I’ve spent years thinking about strategy for every type and size of company imaginable for the last seven years: retail, consumer products, healthcare, IT, conglomerates, restaurants — the list goes on. In my experience, creation of a strategy is messy, disconnected, and far too difficult for what it should be. It should be a fun, collaborative, and generative process that engages individuals towards a unified goal. Instead, creation of strategy tends to divide people and groups into very specific, isolated workstreams. The most egregious divide is the one between strategy and finance. When I was in business school at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, I was always shocked at how little finance had to do with the real facts of business, and how little the real facts of business concerned themselves with finance. 

I did not know about a connection until I studied information theory. Surprisingly, it was a project for a finance class that truly got me started down the path to creating the exponential business. I first learned about information theory and Claude Shannon, and how this one man single-handedly created the methods that enabled the information age by applying the law of large numbers to probability.

Partly, I was fascinated by the simplicity and beauty of the theory and the impact it created by inventing the concept of “digital”. Another part of me know from my college statistical classes at Harvard that the law of large numbers was incredibly powerful, and if that could be applied to strategy and finance, it would be a game changer.

The key was growth. Specifically, how growth is multiplicative, and not additive. Multiplicative growth is also known as exponential growth, and from that insight came the exponential business.

Philosophically, we as humans tend to like things to be linear: in forecasting, we tend to linearly extrapolate out to the next year. In accounting we add and subtract (possibly many, many times) in order to find our profits, losses and balance out the balance sheet. When we estimate and predict, we tend to make simple linear calculations to give our answer.

We don’t remember Einstein’s advice that compound growth is the most powerful force in the universe, nor do we harness that growth to be exponential. Instead, we set linear goals and continue to do business in a linear world.

My personal passion is taking you outside of the linear world and into the world of exponential growth. There are new, exciting concepts based on simple games (like a coin toss, or a horse race) that will change the way you think about growth. My personal mission is to teach you how to recognize the potential for exponential growth and take advantage of that potential to the fullest.

Thank you for joining me and sharing my passion - I hope you enjoy and utilize the content here to drive exponential growth for your business.