Salim Ismail (pictured) has a vision for the organization of the future, and it doesn’t look anything like what exists today. Centralized authority will become distributed, closed decision-making will move toward openness and transparency, and predictability will transition into flexibility and rapid change.

“We now have the ability to scale an organization structure as fast as we can scale technology,” said Ismail, founding executive director of the Singularity University. “The only question is how quickly you can get to the new.”

Ismail spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the BlockChain Unbound event in San Juan, Puerto Rico. They discussed the concepts outlined through Ismail’s organization research and the future of new technologies such as blockchain.

Studying why new organizations are better

Ismail’s organizational philosophy has been captured in a recently published book titled “Exponential Organizations,” which outlines why new organizations are better, faster and cheaper than others. To reach organizational warp speed, Ismail’s global business advisory group offers a 10-week immersive program called ExO Sprint, which is designed to get the leadership culture and management thinking of a legacy organization three years farther ahead in less than three months.

The lessons offered by Ismail and his advisory group come from painful experience. As a Yahoo Inc. vice president he built and ran Brickhouse, the social media giant’s internal incubator. The experiment did not end well. Yahoo Inc. closed the two-year-old business unit in 2008.

“When you try disruptive innovation in any large organization or institution, the immune system attacks you,” Ismail said. “I saw this at Yahoo running Brickhouse.”

As the manager of a far-flung global organization that requires paying more than 200 people in 40 countries, Singularity’s founder is intrigued by the potential opportunities for money transfers presented through digital currencies and the blockchain.

“This feels like the Web in 1996; it’s just starting,” Ismail said. “People know there’s something really magical, and they don’t know quite what to do.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the BlockChain Unbound event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE