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by
Safi Bahcall
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March 31 - April 2, 2019
And then we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water.
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.
“When asked what it takes to win a Nobel Prize, Crick said, ‘Oh it’s very simple. My secret had been I know what to ignore.’”
In physics, you identify clues that reveal fundamental truths. You build models and see if they can explain the world around you. And that’s what we will do in this book. We will see why structure may matter more than culture.
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
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more is different: “The whole becomes not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts.”
As teams and companies grow larger, 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.
We use the same principle to engineer better materials. Adding a small amount of carbon to iron creates a much stronger material: steel. Adding nickel to steel creates some of the strongest alloys we know: the steels used inside jet engines and nuclear reactors.
By the time Vannevar Bush, dean of engineering at MIT, quit his job, moved to Washington, and talked his way into a meeting with the president in the summer of 1940, the US Navy already held the key to winning that race. They’d had it for eighteen years. They just didn’t know it.
That cycling, in which neither phase overwhelms the other, is called dynamic equilibrium.
Alfred Lee Loomis, an expert in chess and magic tricks, who wore perfectly pressed white suits and lived a double life.
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.”
“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”
The Norness, a 9,577-ton tanker, became the first casualty in a wave of destruction off the US coast, in which a handful of U-boats destroyed or damaged nearly 400 ships and killed nearly 5,000 passengers and crew.
In total, Allied planes and ships sank 41 U-boats in May, more in one month than in any of the first three years of the war.
“For some months past, the enemy has rendered the U-boat war ineffective. He has achieved this object, not through superior tactics or strategy, but through his superiority in the field of science; this finds its expression in the modern battle weapon—detection.”
Endless Frontier was “epoch-making” and “must-reading for American businessmen.”
big ideas—the breakthroughs that change the course of science, business, and history—fail many times before they succeed.
The magic of Bush and Vail was in engineering the forces of genius and serendipity to work for them rather than against them. Luck is the residue of design.
When Jobs returned twelve years later, he had learned to love his artists (Jony Ive) and soldiers (Tim Cook) equally.
Noritoshi Kitano,
One in a million people inherit the defective gene from both parents and are born with FH, like the children Goldstein saw. They have up to ten times the normal levels of cholesterol in the blood and often begin having heart attacks early in childhood.
Akira Endo in Tokyo
A $90 BILLION “COINCIDENCE”
victors don’t just write history; they rewrite history.
Judah Folkman.
“You can tell a leader by counting the number of arrows in his ass.”
That’s a project champion.
inventors (artists)
line managers (soldiers)
LSC: Listen to the Suck with Curiosity
It’s hard to hear that no one likes your baby. It’s even harder to keep asking why.
I find it’s when I question the least that I need to worry the most.
Juan Trippe.
Lucky Lindy.
Charles Lindbergh,
Spirit of St. Louis,
Charles Lindbergh and Juan Trippe plan Pan Am’s conquest of Latin America (1929)
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. —Orson Welles as Harry Lime, The Third Man (1949)
Robert Goddard. He was the first to describe the mathematics of rocket flight (1912), the first to design and build a liquid-fueled rocket (1926), and the first to demonstrate gyroscopic stabilization of rockets (1932).
A New York Times editorial stated that Goddard “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” namely that of Newton’s law on action and reaction, which made rocket flight impossible.
People say, “There’s no way that could ever work.” And then it does.
Nearly every company led by a master P-type innovator like Trippe gets shocked.
IBM dominated computers like Pan Am dominated international travel. Its $13 billion in sales in 1981 was more than its next seven competitors combined (the computer industry was referred to as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”).
IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel.
screen, you are using a variation of this trick, with a
1888, Thomas Edison wrote, “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear.” A few years later he used this motion-picture instrument to produce the first American short films.
“Do not undertake a program unless the goal is manifestly important and its achievement is nearly impossible.” The science and technology behind polarizing filters, instant print, and instant color had all seemed nearly impossible when Land dived in. This new challenge was exactly the kind of P-type loonshot worthy of his mind and energy. And so Land launched what became a ten-year, half-billion-dollar project to create instant-print movies.
BAD ADVICE
Traditional photography exploits a chemical reaction. When enough photons (light particles) strike the silver molecules in film, the molecules change form. That creates a chemical memory of where photons landed.
1953, President Eisenhower assembled an expert panel, led by the president of MIT, James Killian,
