{"id":86756,"date":"2018-08-08T05:00:06","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T12:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/?p=86756"},"modified":"2019-01-31T13:10:51","modified_gmt":"2019-01-31T21:10:51","slug":"cybersecurity-canon-review-exponential-organizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www2.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/2018\/08\/cybersecurity-canon-review-exponential-organizations\/","title":{"rendered":"Cybersecurity Canon Review: \u201cExponential Organizations\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"cybersecuity-canon-blog-600x260\"<\/span><\/div><\/p>\n

We modeled the\u00a0Cybersecurity Canon<\/a>\u00a0after the Baseball or Rock & Roll Hall-of-Fame, except for cybersecurity books. We have more than 25 books on the initial candidate list, but we are soliciting help from the cybersecurity community to increase the number to be much more than that.\u00a0Please write a review and nominate your favorite.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Cybersecurity Canon is a real thing for our community. We have designed it so that you can\u00a0directly participate in the process<\/a>. Please do so!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Executive Summary<\/span><\/p>\n

Exponential Organizations<\/em> is not a must-read for all cybersecurity professionals. You do not need the information in this book to do your day-to-day cybersecurity job today, and I am not recommending it as a Cybersecurity Canon candidate. However, it is a must-read for business leaders as a roadmap for what we all might be facing in the next 10 to 15 years. The authors describe how some future-thinking companies are taking advantage of an information-processing-capability phenomenon whereby the number of calculations per second, per $1,000 has been doubling since the early 1900s. This phenomenon of doubling compute power has manifested exponentially in such research areas as artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, nanotech, medicine, neuroscience, energy, and computing. All of these technologies have been doubling in price-performance every couple of years.<\/p>\n

This kind of rapid growth is changing the standard business problem of managing and selling scarcity, like oil, to managing and selling abundance, like energy. The implications are staggering both in terms of how the world will change and in terms of what future businesses will look like. This book is about how organizations are already taking advantage of this notion of \u201cexponential organizations\u201d and how you might evolve your current organization into this new framework.<\/p>\n

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Introduction<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2014, Jeremiah Owyang, a founding partner at Kaleido Insights, noticed that a number of companies had emerged across multiple verticals that were completely disrupting the marketplace. These companies, like Airbnb and Uber, were outperforming the competition by a factor of four or more by staying small and flat but leveraging the information provided by their customer base. In other words, they were destroying their competition by operating counter to what every other business in the world was doing. Owyang coined this phenomenon the \"collaborative economy.\u201d [1] In that same year, Ismail, Malone, and Geest published this book, Exponential Organizations<\/em>, which characterizes the kinds of companies that have had success with this new way of thinking. [2]<\/p>\n

\"canon_1\"In Exponential Organizations<\/em>, the authors describe how some future-thinking companies are taking advantage of an information-processing-capability phenomenon that has been noticed by the likes of Gordon Moore, Intel\u2019s founder, and famous futurist Ray Kurzweil. Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of components on integrated circuits would double every year. [3] Kurzweil went further back and noticed the same doubling pattern as far back as the early 1900s. [4] Kurzweil came up with an interesting metric to track the behavior: what is the number of calculations per second, per $1,000. In 1900, with Charles Babbage\u2019s mechanical Analytical Engine, the number of calculations was extremely small at 0.000005821. [4] But every five to ten years, that numbered doubled. By 1949, the number was 1.837, and we were off to the races. By 1977, the number was 26,870. By 1998, the last year in the study, the number was 133,300,000. [4]<\/p>\n

This phenomenon of doubling compute power has manifested exponentially in such research areas as artificial intelligence, robotics, biotech, nanotech, medicine, neuroscience, energy, and computing. All of these technologies have been doubling in price-performance every couple of years. What the authors of Exponential Organizations <\/em>say is that this kind of rapid growth is changing the standard business problem of managing and selling scarcity, like oil, to managing and selling abundance, like energy. [5] For example, they predict that within 10 years, because of this exponential doubling in the renewable energy space alone, there will be enough solar power available to produce five times what is needed in the world today. Energy will become essentially free and entrepreneurs in those markets will have to figure out how to profit in a new environment where the value of the \u201cthing\u201d is essentially zero.<\/p>\n

The implications are staggering both in terms of how the world will change and in terms of what future businesses will look like. This book is about how organizations are already taking advantage of this notion \u201cexponential organizations\u201d and how you might evolve your current organization into this new framework.<\/p>\n

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Body<\/span><\/p>\n

Ismail, Malone, and van Geest define the key attribute of an exponential organization as \u201ca minimum 10x improvement in output over four to five years.\u201d [2] That is a metric that is easy to detect, and the authors describe how the organizations that attain those metrics are different from the traditional business. One of the authors of Exponential Organizations<\/em>, Salim Ismail, is the founding executive director of Singularity University, whose mission is to train visionary entrepreneurs to use these exponential ideas to solve some of the world\u2019s intractable problems. [6] He believes that, if you don\u2019t transform your own organization into an exponential organization in the very near future, your competition will start to sprint away from you by leaps and bounds. [2] I have said similar things about the DevOps movement, and I believe that most exponential organizations in the future will have embraced DevOps as the key development strategy to attain their goals. [7]<\/p>\n

As the authors point out, most traditional organizations fail to see the doubling effect in their own industries. They project linearly as to what the future will hold. \u201cThat is: x amount of work takes y amount of resources, 2x needs 2y, and so on of ever-greater arithmetic magnitude.\u201d [2] But, exponential organizations work by reducing staff and hierarchy and informationally enabling their company. They enlist their customer base and their communities for every aspect of the business. \u201cThey float atop the existing infrastructure rather than try to own it.\u201d [2] An x amount of work takes less than y resources but the impact on growth is 2n<\/sup> (exponential). And these are just some of the recognizable companies that have managed to pull this off:<\/p>\n