Entropy is the natural tendency of milk to blend into coffee and watch springs to wind down rather than up. It’s described in physics by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
But entropy only applies to closed systems. Open systems, including all living creatures, possess a different behavior than just running out of steam. We leverage entropic processes to access fresh sources of free energy. That enables us to wind up rather than down. This is how fridges stay cold and flowers bloom every spring. This is a pattern of behavior that adapts to keep evolving indefinitely.
In business terms we identify patterns in terms of a metric. Extropy turns up as positive change in the rate of return on investment. But what does it take to initiate exponential growth in a business? The master of the art, Steve Jobs, put it this way:
If you don’t cannibalise yourself, someone else will. If anybody’s going to make our products obsolete, I want it to be us.
Extropic business isn’t about competing with existing products but obsoleting them by delivering products with better experiences. Which is why, ten years ago, there were no smart phones, but ten years from now smart phones will have been destroyed by AR. Any apps business that isn’t working on the AR growth curve in 2016 is trying to make a faster horse.
The point of Extropy isn’t just the big picture stuff about leading the market. It’s concrete and iterative. It’s about making decisions that increase the ROROI of Epics, Features and Stories. In an extropic marketplace, the rate at which businesses can do this, no matter how they package it as products, makes the difference between businesses that grow exponentially and those that struggle and perish.