ExO (exponential organization) a term introduced by Salim Ismail in his book “Exponential Organizations” is a revolutionary organizational design concept. Many organizations and start-ups are using the framework and are looking to scale their organization using the principals outlined. “Staff on Demand” is one of the major pillars of any exponential organization, as highlighted in the book. This mechanism helps organizations to have minimum core organization and have the flexibility to add more staff as needed. This gives them the flexibility to generate more ideas, work on them without much hassle of building permanent employers base.
The traditional organization adopted the hierarchical design which worked while technology is in its infancy. With innovation explosion and resulting costs reduction, that design has become a hindrance and is being challenged. Extensive hiring, by default, required creating an organization that headed towards bureaucracy and politicals. This lead to stifling of ideas down the ranks and defocused organizations to its core purpose.
Many small startups emerged utilizing the concepts of ExO and staff on demand and created companies reaching billion of people in no time. Their valuation topped or reached the level of companies been in business for decades. Staying lean and nimble helps them in adjusting to the realities of business and pivoting as soon as possible. These organizations utilized resources across the globe wherever they could find talent. This led to an access to a workforce of millions within a very short period of time.
In the book, Salim also highlights the McKinsey Global Institute Research by Michael Chui, where he talks about the emerging importance or Staff on Demand concept and tears apart the traditional concepts of hiring and hierarchies.
Remote Staffing or Staff on Demand has been in discussion for ages with pros and cons highlighted to the max.
Some Pros
Talent, Dedicated Resources, Disaster Handling, Overheads Reductions, Liabilities Avoidance are just a few of the pros that staff on demand OR remote staffing can provide. Staffing on short-term notice for scaling organizations also is a major obstacle. With Staff on Demand, any scaling organization can add multiple developers, designers, BI analysts in a matter of days.
Some Cons
Finding the right candidate and partners is the biggest dilemma. Also aligning the share interest and vision of your start-up with the remote team could become an obstacle.
Some Tools
Finding the right communication and project management tools is easy, as the costs of all such services have reduced to nothing. With Skype, Slack, Google Hangout, Dropbox you can pretty much accomplish all you want. To explore all the options, please follow the link,
https://www.remotestarterkit.com/
An Example
Not all activities are equal in terms of value added to the core purpose of the organization. Insourcing all of it just leads to money wastage, expensive hiring, and later on liabilities for permanent employees. Consider the case of San-Francisco based Therapeutics company contacting us for the production of the game that highlights the functionality of their new device. By outsourcing the gamification of the process to us, resulted in 10 times cost reduction and were able also able to deliver the project on time (WITHIN 21 days) with appreciation from the event attendees. The other route available would have been to hire the new game designer, developer, and work on that. The total timeline of doing so would have resulted in missing event participation with meaning.
Summing up, ExO organization design is the future and will become a part of major corporate strategies too. Startups are open to such mechanisms and are already benefitting the most from this approach. Interestingly, mainstream media is also openly talking about it and showing the version of it in hit HBO comedy, Silicon Valley.
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