Purpose

Exponential organizations (ExOs) are purpose-driven companies that leverage exponential technologies and exponential business practices to grow and scale rapidly, transform industries and create massive value and impact. In contrast, non-ExOs follow a linear approach to business and organizational strategy design and execution. This study aims to validate the hypothesis, based on financial metrics, that ExOs outperform their competitors and linear counterparts. Furthermore, it also brings a new understanding of the gap raised in the past eight years about how ExOs can achieve significantly better performance, measured with financial metrics.

Design/methodology/approach

For measuring how exponential an organization is, this study elaborated a completely new assessment tool called Exponential Quotient (ExQ). This study applied ExQ to the 100 largest US headquartered companies as ranked by Fortune magazine in 2014. Calculating the ExQ enabled this study to rank these Fortune 100 companies and identify the most and the least exponential firms. This study tracked these companies as to how they performed on different financial metrics over the eight years of 2014–2021 and analyzed the results.

Findings

Through the analysis, this study revealed that the top 10 ExOs have significantly outperformed their bottom 10 non-exponential peers, delivering 40x higher shareholder returns, 2.6x better revenue growth, 6.8x higher profitability and 11.7x better asset turnover. Furthermore, this study could identify commonalities and similarities between the two groups. This means that ExOs can thrive even in tough times and that accelerating technologies unlock abundance and allow every organization to become a disruptive innovator and stay ahead of the competition. These are novel results in the research focusing on the gap between exponential and traditional organizations.

Research limitations/implications

Using the ExQ diagnostics tool, every organization can see how flexible, scalable and agile they are, which is the starting point for an exponential transformation program. Although this approach has already found its way into practice and is applied globally by thousands of organizations (startups, scaleups and incumbents), so far, the academic establishment is in its nascent phase. With this research, the authors wanted to extend this field of science. On the other hand, because of its novelty, no appropriate previous studies existed to compare the results.

Practical implications

The possible implications showed that there is a plannable way for significantly increasing an organization’s ExQ and advance it from a linear toward an exponential organizational model.

Originality/value

The results validated the robustness of the ExO framework and philosophy and shed light on the importance of exponential transformation – a proven method to increase an organization’s ExQ. This framework is not a “how to be successful” guide. Instead, it uncovered some of the previously unknown and universal mechanisms of scalability – which, in turbulent times, make companies successful (based on financial metrics). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was among the first kind of in-depth analyses to validate the whole ExO model.

中文翻译：

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指数型组织如何在竞争中胜过传统组织（过去八年）？

目的

指数型组织 (ExO) 是目标驱动型公司，它们利用指数级技术和指数级业务实践来快速增长和扩展、改变行业并创造巨大的价值和影响。相比之下，非 ExO 遵循线性方法来设计和执行业务和组织战略。本研究旨在根据财务指标验证 ExO 优于竞争对手和线性同行的假设。此外，它还让人们对过去八年中关于 ExO 如何实现以财务指标衡量的显着更好绩效的差距有了新的认识。

设计/方法论/途径

为了衡量一个组织的指数程度，本研究详细阐述了一种全新的评估工具，称为指数商（ExQ）。本研究将 ExQ 应用于《财富》杂志 2014 年排名的 100 家最大的美国总部公司。通过计算 ExQ，本研究能够对这些《财富》100 强公司进行排名，并确定指数指数最高和最低的公司。本研究跟踪了这些公司在 2014 年至 2021 年八年间不同财务指标的表现，并分析了结果。

发现

通过分析，本研究显示，前 10 名 ExO 的表现显着优于排名后 10 的非指数同行，股东回报高出 40 倍，收入增长高出 2.6 倍，盈利能力高出 6.8 倍，资产周转率高出 11.7 倍。此外，这项研究可以确定两组之间的共性和相似之处。这意味着 ExO 即使在困难时期也能蓬勃发展，加速技术释放丰富性，使每个组织都能成为颠覆性创新者并在竞争中保持领先地位。这些是针对指数组织与传统组织之间差距的研究的新颖结果。

研究局限性/影响

使用 ExQ 诊断工具，每个组织都可以了解自己的灵活性、可扩展性和敏捷性，这是指数转型计划的起点。尽管这种方法已经付诸实践，并在全球范围内被数千家组织（初创企业、规模化企业和现有企业）所应用，但迄今为止，学术机构仍处于起步阶段。通过这项研究，作者希望扩展这一科学领域。另一方面，由于其新颖性，之前没有适当的研究来比较结果。

实际影响

可能的影响表明，有一种可规划的方法可以显着提高组织的 ExQ 并将其从线性组织模型推进到指数组织模型。

原创性/价值

结果验证了 ExO 框架和理念的稳健性，并阐明了指数转型的重要性——这是一种经过验证的提高组织 ExQ 的方法。该框架不是“如何成功”的指南。相反，它揭示了一些以前未知且普遍的可扩展性机制，这些机制在动荡时期使公司取得成功（基于财务指标）。据作者所知，这项研究是第一种验证整个 ExO 模型的深入分析之一。