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

by Safi Bahcall

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.

When someone challenges the project you’ve invested years in, do you defend with anger or investigate with genuine curiosity? I find it’s when I question the least that I need to worry the most.

Years later, Land became known for a saying: “Do not undertake a program unless the goal is manifestly important and its achievement nearly impossible.”

“There’s a rule they don’t teach you at Harvard Business School: if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing to excess.”

Tim Cook, known as the “Attila the Hun of inventory,” from Compaq to run operations.

“The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating,” Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize.” Jobs arrived at the same conclusion

“If a miracle had been accomplished anywhere along the line,” Baxter wrote, “it was in the field of organization, where conditions had been created under which success was more likely to be achieved in time.”

1. Separate the phases • Separate your artists and soldiers • Tailor the tools to the phase • Watch your blind side: nurture both types of loonshots (product and strategy)

2. Create dynamic equilibrium • Love your artists and soldiers equally • Manage the transfer, not the technology: be a gardener, not a Moses • Appoint, and train, project champions to bridge the divide

Spread a system mindset • Keep asking why the organization made the choices that it did • Keep asking how the decision-making process can be improved • Identify teams with outcome m...

For a loonshot nursery to flourish—inside either a company or an industry—three conditions must be met: 1. Phase separation: separate loonshot and franchise groups 2. Dynamic equilibrium: seamless exchange between the two groups 3. Critical mass: a loonshot group large enough to ignite

USE “DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION” TO ANALYZE HISTORY; NURTURE LOONSHOTS TO TEST BELIEFS