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

by Safi Bahcall

Rather than visionary innovators, they are careful gardeners. They ensure that both loonshots and franchises are tended well, that neither side dominates the other, and that each side nurtures and supports the other.

“No division, department, branch or group can be either ignored or favored at the expense of the others without unbalancing the whole.”

generals initially refused even to look at radar, Bush called Stimson. Stimson flew on an experimental plane equipped with the technology and watched as radar quickly sighted distant targets. The next day, the chiefs of both the Army and Air Force found identical notes on their desks: I’ve seen the new radar equipment. Why haven’t you?

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Scientists in Germany, however, had taken Goddard’s ideas seriously. They began their program after reading his papers. Years later, a German officer being grilled by American officers about their V-2 rocket program exclaimed, “Why don’t you ask your own Dr. Goddard?”

A stream of departing employees signals serious dysfunction. As mentioned earlier, after founding what became Bell Labs, Theodore Vail said that no group “can be either ignored or favored at the expense of the others without unbalancing the whole.” Vannevar Bush, during the Second World

Getting the touch and balance right requires a gentle helping hand to overcome internal barriers—the hand of a gardener rather than the staff of a Moses. If the transfer is either overforced (a thunderous commandment) or underforced (no helping hand), promising ideas and technologies will languish in the labs. The organization will lose

We want a model that is just simple enough so that we can extract macro insights with confidence in their micro origins. In other words, we want a model that describes the forest but is built from the trees.

Hemingway wrote that “the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” He called it his Theory of Omission. The power of beautiful prose comes from what you leave out. In science, it’s the same. The power of a beautiful model comes from what you choose to omit.