Exponential Organizations

Why are some companies -including some startups- able to grow 10X faster than other organizations with 10X less staff? This is the question that Salim Ismael's book successfully answers. For 300 pages, he deconstructs the paradigms that govern this world whose principles of management and definition of value no longer have much to do with those of the 20th century. The demonstration is impressive, certainly, because it is effective, but also because Salim manages to highlight, sometimes brutally, the structural differences between the world before and after.

He highlights the use of data as a raw material for value creation, the contribution of the multitude, but also many other factors, such as the "free asset base", i.e. the use of assets external to the company, which can be mobilized on demand, or the agile organization modes. He also insists a lot on the need to set up dashboards (yours truly appreciates this) as well as the need to replace KPIs by OKRs (Objective & Key Results) more appropriate to empowerment and long-term projection.

I also find my two fundamental points: the use of the multitude (Crowd) and the extensive use of data; these two notions being concretized through the platform. All this is at the heart of the book.

And beyond that, with examples and figures, he demonstrates scientifically the performance gains from which these companies benefit, many of them being now unicorns or decacorns, like Xiaomi, Waze, Uber, Github etc.

The concern we have is that French companies as well as our major institutions are far from understanding properly the power of these models. However, in a globalized world, companies that have not made the necessary adaptations will necessarily face competition from those that have.

In this respect, this book, which unfortunately has not been translated into French, deserves to be translated, as its impact could prove to be profound and salutary for companies that follow its precepts.