Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

Later, Folkman would say, “You can tell a leader by counting the number of arrows in his ass.”

Many of the best biotech and pharma companies today have learned to separate the roles of inventor and champion. They train people for the project champion job—the Deak Parsons skill-set—and elevate their authority. It goes against the grain. On the creative side, inventors (artists) often believe that their work should speak for itself. Most find any kind of promotion distasteful. On the business side, line managers (soldiers) don’t see the need for someone who doesn’t make or sell stuff—for someone whose job is simply to promote an idea internally. But great project champions are much more than promoters. They are bilingual specialists, fluent in both artist-speak and soldier-speak, who can bring the two sides together.

Listening to the Suck with Curiosity (LSC)—overcoming the urge to defend and dismiss when attacked and instead investigating failure with an open mind.*

I find it’s when I question the least that I need to worry the most.

When extreme outcomes happen much more frequently than you expect, the probability distribution develops what statisticians call a “fat tail.”

Those bubbles grow or collapse, merge with other bubbles or fragment, all while new bubbles are forming. Johnson proposed that trading cliques act like those percolating bubbles.

The common pattern was a clue, but not definitive evidence of percolating clusters: groups that form and dissolve, merge or fragment, in an endless cycle. There are many possible explanations of power laws (although very few that naturally come with an exponent of 2.5). Johnson needed stronger evidence.

outcomes. Celebrate results, not rank. • Bring a gun

Branch Rickey was the Hall of Fame baseball executive who created baseball’s farm league system for developing new talent: players compete in the Minors and rise up to the Majors if they do well. He used that system to build eight World Series teams. It was Branch Rickey who originated the saying cited in part one: “Luck is the residue of design.”

Being good at loonshots and good at franchises are phases of an organization—whether that organization is a team, a company, or a nation. That’s what the science of emergence tells us.

“Man, I was all set to become a big-city department store owner,” he wrote about opening his first store. He was looking at St. Louis. “That’s when Helen spoke up and laid down the law.” His wife announced, “I’ll go with you any place you want so long as you don’t ask me to live in a big city. Ten thousand people is enough for me.” He ended up in Bentonville, Arkansas, population: 3,000, in part because “I wanted to get closer to good quail hunting, and with Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri all coming together right there it gave me easy access to four quail seasons in four states.” The result was the leaf in the tornado. “It turned out that the first big lesson we learned,” wrote Walton, years later, “was that there was much, much more business out there in small-town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of.”

We want to design our teams, companies, and nations to nurture loonshots—in a way that maintains the delicate balance with our franchises—so that we avoid ending up like the Qianlong emperor. The one who dismissed those “strange or ingenious objects,” the same strange and ingenious objects that returned in the hands of his adversaries, years later, and doomed his empire.

Moses Trap* When an all-powerful leader becomes judge and jury deciding the fate of loonshots. Phase

P-Type loonshot* A new product or technology that no one thinks will work. S-Type loonshot* A new strategy or business model that no one thinks will achieve its goal.

When championing a loonshot, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s important, of why you are doing what you are doing. A little obsession can be good. Too much can backfire. What’s helped me, on occasion, to pull back from the edge—to create a more sustainable and productive level of obsession—is stepping back to think on SRT: spirit, relationships, and time. Spirit Some people find meaning in serving a higher power. Others find it in serving their country. Still others find it in providing for their families, or spreading joy, or helping others live better, freer lives. Everyone has a mission or noble purpose. William Faulkner, for example, spoke of the noble purpose of the writer and the poet: I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. When diving deep into a project or career it’s easy for the head and the heart to stray to things that don’t matter. I began in the academic world, in which the noble purpose is to seek truth. I switched to the biotech world, with a mission to improve the lives of patients in need. Both worlds, like all p...