The Exponential Organization

Network Effects

Well, isn't this exciting! 

Our design for Glia, a social-business ecosystem, which is inherently networked, takes advantage of network effects, and for exponential growth and value creation. Now we have more evidence as to why this is the organizational model of the future. 

In their new book, The Exponential Organization, Salim Ismail, Michael S Malone, and Yuri van Geest, make one of the best cases yet as to why the industrial era, command and control bounded organizational model will not survive in this century. 

"Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.” - David S. Rose

Which has been my mantra for this entire century.
As I made the case in my previous post, the data is irrefutable,  most businesses are flatlined, or have caught a wave not of their making. As more entrepreneurial leaders move to the networked model and its exponential effects, the pressures on the old world business models is going to increase.

This is why we designed Glia as an ecosystem, businesses in the mature phases of their lifespan can become part of the ecosystem, and make a relatively controlled adaptation of a networked architecture best suited for their business. It is appearing more and more this isn't just a way to find new growth, but also a matter of survival.

This post here does a terrific job of pulling together a lot of the themes and charts onto one page.

Before we get too excited, I think it's important to make a distinction between a well designed networked organization and its ecosystems, and that of the collaborative economy, and the businesses that has spawned. In this terrific piece, The Mock Trial of the Collaborative Economy, one of the most insightful writers of this generation, Diana Filippova sets her keen mind on much of what has gone wrong, errors the next generation of models must avoid. Filippova hits it as I do, the necessity of distribution being baked into the model's DNA:

Why? A great number of challenges we are facing today are not economic. There are two of them that I believe are critical: the future of work and the distribution of value created. As I will argue in the second part of this series, collaborative practices and models could not properly solve these challenges all by themselves, at least not in a way that our societies would deem sustainable and fair. For sustainability and fairness are the result of a choice and are based on values. The collaborative economy may be still a convenient term to describe practices and models, but it does not say anything about our values and principles, which should be considered from political, social, cultural and philosophical standpoints.

I remain unwavering in my belief that we can be at the beginning of one of the greatest eras of wealth creation in human history, one that can distribute the wealth as never before. But to achieve that we must take enormous care and thought into the design of these new systems and models, and have the leadership and culture that understands that in these models, your must feed and nourish all the points in the network.