Salim Ismail > Quotes

“Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is; your fate is to be either the disrupter or the disrupted. There is no middle ground.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“in the future, the defining metric for organizations won’t be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“The ultimate objective is what the Gartner Group calls a zero latency enterprise—that is, a company in which the time between idea, acceptance and implementation all but disappears—and implementing”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, Cheaper Than Yours

“Martin Seligman, a leading expert on positive psychology, differentiates between three states of happiness: the pleasurable life (hedonistic, superficial), the good life (family and friends) and the meaningful life (finding purpose, transcending ego, working toward a higher good). Research shows that Millennials—those born between 1984 and 2002—are showing an orientation towards seeking meaning and purpose in their lives.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“As Eric Ries explains, “The modern rule of competition is whoever learns fastest, wins.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“when you move from point A to point B, you can then see point C. But you can’t see point C from point A. Iteration/experimentation is the only way.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“In an ExO world, purpose trumps strategy and execution overrides planning.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“Jerry Michalski notes that in the past, scarcity meant value. That is, without scarcity, you didn’t have a business. Now that notion has been upended. Dave Blakely of IDEO thinks about ExOs in the following way: “These new organizations are exponential because they took something scarce and made it abundant.” Nokia bought Navteq, trying to buy, own and control scarcity, only to be leapfrogged by Waze, which managed to harness abundance.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“McKinsey & Company advised AT&T not to enter the mobile telephone business, predicting there would be fewer than one million cellular phones in use by 2000. In fact, by 2000, there were one hundred million mobile phones.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“as data becomes the new oil, many business models will be transformed from hardware to software to services.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“According to noted hotelier Chip Conley, “Culture is what happens when the boss leaves.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“In 2013, Reddit, which has just fifty-one employees, most of whom manage the platform, saw 731 million unique visitors cast 6.7 billion votes on 41 million stories.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“You have to be self-aware and look for that startup idea and purpose that is a perfect fit with you—with you as a person, not as a business[person].”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“Today, if you’re not disrupting yourself, someone else is;”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“It is our opinion that in the future, the defining metric for organizations won’t be ROI (Return on Investment), but ROL (Return on Learning).”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“In fact, the best definition we’ve found for a startup comes from Ries: “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“An Exponential Organization (ExO) is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large—at least 10x larger—compared to its peers because of the use of new organizational techniques that leverage accelerating technologies.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure in the 21st.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“To demonstrate, consider the number of times the founders of the following companies pitched investors before finally succeeding: Company Number of Investor Pitches Skype 40 Cisco 76 Pandora 300 Google 350”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“as technology brings us a world of abundance, access will triumph over ownership.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“The world has over a trillion hours a year of free time to commit to shared projects,”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“The biggest risk is not taking any risk.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“6Ds: Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Dematerialize, Demonetize and Democratize. Any technology that”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“When failure is not an option, you end up with safe, incremental innovation, with no radical breakthroughs or disruptive innovations.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“There is a fundamental DNA path dependency here. Are you primarily a community or are you primarily a company? The reason you have to ask yourself this is because sooner or later the two will come in conflict. We [DIY Drones] are primarily a community. Every day, we make decisions that disadvantage the company to bring advantage to the community.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“Riaz Shah, the Global Head of Learning at Ernst and Young, trains 100,000 new hires annually. The following image from Riaz is his take on the immune system: Too many people who have worked for a business—especially a large enterprise—are familiar with corporate immune systems.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact

“5P benefits of big data: productivity, prevention, participation, personalization and prediction.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“(If you own a car, it sits empty about 93 percent of the time.)”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours

“One reason for this debacle, according to Dan Colussy, who drove Iridium’s buyout in 2000, was the company’s refusal to update business assumptions. “The Iridium business plan was locked in place twelve years before the system became operational,” he recalls. That’s a long time, long enough that it was almost impossible to predict where the state of the art in digital communications would be by the time the satellite system was at last in place. We thus label this an Iridium Moment—using linear tools and the trends of the past to predict an accelerating future.”
― Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours