My experience at the EXO World Digital Summit

Apr 20, 2020 | Uncategorized, abundance, Better World, Corona Virus, Covid 19, Entrepreneur, Exponential Organizations, Innovation, Leadership

What a wonderful three days at the EXO World Digital Summit with around 1500 or more global participants! Greater than a Digital Summit, it was a Digital Festival. Perhaps a novel way of Summit that will lead us to a newborn category of omnichannel events.  

 I have had the privilege of listening to many speakers during the past years, first at the Singularity University Executive Program at Moffett Field. Later at several SU Global Summits in downtown San Francisco. Moreover, at many podcasts, when working out in my smart bike training at home. This week the new digital experience created by the organizer of the EXO World made it different and better.   

I noticed I was more engaged with participating from home and sharing the experience with my family. Actively commenting within my several WhatsApp and Discord groups, broadcasting to my Twitter and LinkedIn communities, and crowdsourcing the notes of the Summit.  

Ironically in the middle of the quarantine, the whole adventure felt like an enhanced “business” week. Perhaps this better experience to learning and networking is partially explained by the “metacognition” concept presented by @NicoleDreiske on day one.  

The Summit brought to me many take-aways, and it was not easy to select my top “take-home-value.” Disclaimer: it was physically impossible to hear from all the presenters as multiple sessions were happening at the same time. I will binge myself into the recordings to complete the presentations and to listen again to the segments I liked the most. Meanwhile, here my list created right after the experience ended.  

Scarcity = Abundance – TRUST  

I have been wired, for more than five years, to the concept that exponential technologies are enabling us to make more significant gains and solve our big problems in the next two decades. I understand trust as a critical enabler for web 3.0 (the value internet). I evangelize how business models of the past century are based on scarcity, while the business models of this century are based on Abundance.  

However, early on, I felt very connected when @SalimIsmail presented Abundance in terms of Trust while inviting us to move from the male (patriarchy, information wall-guarded, oil-based-world) to the female (distributive and abundant world, collaboration, nurturing, positive reimagining better world) archetypes. Combine with, Peter Diamandis’s remarkable commentary about the inequalities, and his quote, “I’m not worried about artificial intelligence, I’m worried about human stupidity.” It completed my first take-home value.   

An Aha moment – “And COVID just accelerated it”  

@JeffBooth explained at his session that we’ve printed $186 trillion worth of money over the past 20 years, to generate $46 trillion of GDP growth. Then, he illustrated how we are living a deflationary abundance from technological development, e.g., cell phones, are staggering. So, given this increasing deflation, governments are creating a structural problem printing more money as they are destroying the value of cash. All this was pre-Coronavirus.  

He cited how Zoom went from 10M to 200M users in a month to explained that COVID just accelerate it. They are not going to go back to 10 million after the Coronavirus, he added. “This delta and more people working from home are going to put a downward price on commercial real estate prices, which will lead to a subprime crisis.”  

Jeff added, such a crisis and the debt will lead to more dislocation and inequality in society, which will eventually lead to uprisings, wars, and the rise of dictators—causing a system reset.  

Another path is to “let it fail,” Booth commented, but that will cause a global depression like the one from the 1930s, and it can cause the banking system to collapse. Can policymakers stomach this?   

Furthermore, he commented that the loss of trust in one’s currency might lead to the possible pegging of some currencies to bitcoin or other similar cryptocurrencies. Some tech (e.g., crypto-currency) will disrupt this and ultimately lead to an economic explosion. And COVID just accelerated it.  

We have to open the space for the new generation.  

The youth is the future of the world, the future of our countries and our cities. They are the next generation, the entrepreneurs of the Singularity age. We should enable future generations to take the lead.  

The dreamers touched my daughters and me. Dream Tank is an organization on a mission to ignite kids around the world through entrepreneurship to make their biggest dreams become a reality. They are here to activate 1 billion young people worldwide to build solutions to our global crisis and our future. Xprize, Openexo, and many other partners genuinely believe in unleashing the creative ideas of young people to design the future and are standing with them. How are we going to contribute? 

 Here another seven moments from the Digital Summit, worthy of comment. 

@PaulSaffo was explaining how the City-State concept, born out of the Information revolution, is a new challenger in the 21st century. It is as a dominant force versus the Nation-State model from the 19th century.  

@AnneConnely was citing Vitalik Buterin to explain how blockchain removes intermediaries. “Instead of putting the taxi drivers out of work, blockchain puts Uber out of work and lets the drivers work with the customer directly.” She added, much of today was designed around centralized trust models – the future is decentralized. It will be done from the bottom up.  

@VishenLakhiani was ending to-do-lists, phone-calls, emails, regular meetings, and presentations. Cultivating flow, and embracing collaboration and reflection through social tools. Recommending to use the OODA Loop for decision making: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.  

@DavidRoberts remarks about how CEO training is different to SEAL and CIA agents training and how the second ones are prepared to operate within a continuously changing and highly uncertain environments. Should CEO training improve?  

@PaulPagnato inviting companies to have Privacy and Transparency Standards, while explaining his 6Ts model: Transparency, Terms, Total Accountability, Total Cost, Truth, and TRUST.   

@AndrewHessel’s closing remarks: “the future of life is that we’re going to design and build more and more of it.” We have to navigate the limitations, opportunities, and ethics and “we have to move beyond the fear of the virus.”   

@RaymondMcCauley’s interactive and creative presentation illustrated how biotech will move from current applications in pharmacogenetics, disease identification, consumer genetics, precision agriculture, industrial-biology, etc., into CRISPR to create vaccines! Antibiotic, antiviral – Are we going to see the end of infectious disease?  

Thank you to all thought-leaders that took part in the EXO World Summit.  

To end this post, I would like to share a selection of my favorite quotes from my EXO Ambassadors colleagues when reflecting on the EXO World Digital Summit. 

“It is super inspiring, not only the content and the interactions but also for developing new formats for building community and making movements happen at a large scale. Next stop abundance, cheers,” – Lars Lin Villebaek

“What a fabulous chance for exponential thinkers to ideate the best possible future together. Congratulations to all involved!!! Look what can be achieved in one month, navigating huge complexity.” – Emilie Sydney-Smith

“In addition to amazing content and people, it has been a breakthrough experience in terms of emotional engagement. Last night I felt deeply sorry it was over. This feeling so deep never really occurred to me in traditional events. My Singularity attendance 8 years ago was an intellectual breakthrough but certainly not so emotional.” Augusto Fazioli 

“ExO World was awesome! It was as (or even more) inspiring and intensive as SU but accessible to everyone, which is the way to go (democratizing inspiration!). Kudos to all the team who made it possible. I think this event will be the first of his kind, looking forward for more to come 🚀” – Francisco Palao 

“ExOWorld! What-a-festival amidst gloomy times! A zero-carbon conference, attended by over 1500 purpose-driven individuals and knowledge seekers, from 50+ countries. None traveled. Everyone stayed at home with family, ate home-cooked food, logged-in at all odd hours from the comfort of their living room or bed, in their pajamas. All for a single cause: transform the world for a better future!” – Suman Sasmal

Coronavirus and How to Optimize Online Work

Mar 22, 2020 | Experimentation, Teleworking, work from home

The current crisis of Covid-19 is affecting people and companies; furthermore, it will affect the way that we conduct future businesses. The business landscape is changing dramatically; it is creating new opportunities and ways of working that we should all embrace.

Some great companies, with strong balance sheets, will emerge more robust than ever. We will, for sure, experiment concentration of power across sectors. The smaller agile and lean businesses might survive just well. Face-to-face service-oriented companies are suffering, and we will see large and mid-sized companies with weak balance sheets disappear.

During times of crisis, you should not panic. I am a believer that we should prepare for the worst but expect the best. What if the current Work from Home experience works well for companies and people? It can change the way of working from now on.

I am a global ambassador and coach at OpenExO, a community with the purpose of “Transforming the World for a Better Future.” We are more than 3,600 virtual consultants and coaches around the world, working from co-working spaces, coffee shops, airports, trains, homes, etc.

In a couple of weeks, we created and launched the ExO World Conference, a completely live, online, and interactive three-day transformative conference occurring April 14 till 16, 2020.

Additionally, during the week of March 16, three hundred of us worked together in the global ExO Challenge COVID-19. We created more than 20 exponential solutions to problems originated by the current pandemic. There are several remote teams already working on implementing their ideas, and we can’t wait to see the next steps! This experiment was designed, created, and executed online in record time by people around the world working synchronously and asynchronously within a 24-hour schedule each day.

Much like Openexo, many other organizations used to online and remote work are moving forward, adjusting their plans. Others are embracing and learning about the work from home experience and will soon be able to adapt. Sadly, either not everyone around the world will have the same resources to accommodate fast to online work or will not readily accept the change; unfortunately, they will become laggards.

I spend a considerable portion of my time working from home as an entrepreneur, advisor, and coach. During my experience with global corporations, I took my first training to operate and manage remote virtual teams in 2002 and have worked many years with regional and global organizations.

This week, reflecting on what is going on with the Coronavirus, I revised my experiences from working online with digital tools and people around the world. I decided to share some simple tips that I have found useful and vital to working and collaborating effectively online.

  1.  You don’t need to know how to use every productivity application out there, but you should at least become familiar with the communication and social apps that make a good fit for the team. I am a heavy user of Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, and Teamwork.
  2. When leading an online meeting, I try to be disciplined and human, demonstrating care for each of the participants is essential. I recommend starting online sessions allocating time to share feelings and things that are competing for attention. Facilitate but leave room for serendipity.
  3. Differentiate your governance meetings to manage the business of the business from your tactical meetings to move projects forward.
  4. Prepare the meeting’s agenda ahead and allocate extra time for technology mismatches and confusion, as we joke at the EXO’s community, “AI is easier than AV.”
  5. Encourage every participant to engage, call people by name and let them know that it is ok to say “pass” if they prefer not to respond. It is an excellent practice to coordinate with small groups; I find 5-6 people an ideal size for an online SWAP team.
  6. Keep your cameras on and energize the conversation by using facial expressions, hand gestures, smiles, and direct eye contact with the camera. Encourage questions and comments in the chat to keep everyone engaged.
  7. Ask people if they are ok recording the video calls so others who could not participate can watch and catch up offline. This practice allows everyone to come back to review the discussions and conclusions.
  8. Collaborate on shared files while on video, I used GDrive and OneDrive. It is useful to get the job done and to keep people engaged.
  9. Follow up with people after the sessions and gain feedback to make it better next time. In addition to the official meetings, we adopted “water-coolers”, informal voluntary meetings during the week for team members to discuss any topic.
  10. Get buy-in from everyone on decisions and make them explicit. If the team is not in agreement with the changes, the process will fail.

Humanity has a fantastic future ahead. This pandemic will increase the momentum to transform many institutions. This moment is not only about finding ways to survive in the current reality, but it is also an opportunity to build a 10x better world!

Feel free to add any tips that have helped you work and collaborate effectively online!

Unlocking Business Potential in the Digital Era

May 3, 2019 | Innovation, Autonomy, Block chain, ExO, Experimentation, Exponential Technologies

Similarly, the most significant problems of our time are global and require globally coordinated solutions. All these partnerships need more trust and transparency to succeed.

Businesses have always changed with the times, but the confluence of technological innovations such as mobile, cloud, social, and Big Data analytics are accelerating the pace and generating new business models, allowing disrupters better serve their customer and drive growth.

Cloud computing and data technology significantly reduce CapEx as well as operating and maintenance costs while allowing access to computing power to process an ever-increasing volume of data. For example, car-sharing services enable private cars to temporarily become taxis, monitoring drivers and riders, adjusting prices and routes throughout the day.

Distributed systems enable redundant and resilient networks that protect the integrity of the systems. If data is distributed between multiple servers, there may not be any data loss even if a storage device ceases to work.

Data security is of particular importance in distributed systems, and advanced cryptography secures both network and transactions to their integrity.

Together, these technologies enable the potential for blockchain to allow for new collaborative and trusted behaviors that are unlocking new business models.

Fluid Chains’ process leverages the concepts of Exponential Organizations by @salimismail, and it has helped us to simplify the complexity of new interconnected prosperous opportunities. The Exponential Attributes had facilitated to our customer the development of accelerated global coordinated solutions. The application of attributes varies by project and by industry, below a short explanation on how the attributes have been helping our Distributed Ledger projects.

Leveraging External Communities via project incentives is vital to creating value for any blockchain project, it allows to turn community members into engaged advocates participating of securing the network and making the difference between success and failure for the new distributed organizations created around these decentralized projects. Cryptographic Algorithms and hashing, a cryptographic method of converting any data into a string of characters, keep the blockchain secure.

APIs had allowed developers to leverage open source software and build marketplaces with next-generation applications and projects; Interfaces are key in blockchain projects to enable the community to connect with systems. Blockchain technology is in an early stage, the best time to find the right use case for your business problem across your industry, get into space, set a small group in a design thinking process, experiment, learn, measure and pivot.

Autonomy of contributors and stakeholders is a crucial concept for how people related and interact with blockchain projects and each other. It creates efficiencies within individual actors direct their efforts, circumventing inefficiencies of top-down control

At Fluid Chains we integrate the transformational power of blockchain into your organization to create ventures with exponential scaling potential and sustainable business models.

Plataformas Exponenciales

May 3, 2019 | Digital Transformation, Exponential Organizations, Platforms

Emprendedores y ejecutivos con la misión de crear nuevas oportunidades y/o unidades de negocio están buscando como establecer negocios de plataforma, el modelo de moda en la era del internet. Un negocio de plataforma es aquel que facilita la interacción entre consumidores y productores. Es importante diferenciarlo de las plataformas tecnológicas, las cuales son herramientas de hardware y software que hacen funcionar e integran cadenas de valor desagregadas, por ejemplo, entre participantes de una industria específica.

Así un negocio de plataforma no es sólo software, redes sociales y conectividad. Es un modelo de negocio holístico que crea valor al reunir a consumidores y productores. La verdad es que construir un negocio de plataforma no es fácil. Sin embargo, cuando tienen éxito, pueden convertirse en lo que se ha denominado ‘los monopolios modernos’ del internet, descritos como Amazon, Apple, Facebook y Google por Scott Galloway en su libro ‘the four’.

Los negocios de plataforma exitosos generan círculos virtuosos, por los cuales, a más usuarios, más oferta, y a más oferta, más usuarios. Esta característica, también conocida como ‘efectos de red‘, ha permitido a compañías, inicialmente en la industria de las telecomunicaciones y más recientemente a empresas en el sector de tecnologías de información, multiplicarse exponencialmente.

Las plataformas logran generar disrupción en las industrias porque consiguen crear lo que Jeremy Rifkin llama en su libro, “La sociedad de coste marginal cero.” Por ejemplo, para AirBnB los gastos de ofrecer cien habitaciones son prácticamente los mismos que los de ofrecer un millón. Para Uber, ofrecer uno o diez millones de transportes tiene un costo muy parecido.

Por otra parte, las Organizaciones Exponenciales (ExOs), son un nuevo tipo de organización que aprovecha la abundancia de información y las cuales están transformando industrias. Un ExO debe contar con un Propósito Transformador Masivo, utilizar por lo menos cuatro atributos exponenciales, y no menos importante debe ser en esencia un modelo de negocio basado en una plataforma, en un ecosistema, y/o en productos como servicio basados en datos e información.

Un negocio moderno de plataforma es una de las formas correctas de establecer y escalar estas oportunidades. Para obtener éxito, es esencial basar el funcionamiento holístico del negocio en atributos exponenciales tales como comunidad, compromiso, activación de los datos via algoritmos, apalancamiento de activos, interfaces, experimentación, validación de hipótesis y creación de prototipos. Asimismo, para una empresa ya constituida, es importante gerenciar independientemente su nuevo negocio de plataforma, esto evita las fricciones con el “sistema inmune” de la organización actual, comprobado como la principal razón para el fracaso de la innovación disruptiva.

La cuarta revolución industrial está marcada por la convergencia de tecnologías digitales, físicas y biológicas, y está cambiando la forma en que vivimos, trabajamos y nos relacionamos. Las ExOs y sus atributos están alineadas con la nueva jerarquía que la convergencia tecnológica está implantando. Esta jerarquía de la cuarta revolución industrial es una pirámide invertida, la cual está siendo liderada por compañías con productos de solo información, serán las más exitosas y el mayor número.  Le seguirán compañías con productos físicos con flujos de ingresos basados en información, como Apple o Amazon en sus orígenes.  El tercer grupo, el cual será el más pequeño, está constituido por compañías tradicionales que logren extender su modelo de negocio de productos físicos habilitándolos con información y datos.

En resumen, proponemos seis atributos exponenciales claves para los equipos buscando encontrar el Product-Market-Fit y generar ‘efectos de red’ en su Plataforma Exponencial:

  1. Definir un Propósito Transformacional Masivo.
  2. Fomentar el intercambio de servicios, mediante el análisis y activación de DATOS.
  3. Apalancar en los activos de los socios de negocio y de la comunidad en procura de alcanzar coste marginal cero.
  4. Atraer y comprometer los participantes (distintos tipos de productores y consumidores).
  5. Facilitar interfaces y conexión con la plataforma para compartir y realizar transacciones. Por ejemplo, en relación con la infraestructura de producción y el canal de distribución.
  6. Co-crear valor via experimentación con el ecosistema

Es importante resaltar que estamos navegando la incertidumbre de la cuarta revolución industrial y reconocemos que crear un negocio de plataforma no es sencillo. Nos gustaría recibir sus comentarios, aprender de las experiencias de aquellos que han fallado en sus intentos iniciales y de quienes han conseguido encontrar product-market-fit para sus negocios de plataforma.

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

Mar 28, 2019 | Advisory Services, Business Coaching, Consulting, Digital Transformation, ExO, Growth, Mid-market, Small Business, Transformation

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

Dec 12, 2016 | Agility, Business Coaching, Disruption, ExO, Exponential Organizations

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.