In the real world, ideas are ridiculed, experiments fail, budgets are cut, and good people are fired for stupid reasons. Companies fall apart and their best projects remain buried, sometimes forever. The Three Deaths tells the honest history, as opposed to the revisionist history, of nearly every important breakthrough I’m aware of or have personally experienced (the Three often stretches to Four, Five, or Ten). The need to nurture and protect fragile loonshots so they can survive those stumbles and setbacks, whether self-inflicted or caused by others, is the central idea behind the systems of
...more
