Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies for Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol

To encourage the reporting of failures, Google’s moonshot factory, X, takes an unusual approach.65 In most companies, it’s a senior leader who decides to pull the plug on a faltering project. But employees at X are empowered to kill their own projects as soon as they realize, for one reason or another, that the project isn’t viable. Here’s the interesting part: For this act of hara-kiri, the entire team receives a bonus. Recall from an earlier chapter that X led a project called Foghorn to convert seawater into fuel by sucking carbon dioxide out of the ocean water. Although the technology was promising, it wasn’t economically viable, so the team decided to shut down its own project. “Thank you!” X’s head, Astro Teller, announced at an all-hands meeting. “By ending their project, this team has done more to speed up innovation at X this month than any other team in this room.”