BUSINESS STRATEGY

How to transform your company into an Exponential Organization (ExO)

Notes from Yuri Van Geest’s speech ”Exponentiele Organisaties”

Disclaimer: this notes are a collection of personal thoughts, data points and quotes from experts. All info is publicly available. The content hereby written does not reflect in anyway the position of the company I work for.

Dear reader,

A few years back I had the pleasure to attend an extremely interesting, passionate and visionary speech by Yuri Van Geest, author of Exponential Organizations (ExOs). At that time, Yuri worked at the University of Singularity in The Netherlands, studying the “Tsunami” provided by the new technologies. In 2017, he has been recognized by Thinkers 50 as one of the top 50 best emerging management book authors in the world. I am happy to share with you some of the key learnings from his speech, complemented by some personal considerations and notes. Although the following notes are a bit dated, these topics are still valid in 2018.

Exponential Technologies

The rise of disruptive technologies is evident to everyone. This is mainly due to two factors: declining costs of tech and increasing capabilities. Think, as example, about think DNA sequencing, which cost moved from $10M to around $1K.

One of the peculiarities of a new technology is that, when it kicks in, the first thing human beings do is… to be afraid. They are scared of it. What happens next is that people adapts to the new reality, then people embraces it and finally let control go and just trust the machine. The most recent example is voice control, with the likes of AI Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft) and Siri (Apple). Who would have thought that in 2017/2018 thousands of people around the world were talking to an artificial intelligence on daily basis, just to be amused or to facilitate the execution of simple tasks? And that’s just the beginning…

“The future of news is humans talking to machines”. That’s the argument of the BBC’s Trushar Barot, who believes voice AI is the biggest technology revolution that the news industry is missing and that it’s not too late to do something about it.