Fluent Essays

Suppose your CEO just promoted you to Chief Innovation Officer for your company. Using the 12-step framework from the attached document, create an “execution plan” to transform your company into an exponential organization (ExO). Your paper must include at least 5 citations. Your execution plan will be 12 pages in length and include the following format: Title PageExecutive SummaryInclude each of the 12 steps as a major section headingWorks Cited Compose your paper in APA format, including the introduction and conclusion, and in-text citations for all sources used. Include an APA-style title page and reference page. Click the assignment link to compare your work to the rubric before submitting it. Click the same link to submit your assignment. Points Possible: 200 Please select any organization from this list - Verizon, Att, Samsung, Target Please make sure you address each and every step and you must think like a Chief Innovation officer of the company and should have a good massive transformative purpose. exponential_organizations_by_salim_ismail_171_194.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Step 1: Select an MTP (Massive Transformative Purpose). This is the most elemental and foundational aspect of a startup. Feeding on Simon Sinek’s “Why?” question, it is critical that you are excited and utterly passionate about the problem space you plan to attack. So, begin by asking the question: What is the biggest problem I’d like to see solved? Identify that problem space and then come up with an MTP for it. Even as a child, Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s most celebrated entrepreneur today, had a burning desire to address energy, transportation and space travel at a global level. His three companies (SolarCity, Tesla and SpaceX) are each addressing those spaces. Each has a Massive Transformative Purpose. Keep in mind, however, that an MTP is not a business decision. Finding your passion is a personal journey. As Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber, said at the 2013 LeWeb conference in Paris, “You have to be self-aware and look for that startup idea and purpose that is a perfect fit with you—with you as a person, not as a business[person].” Howard Thurman, the American author and philosopher, summarizes the same idea as follows: “Don’t just ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it. What the world needs is people who have come alive.” Drew Houston, founder of Dropbox, agrees: “The most successful people are obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball. To increase your own chances of happiness and success, you must find your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.” Finding an MTP can be seen as a novel and perhaps more interesting way of asking yourself the following questions: What do I really care about? What am I meant to do? https://www.8freebooks.net Two more questions that can help speed the process of discovering your passion: What would I do if I could never fail? What would I do if I received a billion dollars today? It is not only about you as an entrepreneur, however. It is also about your employees. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel poses the following question as an effective way to test if a startup has an MTP that will attract not only friends, but also employees beyond your personal network who share your motivation: “Why would the 20th employee join your startup without the perks, [such as] a cofounder title or stock [options]?” Accordingly, you should gauge your MTP against each of the acronym’s letters. Is it Massive? Is it Transformative? Is it Purposeful? A profit motive alone is insufficient to build an ExO—or, frankly, any startup. Rather, it’s the burning passion to solve an obsessive, complex problem that keeps an entrepreneur pushing along the rollercoaster ride of ebullience and despair that is the story of every startup. Chip Conley, an expert at building purpose-driven companies such as Airbnb, frequently references Kahlil Gibran: “Work is love made visible. The goal is not to live forever; the goal is to create something that will.” Step 2: Join or Create Relevant MTP Communities The collaborative power of communities is critical to any ExO. Whatever your passion (let’s say you dream of curing cancer), there are communities out there filled with other passionate, purpose-driven people devoted to the same crusade. https://www.8freebooks.net The recent rise of the Quantified Self (QS) movement, first introduced in Chapter Five, is a great example of a community with an MTP. Operating in 120 cities and in forty countries, approximately 1,000 companies and 40,000 members currently participate in the QS ecosystem. Anyone interested in setting up a medical device company or addressing a major area such as cancer or heart disease can find and join a rich community of interested fellow participants. For example, some of the many communities devoted to cancer or heart disease research include TED MED, Health Foo, DIYbio, GET (Genes/Environment/Traits), WIRED Health, Sensored, Stream Health and Exponential Medicine. If you think your problem space doesn’t have community support, take a look at www.meetup.com. Meetup’s mission is both to revitalize local communities and to help people around the world organize. The company believes that people can change the world by organizing themselves into groups that are powerful enough to make a difference. Founded by Scott Heiferman in January 2002, Meetup helps convene more than 150,000 interest-based groups— made up of about ten million members—in 197 countries around the world. Given those numbers, the odds are pretty good that a passionate and purposedriven community concerned with your problem space already exists in your own country. However, in any community-driven startup, there’s a tension between the good of the community and the good of the company. For Chris Anderson the choice is an easy one: There is a fundamental DNA path dependency here. Are you primarily a community or are you primarily a company? The reason you have to ask yourself this is because sooner or later the two will come in conflict. We [DIY Drones] are primarily a community. Every day, we make decisions that disadvantage the company to bring advantage to the community. https://www.8freebooks.net Anderson said the advice to opt for the good of the community came from Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of WordPress, the world’s most widely used blogging platform. According to Mullenweg, “Whenever this moment comes up, always bet on the community, because that’s the difference between long-term thinking and short-term thinking.” Basically, if you get the community right, opportunities will arise. If you get community wrong, the engine of innovation dissolves and you won’t have a company anymore. Step 3: Compose a Team While the founding team in any startup is important, given the rapid scaling of an ExO company with a very small footprint in terms of resources, the careful composition of its founding team is especially critical. In his book The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business, Patrick Lencioni argues that the single best way to determine the health of an organization is by “observing the leadership team during a meeting.” Leadership interaction proves to be an accurate barometer of team dynamics, clarity, decisiveness and cognitive biases. Furthermore, the key to putting together a successful ExO founding team is that everyone shares a passion for the MTP. Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen-Horowitz, one of the world’s most successful VCs, noted the importance of shared passion in his recent book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers: “If founders are in a startup for the wrong reasons (money, ego), it often degenerates into a nasty situation.” Similarly, it’s worth revisiting one of the main points of Aileen Lee’s Unicorn study: companies composed of well-educated thirty-something cofounders with a shared work or school history have the highest success rate. Her https://www.8freebooks.net research shows that the average age of a Unicorn founder is thirty-four, and the average number of co-founders is three. In addition, most successful founder CEOs have technical backgrounds. One caveat is that for a community-driven company, diversity is an important part of the package. While building out his DIY Drones community, for example, Chris Anderson came across Jordi Munoz of Mexico, who was just nineteen years old at the time. Anderson found that along with a mutual passion for drones, Munoz’s skills were both fundamentally different from and complementary to his own. Impressed by the young man’s capabilities, enthusiasm and ability to learn, Anderson brought him on as a co-founder. Today, though young and without the “right” background, Munoz is thriving in his role as CEO of a multi-million dollar company. The following roles are critical if founding ExO teams are to deliver diverse backgrounds, independent thought and complementary skills: Visionary/Dreamer: The primary role in the company’s story. The founder with the strongest vision for the company comes up with the MTP and holds the organization to it. User Experience Design: Role focuses on users’ needs and ensures that every contact with users is as intuitive, simple and clear as possible. Programming/Engineering: Role responsible for bringing together the various technologies required to build the product or service. Finance/Business: The business function assesses the viability and profitability of the organization, is the cornerstone of interactions with investors and manages the all-important burn rate. In The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, co-author Clayton Christensen approaches the skill portfolio question slightly differently, identifying two distinct sets of skills: Discovery skills: The ability to generate ideas—to associate, question, observe, network and experiment. https://www.8freebooks.net Delivery skills: The ability to execute ideas—to analyze, plan, implement, follow through and be detail-oriented. These are just two of many ways of looking at how to put a founding team together. Whatever the approach, however, founders must be intrinsically motivated self-starters. Most of all, in the face of rapid growth and change, they must have complete trust in one another’s judgment. Think about the PayPal story. Peter Thiel told his co-founders (Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Max Levchin and Chad Hurley) and employees that they all should work together as friends rather than more formally as employees. Looking back, perhaps friendship was PayPal’s MTP. Not only was PayPal very successful as a company—it was sold to eBay for $1.2 billion—but the friendships that grew out of it were equally successful. The original team is now known as the “PayPal Mafia,” and its members have helped one another on subsequent startups, including Tesla, YouTube, SpaceX, LinkedIn, Yelp, Yammer and Palantir—companies that today have a total market cap of more than $60 billion. The pace of growth of an ExO requires an extra emphasis on a fully synergistic core team. As Arianna Huffington says, “I would rather have somebody much less brilliant and who’s a team player, who’s straightforward, than somebody who is very brilliant and toxic to the organization.” Step 4: Breakthrough Idea We don’t have to tell you that this next step is a big one. It is essential to leverage technology or information in some way to transform the status quo. And when we say transform, we really do mean it. ExOs are not about incremental improvement in a marketplace. They are about radical change. https://www.8freebooks.net According to Marc Andreessen, “Most entrepreneurs prefer failing conventionally rather than succeeding unconventionally.” Remember, the three key success factors for an ExO idea are: First, a minimum 10x improvement over the status quo. Second, leveraging information to radically cut the cost of marginal supply (i.e., the cost to expand the supply side of the business should be minimal). Third, the idea should pass the “toothbrush test” originated by Larry Page: Does the idea solve a real customer problem or use case on a frequent basis? Is it something so useful that a user would go back to it several times a day? It is also possible to leverage a community or crowd to discover breakthrough ideas or new patterns of implementation. Elon Musk set an MTP for transforming transportation with his Hyperloop high-speed transportation idea. At the same time, he opened up the design and implementation of that idea to whoever wanted to take a crack at it. It may seem counterintuitive to delay the breakthrough idea several steps into the process. After all, legend holds that most startups begin with an explosive new idea that’s then applied to a problem space. We believe, however, that it’s better to start with a passion to solve a particular problem, rather than to start with an idea or a technology. There are two reasons for this. First, by focusing on the problem space, you are not tied to one particular idea or solution, and thus don’t end up shoehorning a technology into a problem space where it might not be a good fit. Silicon Valley is littered with the carcasses of companies with great technologies searching for a problem to solve. Second, there is no shortage of either ideas or new technologies. After all, everybody in a place like Silicon Valley has an idea for a new tech business. Instead, the key to success is relentless execution, hence the need for passion and the MTP. To demonstrate, consider the number of times https://www.8freebooks.net the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350 What if Larry Page and Sergey Brin had stopped pitching after 340 attempts? The world would be a very different place today. Just as intriguing: what magical technologies and businesses don’t exist today because the founders gave up one investor pitch too soon? We’ve said this already, but it can’t be emphasized enough: Entrepreneurial success rarely comes from the idea. Instead, it comes from the founding team’s never-say-die attitude and relentless execution. Those who really want something will find options. Those who just kind of want it will find reasons and excuses. This has been the case since Hewlett and Packard started their business in that now-famous Palo Alto dirt-floor garage—where, don’t forget, they began with a passion and not a product. In the end, only raw, unbridled passion can solve an important problem and overcome the endless hurdles that present themselves. As investor Fred Wilson says, “Startups should be hunch-driven early on, and data-driven as they scale.” PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel builds on this with a profound question for startup founders: “Tell me something you believe is true but [that] you have a hard time trying to convince others [of].” This is about conviction and passion on the one hand, and radical, unconventional, breakthrough ideas on the other. As Peter Diamandis is fond of saying, “The day before a major breakthrough, it is just a crazy idea.” https://www.8freebooks.net To illustrate: In a recent conversation with Elon Musk, Salim asked Musk about his Hyperloop concept: “Elon, I have a background in physics and it seems impossible to accelerate humans to 1,000 kilometers an hour and then decelerate them to zero in such a short space of time. Have you thought about that?” Musk’s answer? “Yes, it’s an issue.” To a true entrepreneur, there are no impossibilities, just barriers to overcome. (And yes, it turned out there is a solution to that particular physics problem— quite an easy one, in fact—via fluid dynamics). As mentioned earlier, Chris Anderson’s DIY Drones product ArduCopter replicates 98 percent of the functionality of a military-grade Predator drone at one-thousandth the cost. That’s a drone for less than $1,000. It’s also transformational. Note the sudden appearance of drones in the planning agendas of companies as diverse as Amazon, QuiQui and UPS. This is not a coincidence. Such breakthrough thinking also inspires. At Singularity University, students form teams in major problem spaces such as healthcare, education, clean water and so on. They are then given the challenge of coming up with a product or service that could positively impact a billion people within a decade [MTP]. One team, which called itself Matternet, chose poverty as its problem space after reading that 85 percent of all roads in Africa are regularly washed out during the wet season. But how do you alleviate poverty if you can’t easily transport people or items? That question led Matternet to home in on “Transportation in Developing Countries” as its MTP. When Anderson described his DIY Drones idea in a lecture, the team had an epiphany: In the same way that Africa leapfrogged the entire copper wire telephony generation by going straight to wireless, why not use drones to do the same thing with transportation, and avoid building roads altogether? The most exciting trend in drones today is that they’re doubling their price/performance ratio every nine months. That’s twice as fast as Moore’s Law. A drone today can carry a four kilogram package up to a distance of twenty https://www.8freebooks.net kilometers. In nine months, that drone’s capacity will double to eight kilograms per twenty kilometers, and nine months after that things will get really interesting at sixteen kilograms over twenty kilometers. By leveraging this doubling capability by building drones to deliver food and medicine in developing countries, Matternet is revolutionizing transportation as we know it. Matternet, which has completed trials in Haiti and is now launching in Bhutan, is a great example of an ExO because it harnesses information technologies, has an exponentially dropping cost of supply, and can either transform the problem space or inspire the startups that will do so. Amazon’s recent announcement that it wants to deliver packages via drones has added blue-chip legitimacy to this effort. Step 5: Build a Business Model Canvas Once a core idea or breakthrough has been identified, the next step is to elaborate how to get it to market. Our suggested tool for this is the Business Model Canvas (BMC), which was created by Alexander Osterwalder and has been popularized by the Lean Startup model. As shown below, you begin the process by diagramming the various components of the model (value propositions, customer segments, etc.). A warning: At this stage, it is important that the BMC be simple and not overthought. Experimentation will navigate you to the best path and provide the next level of fidelity. https://www.8freebooks.net Credit: Alexander Osterwalder. For more on how to create effective value propositions, we recommend reading Osterwalder’s new book, Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want. Step 6: Find a Business Model It is also important to understand that if you’re going to achieve a 10x improvement, there’s a strong likelihood that your company will require a completely new business model. As Clayton Christensen illustrated in The Innovators Dilemma, which was published in 1997, disruption is mostly achieved by a startup offering a less expensive product using emerging technologies and meeting a future or unmet customer need or niche. Christensen emphasized that it is not so much about disruptive products, but more about new business models threatening incumbents. https://www.8freebooks.net For example, Southwest Airlines treated its planes like buses and created an entire niche for itself. Google created the AdWords business model, which never existed before the advent of web pages. In the near future, micro-transactions, enabled by crypto-currencies like Bitcoin, will create entirely new financial business models that have never existed before. In his 2005 book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson built on the lower cost positioning of the disruptor, noting that pretty much all business models, and certainly those that are information-based, will soon be offered to consumers for free. The popular “freemium” model is just such a case: many websites offer a basic level of service at no cost, while also enabling users to pay a fee to upgrade to more storage, statistics or extra features. Advertising, cross-subsidies and subscription business models are other ways of layering profit-generating operations on top of what is essentially free baseline information. Kevin Kelly expanded further on this idea in a seminal post e ... Purchase answer to see full attachment