Getting Our Big Ideas Off the Ground
How MegaFood is making bold forays into exponential thinking
Just imagine flying home from a business conference at which you learned the following firsthand from those directly involved:
- By 2019, space flight will be open for tourism;
- By 2022, a cure for cancer will be discovered;
- By 2030, for every year you live, technology will extend your life by more than one year;
- Thanks to nanotechnology, quantum computers will perform a trillion more transactions per watt than today’s fastest computers.
I recently heard these very same assertions at the 2018 Abundance 360 Global Summit, which is something I’ve wanted to attend ever since I read Peter Diamandis’ 2012 bestseller Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. And now I want to share my enthusiasm for his ideas with you. Diamandis argues that exponential technological growth in computing, energy, medicine and many other areas are innovating at an exponential rate and will soon enable an unprecedented abundance that today seems impossible. Billions of people around the world will enjoy greater access to food, clean water, healthcare, education and many other things that will improve their lives. The book offers plenty of examples of recent breakthroughs, so it wasn’t an exercise in futurism but rather a report from the cutting edge of innovation.
Personally, I’ve always been the ultimate early adaptor. You know . . . the guy who was using Outlook to set up meetings and Excel to run macros before anybody else. Ditto with the Pegasus email platform (way, WAY back!) and eBuilder, where I worked early on in the Internet Age… So, when I learned that Diamandis was also the co-founder, along with Ray Kurzweil, of Singularity University, I knew I wanted to become much more directly and personally involved with his project.
If you’re unfamiliar with SU, it has two broad agendas: first, to harness the enormous creativity and productivity in the world today and direct it toward solving the world’s biggest problems. It strives to accomplish this by gathering a “global community of doers and leaders” and giving them the necessary ingredients to put great ideas into effect. So, they are a powerful organization built on idealism.
Second, SU serves as a forum for discussing the ethics of technological growth. While new technologies can help solve big problems, they can also create their own problems. How, for example, do you insure the makers and users of self-driving cars? How will the FAA think about drones flying all over the place delivering goods and services to people? If artificial intelligence enables companies to replace workers with robots, what responsibilities to their human workers do they have? What new competencies will workers have to master?
The challenges and opportunities posed by technological breakthroughs should be on all our radars. Last year, 6,700 retail doors closed, in large part due to the exponential growth of ecommerce. According to Diamandis, an S&P 500 company closes every two weeks, replaced by this or that disruptive technology. I wanted to know more about which technologies were the most likely to win out and how I could prepare my organization, MegaFood, to take advantage of them. I also care a lot about my workforce. If I think there’s a good chance that some of my employees will be put out of jobs in five or 10 years as robotics comes in, for example, I want to know what to do now to begin to train them and move them into the next generation.
In January, I attended SU’s Abundance 360 Global Summit and heard directly from the inventors, thinkers, entrepreneurs and technology visionaries who are responsible for driving the innovations I mentioned at the beginning of this post. One of the guiding principles articulated in Abundance and taught at SU is that to take advantage of technological growth — and not be swept aside by it- leaders and their organizations have to adopt a mindset SU calls “exponential thinking.” Exponential thinking boils down to this: big challenges call for radical or “moonshot” solutions that leverage technological breakthroughs for their accomplishment. Within this model, “aiming for the moon” replaces traditional, incremental measures of progress — say, 10% annually — with exponential measures of progress of 10X or 100%, whichever you can attain first!
At first glance, this kind of transformative change can seem audacious and even hubristic, but the mindset that most aptly defines it is probably “urgent.” A moonshot isn’t something you tinker with, in other words; it’s something you launch into with your whole soul. At MegaFood, we’ve had a bona fide moonshot of ending nutritional poverty for the last six years. We just didn’t know it — at least not as such. For us, it was our mission. Now, we do. And to help us reach our moonshot we’ve begun to rethink how and why we do what we do. For example, in my last post I wrote of the path we’re taking to aligning our organization with a shared value creation model and retooling to become a Certified B-Corp.
We’re also undertaking something quite a bit more radical, if you want to call it that, something that really ups the ante in our commitment to our cause. Beginning in February of 2018, we are launching an experiment called MegaFood Blue. Drawing inspiration from Google X, which Google bills as it’s “moonshot factory,” Blue will explore and ultimately place little financial “bets” on exciting new opportunities that do not fit within MegaFood’s current corporate structure and cannot be properly valued. Examples of these moonshots might include DNA/genetics, personalized wellness, silicon-valley partnerships, new agricultural technologies and off-the-wall new channel or product opportunities.
Blue operates completely separately from MegaFood and is led by an “entrepreneur in residence” who reports directly to me. Our first entrepreneur is Andrew Brandeis, a graduate in Naturopathic medicine and founder of two Silicon-Valley-backed companies in the personal wellness space. He’ll be out there placing small bets that will either be killed quickly or be nurtured into larger projects that will advance MegaFood’s cause of curing nutritional poverty in our lifetime. [ Andrew is committed to blogging about Blue’s experience along the way and you can find his blog here — be sure to follow Andrew to stay up to date on Blue.]
Twice each year, the combined MegaFood and Blue entities will meet for a one-day retreat to explore exponential projects that might be ready for transfer from Blue to more formal MegaFood roadmaps & strategies.
Blue is an experiment in 10X rather than 10% thinking. And it’s got the potential to be a game changer for MegaFood, the natural products industry and a whole world of consumers, for sure. I’ll let you know how we’re doing. In the meantime, I encourage you to spend some time on the websites I’ve linked to and think about how you might design your own moonshot.
Better still, drop me a line and let me know what kind of game changer you’re working on. It might involve technology, and it might not. You’ll know what it is by how excited you feel while your working on it.
Robert U. Craven, MegaFood CEO
PS: All credit to my ghostwriting partner, Dave Moore, who is instrumental in getting my thoughts out in a coherent manner & into these blogs. Thanks Dave!
