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 J… - Salim Ismail

OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way.

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.

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.

How quickly can you convert exponential growth into the critical mass needed to become a platform? Once that happens there is no practical limit. It's one big coral reef.