Escalate Group a proud Openexo Transformative Partner

“Today, if you are not disrupting yourself, someone else is. Your fate is to be either the disruptor or the disrupted. There is no middle ground.” – Salim Ismail, Founder OpenExO. 

Through the long-term partnership with OpenExO and since the inception, Escalate Group has been using proven OpenExO transformation methodology and a global ecosystem of ExO certified coaches and emerging technologies specialists to enable the co-creation of meaningful business opportunities.  

Escalate Group Services

Escalate Group Awake sessions and Workshops makes executives aware of the implications of accelerating technologies and new business models leading your industry to disruption and mark your path for transformation. The ExO Sprint is a tested and proven 10-week customer-focused process that allows any organization to address industry disruption and overcome internal resistance to change. 

As an OpenExO Certified Partner, Escalate Group is on the cutting edge of innovation, bringing thought leadership and a proven transformation solution to our clients. Besides, we instantly scale our organization with 1000+ people in 100+ countries and 300+ certified coaches & trainers. 

“With our guidance, customers in the healthcare, telecom and fintech sectors have been able to identify solutions based on accelerated technologies and to scale their organization to solve new challenges,” Olga Calvache, Managing Partner, Escalate Group. 

To transform the world for a better future, OpenExo wants to become the world’s leading global ExO transformation ecosystem by building Exponential Organizations (ExOs).

Escalate Group unlocks digital value, helping organizations envision, accelerate and scale sustainable/impactful projects and solutions. 

How to take an established mid-market company and supercharge it to exponential growth?

The combined effect of new exponential technologies is changing the world faster than before. Peter Diamandis’s 6Ds (Digitization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization) provide the best ideas on the “how” this is happening.

There is a clear need for transformation and re-inventing our organizations. As coined by David Rose “Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure on the 21st”

Mid-market companies’ leaders should constantly ask two questions that can help them win in today’s competitive and disruptive world: 1) How do I always create new customer value? Also, 2) How do I always optimize and speed up the processes of my organization?

However, that’s not enough to keep up with today’s Fourth Industrial Revolution. The ExO attributes from Exponential Organizations by @SalimIsmail, are essential to connect not only Corporates and Unicorns but also mid-market companies to the abundance of opportunities in the new digital world and to help these organizations to manage that abundance.

The Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) is the base of any Exponential Organization, and it serves as a guiding principle when critical decisions need to be made.

From our experience working with founders, CEOs and leadership teams in the mid-market segment, the MTP helps to identify priorities. Depending on the industry, geography and those priorities, the ExO attributes to implement varies for each organization, we have found the following as core attributes for several mid-market companies:

–         Developing a Community that interacts with the core team of the organization via social media and mobile apps to for example get product feedback and find contractors and experts.

–         Engagement to connect customers and their ecosystem to create network effects and feedback loops with extraordinary reach and a positive impact on the business and the participants.

–         Real-time Dashboards to track and monitor data from critical processes, teams OKRs (Objective and Key Results) as well as from for example of a proprietary mobile app.

–         Establish a culture of Experimentation, growth hacking and constant iteration through their teams. A culture where people is willing to fail, and pivot as needed with constant product iteration and LEAN approach.

Our involvement within the ExO ecosystem has shown that transforming an existing mid-market company into an Exponential Organization is doable but requires three things:

1.      A company culture that can quickly adapt to rapid and often radical change.

2.      A visionary leader who has the full support of the board and senior management.

3.      A group of ambitious and motivated people ready to transform and scale the organization.

We have seen lots of companies passively being disrupted; people don’t see this coming. At Escalate Group, we embed ExO principles into pre-existing mid-market organizations—to help them to explode their performance.

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.

The Opportunity gap of the Digital Transformation

By Cesar Castro, Managing Partner at Escalate Group

Remember Compaq? MCI Worldcom? TWA? They were once household names, but not anymore. In the mobile industry, I closely experienced the rise and the fall of mobile pioneers and giants such as Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Blackberry.

We have all heard that businesses are more volatile and uncertain today and the truth is that the current speed of transformation requires agility on how we manage our business and ourselves. Big changes across industries are driven by external factors such as cheaper computing power, the emergence of platforms, the rise of mobility and the cloud, the social business and the explosion of big data and advance analytics.

Digital business transformation is one of the hot topics today, complete industries such as music and newspapers have been disrupted and more recently successful “Unicorns” such as Quirky (Make Invention accessible), GitHub (Social Coding), AirBnB (Belong Anywhere) and Uber (Everyone’s Private Driver) are disrupting with new platforms while creating new business models using the sharing economy to drop the cost of demand and the cost of supply while bringing revolutionary innovation to our lives. We are surrounded by people and companies developing new products and apps that improve our daily lives with evolutionary innovation models. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix are good examples of companies that innovate outside-in making bold choices. It is very exciting living in these times. Peter Diamandis[1] is totally right when he affirms that we are living in a novel era of extraordinary abundance. We are in the golden age of Information Technology.

Innovation will only accelerate the creation of opportunities for everyone. Internet has democratized the information and the breakthroughs will happen around the world both in developed countries and particularly in emerging markets where the opportunity gap of the Digital Transformation is even bigger. We are moving from physical products to digital products, from physical distribution to distribution over Internet. In the future you are a digital business or a dead business, or in Andreessen’s[2] words “Software will eat the world, in all sectors. Companies need to adapt or they will become extinct. In the future every company will become a software company.”

The digital transformation journey starts when we engage with the digital consumer and create value in the networked world. In Saffo’s[3] terms, it is “the transition from the producer economy to a creator economy”. Many companies are already well advanced engaging with their digital consumers and some are even one step ahead digitalizing their business and operating processes while integrating technologies to transform themselves. Gartner[4] sees a world moving toward business models based on services and impact, where the cloud is the key for business to gain scalability and competitiveness. I am seeing a huge momentum in Enterprise platforms across different industries in Latin America, choosing your cloud partner is as critical as choosing your new default platform so please don’t make these decisions lightly.

Internet is evolving into a new 3rd phase that is divided in three stages: 1.The Internet of money driven by technologies such as bitcoin/blockchain that are already disrupting the banking industry; 2.The energy Internet where solar technology and Sensors/ IoT (Internet of Things) will play a very significant role; and 3. The logistics Internet driven by platforms, AI (Artificial Intelligence) and technologies such as 3D printing. A totally new phase of Digital transformation is in front of us, some denote it as the industrial Internet, and Rifkin[5] refers to it as a new economy paradigm in his book “The Third Industrial Revolution”. Soon, much faster than the rapid adoption of smartphones, we will have billions/trillions of sensors connected to the Internet that will, in many cases, communicate among them without human interaction.

The first step of any successful transformation is self-awareness, so it is important to ask ourselves where we are standing on our Digital transformation journey. Here are a few relevant questions for reflection:

  • Am I using engaging marketing to maximize the interactions with my consumers while reducing their friction with my products/services?
  • How advanced am I in the process of digitalizing my operating and business processes?
  • What percentage of my revenues are under threat from digital disruption?
  • As a business leader, am I willing to co-drive the digital transformation?
  • How am I preparing for the industrial Internet?

According to IDC[6] predictions, by the end of 2017, one in three CEOs of the Top 3,000 Companies in Latin America will have Digital Transformation at the center of their corporate strategy. Leadership plays an important role in the highly volatile and uncertain world we all have to operate, a world that requires deep business transformations while we keep driving the execution and performance of our short-term goals. Leaders that become the catalytic agent of change at their businesses cultivating the right environment, driving the culture and way of working for change to happen will lead their companies to emerge as the winners of the 3.0 Internet era.

There are many frameworks available in order to facilitate the creation of new business models where digital meets physical and to help companies become digital, consulting firms and IT providers can help you as well. For example the ExO (Exponential Organizations) Community, founded by Salim Ismail[7], recommend and help businesses to focus on creating Massive Transformation Purposes (MTP), examine ExOs in your industry (and adjacencies), learn through experiments and implement innovation and creativity into the traditional organizational structure.

Perhaps you have heard the stat that 40 percent of today’s Fortune 500 companies will no longer exist in 10 years. So the key question is: Are you taking the right steps to tackle the opportunity gap of your Digital Transformation journey?

I hope these lines motivate you to post your comments below, so we can all learn from each other experiences!

[1]Peter Diamandis, International pioneer in the fields of innovation, incentive competitions and commercial space

[2] Mark Andreessen, Founder of Netscape, renowned Venture Capitalist

[3] Paul Saffo, Consulting Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University

[4]Gartner, Inc. is a research and advisory firm providing information technology related insight

[5]Jeremy Rifkin is an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist

[6] IDC, American market research, analysis and advisory firm, specializes in information technology.

[7] Salim Ismail is a Canadian angel investor, speaker, advisor, entrepreneur and strategist. He is author of the Amazon bestseller Exponential Organizations