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Once upon a time, about 3000 years ago, a king lived in India. A visitor presented him with a game. He called it Chess.
The King loved the game. Elephants and camels and horses and men. Strategy and war. It made sense.
The King asked - what do you want as payment?
The game developer said “I want see rice”. The King was surprised “rice, really?”
How much do you want?
The game developer asked for
The payment is whatever the number of grains ends up at the end of the chess board.
The King says that should be easy.
What do you think the number of grains will be? We have 64 blocks on the chess board?
It’s 1,000,000 by the 20th Its 1,000,000,000 by the 40th And 18 quadrillion by the 64th.
More rice than the entire world was a rice field.
Humans are bad at exponential projections. We cannot imagine the power of this doubling. This is now going beyond the computer chips but into drones, AI, gene sequencing, robotics and a range of other technologies.
How might we bring that exponential technology into our organisation Startegy?
BTW, the king did not like being fooled. The game developer lost his head.
