Salim Ismail, co-author of Exponential Organizations, discusses the practical applications and disruptive potential of generative AI models.
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Ismail: Coase's Law is obsolete due to cheap web service transaction costs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…”
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.”
Assertion Supported
Ismail: Top exponential Fortune 100 companies outperformed bottom 10 by 40x
“Over a seven-year period, the top 10 did better than the bottom 10 by three x on revenue growth 6.4 times on profitability, 10.9 times on return on assets, but shareholder returns, compound annual growth rate, top 10 outperformed the bottom 10 by 40 x.”
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…”