The Leadership Exponential

Exponential leadership means letting go of legacy thinking, legacy processes, legacy expectations and legacy mindsets. It requires leaders to be unshackled from the past, have the intellectual curiosity to embrace the Now, and develop the humility to understand and accept that the best ideas for compounding the business may not reside at the top of the organisation.

- Dr. Sujaya Banerjee

In the future of work, you are either the one causing the change, or the one being changed yourself. Highly successful companies of our times are at the forefront of innovation and disruption and are experiencing hyper growth. What does it mean to be an exponential organisation? Exponential organisations (ExOs) use a small footprint to leverage accelerating technologies to go outside their traditional boundaries. As opposed to the larger companies that had a hard time innovating owing to their sheer size, exponential companies have generally kept things compact and agile so that they could adapt as needed.

What does it take to be exponential?

Salim Ismail of Singularity University has identified ten characteristics of exponential organisations; 5 external and 5 internal. Salim Ismail predicts that organisations can reach 10 X performance improvement by adopting only four of these ten characteristics.

Five external characteristics (Acronym SCALE)

S: Staff on demand. Just like Uber does not actually employ its own workers, we are moving to a model where companies outsource most of their major work, which gives them better flexibility to quickly adapt to market changes.

C: Community and Crowd. Exponential organisations use collaborative means to build community and scale their work.

A: Algorithms. UPS is a good example of a company using an algorithm to maximize its efficiency- in this case, finding the best routes for its trucks.

L: Leased assets. Similar to having staff on demand, exponential companies have assets on demand, and do not own much of what they use.

E: Engagement. To create connectivity between the organisation and the community, exponential organisations utilise digital feedback, incentives, and gamification.