Technology is disrupting the world. For companies this means that, in order to ensure their adaptation and survival, they must move at the same speed by taking advantage of these disruptive technologies and innovating their business model. Which leads us to wonder: how many business leaders are really ready for this?
The World Economic Forum defined the period of transformation we are experiencing as “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”, this due to the impact and growth of technologies such as artificial intelligence, drones, virtual reality, blockchain, biotechnology, nanotechnology, among others, which are doubling their capacity every 5 to 24 months.
Faced with this transformation, business leaders who freeze and hope that the changes in the world will not affect their companies will cause their decline. Traditional models and approaches will make companies disappear. As investor Angel David Rose put it: “Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to fail in the 21st century.”
Follow us on Google News to keep you always informed
Such was the case of giants like Nokia, which in 2007, trying to dominate the navigation industry, invested more than 8.1 billion dollars in traffic sensors while a small startup called Waze, took advantage of the GPS sensors on your users’ phones to obtain real-time traffic information at no cost. Or the famous case of Blockbuster, the video rental giant that rejected the proposal to adopt an online video store format; or Kodak, whose leaders refused to commercialize the digital camera so as not to hurt its sales model for photographic films.
Linear or traditional thinking means staying in a “safe” place, where innovations are not generated that could “put the business model at risk”; is to maintain the same operating structure, systems, technology and strategy that have previously worked; is to sell to the same market; is to see experimentation as a risk and innovation as a threat to status quo.
Exponential thinking, on the other hand, is to use new technologies to reduce operating costs and as a competitive advantage; it is to innovate in the business model in terms of strategy, information, structure, culture, processes, operations, personnel, KPIs; is to see consumer needs as an opportunity for growth; is to provide solutions with a global reach to create companies with disruptive transformation purposes. It is to develop companies with vision and exponential models such as Uber, Kavak, Google, Slack, Rotoplas, TED, Airbnb, among others.
Follow the information about business and current affairs in Forbes Mexico
“You must first think exponentially and then grow your company exponentially,” says Daniel Marcos of the Growth Institute. This is because at the heart of each organization are its leaders, so it is necessary that they update and guide their organizations on a path that takes advantage of exponential technologies.
We see examples of disruptive companies like The Skysource / Skywater Alliance that succeeded in developing a technology that can extract 2,000 liters of water per day from the atmosphere at a cost of 2 cents per liter. Or Nido Robotics, a company that has created specialized drones to explore the deepest and most unknown areas of the sea. Or Tesla, which has developed an increasingly sophisticated autopilot that can recognize traffic signs and differentiate between traffic control lights.
According to the IDC consultancy, only in 2019, 80% of the country’s SMEs had the objective of digitizing in the medium term, then the crisis due to the pandemic arrived which accelerated the transformation plans from years to only weeks. This provides the opportunity to generate a new type of business with vision and exponential growth.
The rise of a new type of exponential organizations
Follow the business information in our specialized section
The new type of organizations that take advantage of exponential technologies, are agile, adaptable and fast, were called by the co-founder of Singularity University, Salim Ismail, as Exponential Organizations (ExO). ExOs are a different way of organizing, building and managing an organization using technological tools and a set of attributes such as experimentation, algorithms, data, personnel on demand and interfaces, which allow them to have exponential growth.
Salim explains it this way: “ExOs are a new generation of organizations that revolutionize entire industries by scaling as fast as exponential technologies do. The ExO model is the framework that finally allows both entrepreneurs and corporations to speak the same language and revolutionize industries together ”.
In 2021, unless processes are iterated, new technologies are experimented and implemented, companies will lag behind their competition and market. Trends show that 2021 will be the turning point where entrepreneurs will leave behind traditional models and approaches to start developing Exponential Organizations.
Subscribe to Forbes Mexico
Contact:
Antonio Velázquez is editor-in-chief of the Growth Institute*
The opinions expressed are solely the responsibility of their authors and are completely independent of the position and editorial line of Forbes Mexico.