Irene Lee put forward the concept of "unicorn company" at the TechCrunch International Innovation Summit in 20110/0, which was used to refer to those startups with a valuation of more than $65,438 billion. These business giants used to take decades or even hundreds of years to build, but now they only need a few years.
The book "Exponential Organizations" helps us to explore the mysteries and laws of the darling of these times. Exponential Organizations refers to an organization (at least 10 times) whose influence (or output) increases disproportionately compared with its peers with the help of a new organization method using high-speed technology. Through research, it is found that the scores of most Li unicorns are higher than the passing line of Exponential Organizations, and there is a high degree of coincidence between them.
The author interviewed or studied 90 top entrepreneurs and dreamers, and investigated 65,438+000 fastest-growing and most successful startups in the world, including members of the Unicorn Club. On this basis, this paper summarizes and analyzes the similarities between these companies, which can be summarized as 1 1 the strongest attribute: MTP+ scale+concept.
MTP, that is, a huge goal of change. In addition, 65,438+00 reflects the internal and external attributes of the exponential growth of exponential companies, which is vividly described by the author with the left brain and the right brain respectively. The internal attribute is abbreviated as IDEAS, which is indicated by the left brain and represents order, control and stability. The external attribute is abbreviated as SCALE, which is indicated by the right brain and represents creativity, growth and uncertainty.
After careful analysis, in addition to MTP, I personally think that we can understand the internal and external attributes of 10 proposed by the author from four angles: breaking the external boundaries of the organization, opening up innovation and information exchange, lightweight management, and building new enterprise infrastructure.
MTP is not an empty slogan, on the contrary, it is the most essential and basic aspect of a startup company. The success of enterprises is not due to creativity, creativity or new technology is endless. Such failed companies can be seen everywhere in Silicon Valley. They have extraordinary skills, but they can't find any problems that can be solved.
The success of an enterprise stems from the focus on the problems to be solved, the attitude of the entrepreneurial team never giving up and the courage to execute. Those who believe in changing their goals will naturally find innovative ways.
MTP helps you find passion and enthusiasm and solve the problems you are ready to overcome. It will become a competitive advantage, allowing you to define your goals and persevere, and then form a cultural cohesion and pull, which will benefit all aspects of the company's ecosystem, such as attracting talents, building communities, and exerting external influence.
Two ways for unicorn enterprises to achieve extraordinary growth are to use on-demand employees and leveraged assets.
The use of on-demand employees refers to the use of people outside the organization to create and operate the company. Its advantages are as follows:
① Internet-driven technology is developing with each passing day. No matter how competent the existing employees are, they may also hinder the development of the enterprise because employees cannot update their skills in time. External temporary labor can help organizations fill the vacancy of professional competence as soon as possible;
② It can enhance the flexibility of the company and reduce the burden;
(3) Even with a large number of the smartest full-time employees (for example, Google has 50,000 talented employees), it can only be dwarfed by the collective wisdom of billions of netizens.
There are many common forms of leveraged assets, including leasing, sharing, lending and outsourcing. For the China market, people are most familiar with Didi Chuxing, and the assets of the car belong to the driver rather than the company.
Like employees hired on demand, Exponential Organizations can maintain flexibility and save management personnel because he doesn't own assets, allowing enterprises to expand at an incredible speed.
Of course, the assets here refer to information, or are essentially daily necessities. But if it is a rare asset, the best strategy is to own it. For example, Tesla owns its own factory.
Internet era is an open era. With the intensification of commercial competition, the self-enclosed innovation of enterprises is not only costly, but also bound to hinder their own development due to the limitations of speed, thinking, resources and information.
Openness and communication have become the ways and means to help enterprises get information first, respond in time and better participate in future competition. The open innovation and information exchange of index enterprises include three attributes: community and public, participation and experiment.
Exponential Organizations has been using the community and the public to solve many functions traditionally handled by enterprises, including creativity, design, crowdfunding, publicity, sales and so on. This coincides with what clay shirky, a famous professor and social media leader, called cognitive surplus.
The community consists of core teams, partners, distributors, customers, users and fans, and the public is a wider group located outside the community. Through MTP and interest, enterprises organize wider groups outside the boundary, verify new ideas, learn new content, enlarge their thinking ability, and communicate and realize quickly. This can help enterprises to innovate quickly, transform them into products and services that meet market demand, and better cope with market changes.
Initial methods to attract users to participate, such as lottery, quiz, discount coupons, membership cards, etc. Everyone is already familiar with it. Nowadays, the ways of users' participation have become digital receiving system, games and integral, which has formed a positive and beneficial feedback loop between enterprises and users. Grand Prix is an effective way to seek suitable talents and breakthrough ideas among the public.
In non-game products and services, Exponential Organizations applies the elements and mechanisms of games (such as motivation, mechanism and components of games) to create interesting participation experiences and turn users into loyal fans.
These methods can also be used within the company to improve the company culture, carry out employee training, and enhance cooperation, innovation and loyalty. Pep Boys automobile maintenance company has established the Axonify platform, which allows employees to know about specific accidents and win bonuses through tests. In this way, the number of safety accidents and casualties has decreased by more than 45%.
Experiment is a practical and innovative method driven by customers, which is widely known for its lean entrepreneurial movement. The core idea of lean entrepreneurship is to put a minimalist prototype product (MVP) on the market now, and then optimize the product quickly and iteratively through continuous learning and valuable user feedback to meet the market demand.
This process often takes only a few weeks to a few months, with few resources and low cost. If the product design is flawed from the beginning, it will soon be discovered by the market and avoid a lot of investment.
The traditional bureaucratic organizational form has high administrative cost, low organizational efficiency and lack of creativity, so it is difficult to adapt to market changes quickly and to the rapidly developing and changing industries. Exponential Organizations got rid of this heavy management mode, making the organization and management lighter, more flexible, more agile and more creative.
Strict control framework is very important for managing ultra-high-speed growth, and real-time dashboard and OKR are the key factors of this control framework.
Real-time dashboards allow everyone in the organization to know all the key quantitative indicators of the company and employees. This is a management method that directly faces the overall goal of the company, integrates and summarizes the evaluation results of individuals and teams in real time, and avoids small mistakes from turning into serious consequences.
Many index companies, such as Google, Facebook and Linkedin. OKR method, that is, goal and key result method, has been adopted. OKR pays attention to the company's goals and employees' contribution to these goals. It is independent of employee evaluation and set from bottom to top. It requires the goal to be challenging, and it is good to reach 60-70%.
This flat and goal-oriented management method not only shortens the feedback loop, but also reduces the possibility of deviation of key performance results through the control framework created by lightweight OKR.
With the change of traditional hierarchical system, top-down management will gradually be replaced by self-management of employees, that is, autonomy.
Take Morningstar Company as an example. The company encourages employees to innovate independently, clarify their job responsibilities or negotiate with colleagues, make independent decisions on equipment procurement, and the salary is determined by peers.
In the way of employees' self-management, management and decision-making are scattered in scattered and self-organized teams, rather than concentrated at the top of the company, which improves the agility, innovation and responsibility of the organization.
In this way, enterprises can feedback customers' needs as quickly as possible, which is helpful for organizations to respond better under the rapidly changing environment and business elements.
In order to achieve exponential growth, high-growth enterprises need to establish new enterprise infrastructure, such as algorithms, user interfaces and social technology platforms.
In this Internet age, data is everywhere, and various algorithms are flooding our lives. The search results of search engines, the guesses of your favorite shopping websites, and the matching between Didi and your closest driver when taking a taxi are all masterpieces of the algorithm.
Machine learning and deep learning are the most advanced algorithms at present. Machine learning trains through historical data and accurately completes new unknown tasks based on prediction methods. Deep learning is a subset of machine learning, which is based on neural network technology and allows machines to discover new laws without any historical data.
For example, Google X has built a network, and after browsing100000 randomly selected pictures in three days, it can identify "cats", although it doesn't know the concept of "cats".
With the advent of the Internet of Things era, the amount of data created by human beings will increase explosively. Organizations are more faced with how to mine and manage rich data. Algorithms have become the core business value of a company's foundation: using algorithms and data to drive correct business insights and decisions.
User interface is a systematic and automatic way to filter and match a large amount of information, data, ideas and feedback generated from the outside, and treat it as the key input information needed by the core organization. Of course, this interface can be handled manually at first, but with the expansion of scale, it must become an automatic configuration platform.
This provides enterprises with the ability to manage external attributes, especially on-demand employees, leveraged assets, community and public participation. Filtering and matching through user interface can make the process more effective and efficient, and reduce the error rate. It is like a bridge, connecting the outside and the inside, and it is the core lever for Exponential Organizations to expand its territory.
For example, the user interface of Local Motors consists of three parts: creative submission tool, competition creation tool and scoring voting tool. Through these tools, users can submit ideas, create new competitions and vote for every aspect of the product cycle. Enterprises use these tools to screen out effective ideas and prioritize the functional characteristics of new products.
In the era of more and more digital working environment, social technology has created horizontal interaction in vertically managed companies. Enterprise instant messaging, task management, file sharing, cloud document management, remote communication, etc. They are all social technologies commonly used by enterprises.
Based on social technology, organizations can create transparency and connectivity, reduce the information delay of organizations, speed up decision-making, improve the intimacy of organizations, increase the level and scope of knowledge, and better seize opportunities.
The ultimate goal of enterprises adopting social technology is to become a zero-delay enterprise, without wasting any time between conception, acceptance and implementation.