Nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries

By Safi Bahcall

Moonshot: (1) The launching of a spacecraft to the moon; (2) an ambitious and expensive goal, widely expected to have great significance

Loonshot: A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged

Argument in brief:

1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy
2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries
3. Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better

Introduction

• Miller, ibrutinib example - The most important breakthroughs rarely follow blaring trumpets and a red carpet, with central authorities offering overflowing pots of tools and money. They are surprisingly fragile. They pass through long dark tunnels of skepticism and uncertainty, crushed or neglected, their champions often dismissed as crazy - or just plain dismissed.
• In 2004, a handful of excited Nokia engineers created a new kind of phone: internet-ready, with a big color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera. They proposed another crazy idea to go along with the phone: an online app store. The leadership team - the same widely admired, cover-story leadership team - shot down both projects. Three years later, the engineers saw their crazy ideas materialize on a stage in San Francisco. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Five years later, Nokia was irrelevant. It sold its mobile business in 2013. Between its mobile peak and exit, Nokia’s value dropped by roughly a quarter trillion dollars.
• There’s no way to analyze the behavior of any individual and explain the group. Being good at nurturing loonshots is a phase of human organization, in the same way that being liquid is a phase of matter. Blood good at developing franchises (like movie sequels) is a different phase of organization, in the same way that being solid is a different phase of matter.
• When people organize into a team, a company, or any kind of group with a mission they also create two competing forces - two forms of incentives. We can think of them loosely as stake and rank.
  • When groups are small, for example, everyone’s stake in the outcome of the group project is high. At a small biotech, if the drug works, everyone will be a hero and a millionaire. If it fails, everyone will be looking for a job. The perks of rank - job titles or the increase in salary from being promoted - are small compared to those high stakes.
  • As teams and companies grow lather, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase. When the two cross, the system snaps. Incentives begin encouraging behavior no one wants. Those same groups - with the same people - begin rejecting loonshots.
  • The bad news is that phase transitions are inevitable. All liquids freeze. The good news is that understanding the forces allows us to manage the transition.
• Leaders spend so much time preaching innovation. But one desperate molecule can’t prevent ice from crystallizing around it as the temperature drops. Small changes in structure, however, can melt steel.

Part One

Engineers of Serendipity

How Loonshots Won a War

Life on the edge

• One molecule can’t transform solid ice into liquid water by yelling at its neighbors to loosen up a little. Which is why (Vannevar) Bush didn’t try to change military culture. A different kind of pressure is required. So bush created a new structure. He adopted the principles of life on the edge of a phase transition: the unique conditions under which two phases can coexist.
• Bush changed national research the same way Vail changed corporate research. Both recognized that the big ideas - the breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history - fail many times before they succeed. Sometimes they survive through the force of exceptional skill and personality. Sometimes they survive through sheer chance. In other words, the breakthroughs that change our world are born from the marriage of genius and serendipity.