Reflections on How to Create Exponential Mindset

By Cesar Castro – Managing Partner at Escalate Group

Interesting article from HBR on How to Create Exponential Mindset and very valuable information to anyone driving digital business. It validates my 2 years journey of developing the exponential mindset and supporting others to create and generate exponential value.

In October 2014, I attended Singularity University-YPO’s executive program at the NASA facility in Mountain View. We studied several accelerating technologies that have grown exponentially for several years and how those technologies help to address humanity’s grand challenges.

The amount of information received from successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the amazing SingularityU team, and very structured and senior classmates were extremely interested and surprised. More importantly, after the executive program was completed, I faced the challenge of summarizing my take-home value. I concluded that it is not about the cool technologies per se, but about how much exponential value those bring to the people, the organizations, and the business and how to rally and manage resources in this new exponential mindset.

After digesting my week and getting back to my normal life, I tried to explain the concepts I learned to my family, friends, and colleagues – People looked at me as if I was speaking another language. They seem not to understand what I was talking about, as they were all tied to the traditional linear mindset. 

At that same time, Salim Ismail, our program director, and a few of his colleagues had just launched their book Exponential Organization. Very soon after, it became a business best-seller. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about the new organizational mechanisms and business practices that create value from exponential technologies.

In November 2014, I realized that developing my exponential mindset and helping others to do the same would be an important journey and my take-home value was confirmed. I proactively joined the ExO community, which has to keep me on track with my exponential mindset journey, and nowadays become an ExO Global Movement, see the latest here. I have further developed my abundance mindset and my bold ambitions both on the personal and business fronts, to better manage the uncertainty of modern times.

As Certified ExO Consultant at ExO Works, I have been implementing innovation and pursuing the transformation of businesses, teaching and helping people how to connect with the new world of abundance and how to manage it. More recently, as advisors in the areas of the application of exponential technologies, start-up innovation, Business Model Canvas, and Exponential Organizations to Fastrack Institute a not-for-profit organization we are accelerating technology into society.

 My exponential mindset journey continues and this mainstream HBR article validates it and provides energy to keep it up.