Corporate vision: Extinction?

A book called Exponential Organizations has just hit the streets. It’s a good read and it’s a wake-up call for any leader that believes an organisation’s operating model is a constant. That may have been true in the industrial era but no longer holds in the fast moving digital economy.

The reference to exponential relates to the manner in which new technology evolves. On the face of it new technology has been evolving for circa 70 years. However the first ‘new’ technologies arrived 2.5 million years ago in the form of stone tools.

The nature of exponential curves is that they are relatively flat until the exponential effect becomes very noticeable and the curve then heads skywards.

So perhaps the industrial revolution circa two centuries ago was the first sign of the upturn.

The fact that today technology is evolving faster than it ever has is fascinating. But the fact that today is the slowest day that that technology will ever evolve again is sobering.

Leaders who do not grasp what is happening are blindly leading their organisations and societies across what might be called an ‘extinction event horizon’.