I’ve been a long-time reader of Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View newsletter. His latest work demonstrates that many of the unwritten rules leaders still operate by are becoming fictions. He writes that we are entering a new world in which energy is abundant, biology is programmable, and intelligence is a commodity. This makes me ponder the consequences for leaders.
The first shift that Azeem points to: Energy is shifting from a resource to a technology. For most of human history, energy meant extracting something finite and burning it. Power followed scarcity, geography, and control. Renewables break that logic. Costs keep falling as scale increases; moreover, production is decentralized. The implications are geopolitical and organizational: advantage no longer comes from ownership alone, but from deployment speed, integration, and system design.
Second: Biology has become programmable. Technology improvement curves have been steep since the first sequencing of the human genome, and costs are dropping fast. “Biology moved from evolutionary timescales to engineering timescales, and as a result we got mRNA vaccines and CRISPR.”
Third: Intelligence has become engineerable. More compute and more data are predictably yielding more capability. “AI became a predictable engineering problem. We crossed from uncertainty to a learning curve.”
Taken together, this signals a deeper shift. As Azeem argues, the civilizational operating system built on scarcity is giving way to one based on abundance. In the Scarcity OS, the game was about finding limited resources, controlling them, and defending your share. That logic shaped our institutions, hierarchies, and leadership models. But many of the constraints leaders still plan around—slow progress, fixed talent pools, linear productivity, zero-sum competition—are becoming fictions. Azeem advocates a different mindset for a world in which the fundamental inputs are both becoming cheaper and more abundant and that is about accelerating abundance, not “how do I get my share?” but “how do I help make more?”
Azeem’s insights really make me think—particularly about the implications for senior leaders of large organizations. What I’ve come up with thus far is:
- Strategy can no longer be built on protecting advantage alone. Moats erode faster when inputs (energy, intelligence, tools) get cheaper at an accelerating pace.
- Operating models optimized for control will underperform. Organizations still anchored in scarcity thinking (“who gets the budget,” “who owns the idea,” “who controls the resource”) will move too slowly. Abundance favors speed, adaptability, and experimentation over certainty and scale alone.
- Complexity increases, while complicatedness remains. Organizational success no longer relies on the individual genius of leaders, but on their ability to mobilize people who build teams that move systems.
- Talent strategies must change. When intelligence is a commodity, the differentiator is not access to smart people, but how well organizations amplify, coordinate, and deploy intelligence—both human and artificial.
The question for leaders is no longer, “How do I secure my share?”. It is, “How do I help create more—and move faster as abundance accelerates?”