Healing the World

Remember the data described at the beginning of this book regarding the Fortune 100 study between ExO and non-ExO companies? To summarize: The most ExO-friendly organizations delivered 40x the shareholder returns compared to the most inflexible, traditional enterprises. 

As Raj Sisodia has written so compellingly in The Healing Organization, new organizational forms need not just to be sustainable but also lead the process of healing our planet, our communities, our people, and our institutions. We couldn’t agree more: purpose-driven, scalable, adaptable organizations—ExOs—are natural candidates to heal the world and transition it from Scarcity to the Abundance that is our singular destiny.

What does that mean? 

Up until recently, most of human products and services were based on a scarcity model. But as we have learned to digitize products and services—that is, turning them into 1’s and 0’s—it has allowed us to dematerialize physical things, duplicate them, and transmit them in a fashion that has effectively dropped the incremental cost of that production and transmission to zero. 

The implications of this widespread virtualization are so profound as to be almost unbelievable. What it means is that, for the first time in human history, we may be on the brink of a post-scarcity world. One reason this is so unimaginable is that our minds, evolving over the past 300,000 years, were wired for scarcity, not abundance. So the notion of an end to endemic scarcity is not only earth-shattering, it is literally mind-boggling.

That said, there is no doubt that a post-scarcity world will require a very different form of organization to survive and succeed. This transformation is already well underway.

It is hard not to see these changes in nearly apocalyptic terms. In the 2000s, a figurative information asteroid, the Web, struck the Earth. In the 2010s, we experienced a Cambrian explosion of new organizational forms (e.g., DAOs) emerging and being tested. And, entering the 2020s, the data is clear that ExOs are now the dominant species of organization on Earth. The days of large, hierarchical—dinosaur—organizations are numbered.