Jerry Michalski notes that in the past, scarcity meant value. That is, without scarcity, you didn't have a business. Now that notion has been upended. Dave Blakely of IDEO thinks about ExOs in the following way: "These new organizations are exponential because they took something scarce and made it abundant." Nokia bought Navteq, trying to buy, own and control scarcity, only to be leapfrogged by Waze, which managed to harness abundance.

Waze's triumph and Navteq's decline should be the model for every budding ExO. Ask yourself, "Which of my products or services can I digitize and dematerialize?" and "How can I use the Six Ds to leapfrog my biggest linear competitors? How can I use them to demonetize and democratize my products and/or services?"

many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove's highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I'm getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)

When Kaggle runs a competition, it has found that the first responders are experts in a particular domain who say, "We know this industry, we've done this before and we'll figure it out." And just as inevitably, within two weeks, complete newcomers to the field trounce their best results.

And while not owning assets has been standard practice for heavy machinery and non-mission-critical functions (e.g., copiers) for decades, recently there's been an accelerating trend towards outsourcing even mission-critical assets.

Trust Beats Control and Open Beats Closed As we saw with Valve software, autonomy can be a powerful motivator in the age of the Exponential Organization. The Millennial generation is naturally independent, digitally native and resistant to top-down control and hierarchies. To take full advantage of this new workforce and hang on to top talent, companies must embrace an open environment. Google has done just that. As we outlined in Chapter Four, its Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system is fully transparent across the company. Any Googler can look up the OKRs of other colleagues and teams to see what they're trying to achieve and how successful they've been in the past. Such transparency takes a considerable amount of cultural and organizational courage, but Google has found that the openness it engenders is worth any discomfort.

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History and common sense make clear that you cannot radically transform every part of an organization — and accelerate the underlying clock of that enterprise to hyper-speed — without fundamentally changing the nature of that organization.

When assessing a startup for funding, investors typically categorize three major risk areas: Technology risk: Will it work? Market risk: Will people buy the product? Execution risk: Is the team able to function and pivot as needed?