Salim Ismail, co-author of Exponential Organizations, presents findings from a seven-year study tracking Fortune 100 companies ranked by their ExO agility and structure diagnostic index.
Opinion
Ismail: Coase's Law is obsolete due to cheap web service transaction costs
“So in the book, we actually declare Coase's Law, which has been, ah, very touted for a hundred years, essentially gone. Because the pay, the need to control a big company makes it too slow to navigate all these massive changes that are happening. And B, the tr…”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2028
Ismail: Generative AI will replace most lawyers
“The best benefit is we'll replace most of the lawyers. Because you could just say, generate me a contract that has these characteristics and it'll throw in the clauses and et cetera.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ismail: Amazon penalizes employee bonuses if their experiments do not fail enough
“We saw, for example, an Amazon that every team is measured on how many experiments they ran this quarter, how many succeeded, how many failed. If you're not running enough experiments and not enough for failing, you're actually, your bonus gets dinged, right?”
Assertion Partly supported
Ismail: GE sold its appliance business to Haier after failing to compete
“GE actually gave up and sold GE appliances to them because they couldn't compete.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Ismail: Companies without generative AI will not survive
“If you're not building generative AI into your products and services going forward, you're not going to last.”
Opinion
Ismail: Apple's real competitive edge is its organizational design, not products
“I will argue that Apple's real real edge is organizational, because what they will do is they will form a small team that's really disruptive. They will put that team at the edge of the company. They'll keep them secret and stealth, and they'll say to them, go…”