“Exponentially” is not synonymous to “a lot”. Exponent is a mathematical term and exponential growth requires at least two variables exponentially related to each other. For this to be possibly exponential growth a) progress should be quantifiable (removing management and treating workers well should be quantized somehow) b) performance should be quantifiable and measured at a bunch of progress points (if you have only two measurements it can as well be linear) c) performance should be or can be modeled as a an exponential function of progress in removing management and treating workers well.