big challenge was to get new customers. They tried advertising. It was too expensive. They tried BD [business development] deals with big banks. Bureaucratic hilarity ensued. … the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth. They needed to give people money. So that’s what they did. New customers got $10 for signing up, and existing ones got $10 for referrals. Growth went exponential, and PayPal wound up paying $20 for each new customer. It felt like things were working and not working at the same time; 7 to 10 percent daily growth and 100 million users was good. No revenues and an exponentially growing cost structure were not. Things felt a little unstable. PayPal needed buzz so it could raise more capital and continue on. (Ultimately, this worked out. That does not mean it’s the best way to run a company. Indeed, it probably isn’t.)2 Thiel’s account captures both the desperation of those early days and the almost random experimentation the company resorted to in an effort to get PayPal off the ground. But in the end, the strategy worked. PayPal dramatically increased its base of consumers by incentivizing new sign-ups. Most important, the PayPal team realized that getting users to sign up wasn’t enough; they needed them to try the payment service, recognize its value to them, and become regular users. In other words, user commitment was more important than user acquisition. So PayPal designed the incentives to tip new customers into the ranks of active users. Not only did the incentive payments make joining PayPal feel riskless and attractive, they also virtually guaranteed that new users would start participating in transactions—if only to spend the $10 they’d been gifted in their accounts. PayPal’s explosive growth triggered a number of positive feedback loops. Once users experienced the convenience of PayPal, they often insisted on paying by this method when shopping online, thereby encouraging sellers to sign up. New users spread the word further, recommending PayPal to their friends. Sellers, in turn, began displaying PayPal logos on their product pages to inform buyers that they were prepared to honor this method of online payment. The sight of those logos informed more buyers of PayPal’s existence and encouraged them to sign up. PayPal also introduced a referral fee for sellers, incentivizing them to bring in still more sellers and buyers. Through these feedback loops, the PayPal network went to work on its own behalf—it served the needs of users (buyers and sellers) while spurring its own growth.

Non-ownership, then, is the key to owning the future—except, of course, when it comes to scarce resources and assets. As noted above, Tesla owns its own factories and Amazon its own warehouses. When the asset in question is rare or extremely scarce, then ownership is a better option. But if your asset is information-based or commoditized at all, then accessing is better than possessing.

When Kaggle runs a competition, it has found that the first responders are experts in a particular domain who say, “We know this industry, we’ve done this before and we’ll figure it out.” And just as inevitably, within two weeks, complete newcomers to the field trounce their best results.

Program. Some

According to entrepreneur Chris Dixon, the most important change for entrepreneurs versus a decade ago is the ratio of reach to capital. Today, the reach of a startup is 100x larger, while the capital needed is one tenth that of a decade ago—a thousandfold improvement in just ten years.

In his book The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil identified a hugely important and fundamental property of technology: when you shift to an information-based environment, the pace of development jumps onto an exponential growth path and price/performance doubles every year or two.

Gamification should empower people, not exploit them. It should feel good at the end of the day because you made progress towards something that mattered to you.

Mark Zuckerberg agrees, noting, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk.” Constant

Two well-known examples of crowdfunding companies are Kickstarter and Indiegogo. In 2012 there was an estimated $2.8 billion raised via crowdfunding campaigns. By 2015 that number is expected to climb to $15 billion. The World Bank predicts crowdfunding to grow to $93 billion by 2025.

Clay Shirky calls cognitive surplus. “The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects,” he

Indeed, the rate of change is so high everywhere these days that you now must assume that someone will disrupt you, and often from a direction you least expect. As Steve Forbes sees it, “You have to disrupt yourself or others will do it for you.” This applies to every market, geography and industry.

the fact remains that most large organizations punish failure quite severely.

don’t try to wedge the emerging business back into the mother ship.

OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way.

Specificity and rapid feedback cycles energize, motivate and drive company morale and culture.

At Google, for example, all OKRs are completely transparent and public within the company.

small, independent and interdisciplinary teams are critical to future organizations, especially at the edges.

We’ve learned how to scale technology; now it’s time to scale the organization.

We define Experimentation as the implementation of the Lean Startup methodology of testing assumptions and constantly experimenting with controlled risks.

Eliminate all expenses with any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer.”)

A common saying around Silicon Valley is execution eats strategy for breakfast.

It used to require millions of dollars in servers and software to launch a software company. Thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), it now costs just a tiny fraction of that amount.

within a decade, the Chinese economy could be under serious threat from 3D printing technology.

Rapid or disruptive change is something that large, matrixed organizations find extremely difficult.

knowledge-based one. And this is just beginning. Ten years ago we had five hundred million Internet-connected devices. Today there are about eight billion. By 2020 there will be fifty billion and a decade later we’ll have a trillion Internet-connected devices as we literally information-enable every aspect of the world in the Internet of Things. The Internet is now the world’s nervous system, with our mobile devices serving as edge points and nodes on that network. Think about that for a second: we’ll be jumping from eight billion Internet-connected devices today to fifty billion by 2025, and to a trillion a mere decade later. We like to think that thirty or forty years into the Information Revolution we are well along in terms of its development. But according to this metric, we’re just 1 percent of the way down the road. Not only is most of that growth still ahead of us, all of it is. And everything is being disrupted in the process.

The platform can be thought of as a combination of Quirky (product development) and Kaggle (incentive competitions), but for cars and other vehicles.