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

You would imagine that the first time someone presented the idea of using an invisible beam to detect ships and airplanes, or a drug to reduce cholesterol, or to kill tumors by choking their blood supply, there would be wild jubilation welcoming such a world-shaking breakthrough. Aaaand you would be wrong. As a rule, the folks who came up with such painfully obvious innovations as radar, statins and anti-angiogenesis drugs were rejected, and again, and again. For up to 32 years. Loonshots are “widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.” Through dozens of engaging stories told with insight and wry humor, Bahcall describes how loonshots (such as radar, the internet, and Pixar movies) come about, how to nurture them, how to champion them, and how to keep from inadvertently killing them. A gifted storyteller, Bahcall populates the narrative with characters endlessly fascinating because of their pluck, stubbornness, luck, or sheer genius: Vannevar Bush, the creator of the Office of Science Research and Development which basically won WW2; Akira Endo, the Japanese chemist who screened 6000 fungi to discover statins only to have his work stolen; Judah Folkman, the saintly discoverer of angiogenesis; Juan Terry Trippe, the larger-than-life founder of PanAm; Charles Lindbergh; Edwin Land, the supergenius founder of Polaroid; and Steve Jobs, who continues to get a lot more credit for Apple’s products than he deserved. In each of these instances, Bahcall goes deep, uncovering the complexities that belie simplistic origin stories and hero worship (Jobs and Newton are notably knocked down a few notches). Bahcall has done some serious sleuthing here. He also has a flair for super-clear explanations of complex scientific subjects. One of the book's central theses is that loonshots have their genesis in company *structure* and not culture. He draws a parallel from the science of phase transitions. To generate loonshots, you want fluidity: smaller teams with mostly creative folks (“artists”). To generate franchises, or even just to bring the loonshots to market, you want solidity: bigger teams staffed with “soldiers” with well-defined roles. Leading to the Loonshot Rules: 1. Separate the phases: Separate your artists and soldiers. 2. Dynamic equilibrium: Love your artists and soldiers equally. 3. Critical mass: Have a loonshot group large enough to ignite. In the latter part of the book, Bahcall presents a plausible quantitative model for the various forces that incline team members towards loonshot vs franchise behavior, and how to tweak those variables to get the kind of company you want. I found this book enjoyable and enlightening enough to have read it twice already. If you are an entrepreneur, scientist, artist, drug developer, military officer, or just a rabid fan of ideas with some of your own you’d like to make real, you should find out about P-type (product) loonshots vs S-type (strategy) loonshots; the Bush-Vail rules; systems mindset vs outcome mindset for doing postmortems; and the dreaded Moses trap. Also, why *does* the world speak English and not Chinese, when the Chinese invented printing and gunpowder hundreds of years before the West? With the word “loonshot” likely poised to become part of the vernacular in innovative circles, this is the book that puts you ahead of the curve. Consider it the most fun required reading you’ll ever do. -- Ali Binazir, M.D., M.Phil., host of "The Ideaverse", author of The Tao of Dating: The Smart Woman's Guide to Being Absolutely Irresistible , the highest-rated dating book on Amazon, and Should I Go to Medical School?: An Irreverent Guide to the Pros and Cons of a Career in Medicine

Call it dynamic equilibrium or harmony in music or life, this book presents important historical anecdotes, as well as recent and current trends in science and tech. It presents, to me, the interactions between people and ideas. But foremost how dynamics change when people, the clustering substance, the oil, gather in the water, in the pool of ideas. The changes to individuals when they turn into a group, the relativity to accepting or rejecting ideas. This book is for everyone, because it relates to each and every one of us no matter of background. It is easy to read, and for the scientifically minded, clues and even formulae for measuring the phase in which you might find yourself, or are up against. I will not write a spoiler, to understand the phases, you’ll need the awareness this piece brings. Reading many books about both famous human heroes and the unrecognized John Doe’s. If Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates were to ever write such a horizontal and perceptive book, it would be this one. It was a pleasure reading! If you ever feel let down by an investor, a company, manager(s), colleagues, whatnot, this book will give you your wings back, and return as thunder, not rain 😊

As a former consultant, I get stupidly excited about books with 2x2 matrices and Loonshots was no exception. Alas, Bahcall commits two unforced errors in his usage of this most sacred tool: long words as X/Y axes labels AND having two items (instead of the canonical one) in one of the four boxes. The horror!!! In all seriousness though, Loonshots is a pretty compelling read about managing the tension between nurturing high risk, “crazy” projects and offering due respect to the steady part of a business, as well as ensuring adequate collaboration between those two areas of a company. Not only do the ideas make sense as described, but what makes this book particularly enjoyable is the handful of examples of this theory in action - all presented in a new light. There are a couple of things to complain about besides the matrix comment above (which is only part joke - the labels were indeed confusing the first time I encountered the matrix in the book). First and foremost, the book itself goes somewhat against Bahcall’s own advice to “love your artists and soldiers equally,” aka show equal appreciation to both the ones doing the high risk experimentation as well as the ones leading the steady business lines. The book is an ode to the artists, as their adventures get considerably more airtime. Undoubtedly the artist’s journey is more interesting, but it’s important for an overall balanced argument to show the work of the steady hand as well. Second, Bahcall’s approach towards figuring out the ideal team size in a business is unnecessarily “scientific.” The content on that topic stands well enough on its own without forcing an equation on it. Despite those two issues, count me as a fan, though - an easy, well-researched read that could spark a few interesting experiments in the corporate world.

Good book. This is a great book. I read it of late and re-read after Gladwell’s recent. Bahcall is clever: thoughtful. maybe bright. Don’t know. Difficult to assess humans. The book is thought provoking. Now, I know, saying it must be read in light of Gladwell, isn’t a great thing, but there are commonality between the two. Both focus on ‘how we know’. Both are exceptional writers (my previous experience of great writers was Burgess, which dates). Both think: rare in humans. Safi can write: it’s really unusual to find a person who has been through the US system who can. He can, and does. It’s a clever book. It will not win him buddies. But WTF. He’s clever, and thoughtful. On another note. I’ve reviewed the reviews: there are clearly those who worked with him. I don’t use aliases. I can’t. There are those who do and have taken this opportunity to denigrate Safi. He was a CEO of a biotech. He ultimately failed. But I’ve worked with many, many humans who have failed. As a CEO he was a pain, but no more so than other biotech legends, and I’ve worked with many, and Synta ran a good few years. To conflate his books, which is great, to synta is wrong and dishonest.

By now most of us have gotten past the tired old notion of a lone inventor or a brilliant marketer single-handedly creating the Next New Thing. Instead we focus on trying to create a culture in our organization that will enable great things to happen. But what we fail to see - and what Safi Bachall so ably and lucidly points out in this book, through richly entertaining historical examples with a dollop or two of basic physics thrown in - is that structure trumps culture when it comes to corporate creativity. That's not to say that the people in an organization don't matter, only that there are ways of organizing teams for success, and ways of organizing that will ensure even the best and brightest are bound to fail. Anyone who has experienced the rigid bureaucracy that emerges as companies or teams reach a certain size will immediately grasp Bachall's simple but brilliant use of phase transitions (e.g., from water to ice) as a metaphor for the structural transformation over time of organizations. Even better, he offers solid, helpful advice on how to keep things "on the edge," not too rigid, but not too loose, either - maintaining the dynamic equilibrium required to function as a cohesive unit while still allowing creative sparks to grow into roaring, "loonshot" infernos. You don't need to be a physicist to understand his examples, but by drawing on real world, physical rules Bachall deftly shows how organizations behave in real life. And I guarantee you'll soon find yourself looking at your own organization and recognizing False Fails, the Moses Trap, the importance of franchises in supporting new breakthrough exploration (and all the ways they can also block the loonshot that might become the next franchise), as well as P-Type and S-Type loonshots. My office wall is lined on one side with books about how great companies got that way. On the other side are books detailing the mistakes companies made that doomed them to failure. The kicker? The books on both sides are all about the *same* companies! As the grew and thrived they also slowly became prisoners of sclerotic organizational structures that stopped them from being creative. Loonshots shows how organizations can maintain the "dynamic equilibrium" required for continual success and reinvention. Which I guess means I need to start a new bookshelf somewhere in the middle...

The idea of a loonshot, that seemingly crazy or fuzzy idea that ens up being awesome is an output of complex science. It's not the most surprising emergent property of systems but the author does a nice job with his examples. The book does not teach you much apart from listing what you should do. How you should is beyond this small booklet that just illustrates you a fancy outcome of complexity. Fun to read.

Every so often I come across a book that I know as I'm reading it that my perspective is changing and my horizons are broadening. "Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries" is one such book. From the outset, Safi Bahcall grabs the reader's attention and keeps it with examples from history of what he's going to explain, setting it up to be understood thoroughly. He talks about lessons learned in wartime as well as from Polaroid and space exploration, among other periods and events. There's a lot I could say about this book, but to keep it simple I'll anchor my comments to a few of the many key terms the writer discusses. To begin, there's the important distinction to be made between a franchise and what Bahcall refers to as a 'loonshot.' Franchise: The subsequent iterations or updated versions of an original product or service. Examples provided include each new version of the iPhone and the 26th James Bond Movie. I also relate this to a phenomenon I noticed many years ago among fast food restaurants, where new items on the menu are often just reformulations of existing menu items. A prime example is the 'KFC Famous Bowl,' which marketing now refers to as a 'classic.' Ever since first time it went on sale, not long enough ago to count as a 'classic' by any normal measure, I've seen it as the company just phoning it in. Innovation is too risky, and they already have the ingredients, so they just toss it all in a bowl and sell it. Loonshot: A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged. A loonshot is risky, because it's based on an idea that established 'experts' generally consider unfeasible and unfundable. Radar is a famous example of a technology that was roundly rejected by military brass and bureaucrats until it was almost too late. Another is statins, the first of which faced a difficult road to success and acceptance. False Fail: When a valid hypothesis yields a negative result in an experiment because of a flaw in the design of the experiment. Sometimes the test is the problem. When Akira Endo was testing a drug to see if it would lower cholesterol, the tests failed. He was testing on rats, which were later discovered to have low levels of LDL (aka 'bad cholesterol'). When he tested on chickens, which have high levels of LDL, the results were spectacular. Eventually, statins resulted, and people were provided a pharmacological solution to high cholesterol. This almost didn't happen, because Endo's research had repeatedly faced setbacks and failures. It was only through luck and his determination to see it through that we now have this option for treatment. Phases of organization: When an organization is considered as a complex system, we can expect that system to exhibit phases and phase transitions — for instance, between a phase that encourages a focus on loonshots and a phase that encourages a focus on careers. This part about organizational phases was an eye-opener for me. I've heard various executives over the years complain about the lack of innovation in major corporations generally, and I've always attributed it to the size of such companies making them slow-moving. While that may still be part of it, I now see how managers at various levels act in the interest of their careers over the chance at a breakthrough success. Loonshots are often ugly babies, easily dismissed and lethal to careers if they face failure. Bahcall tells the reader about his observation that loonshots experience three deaths before possibly reaching success, which translates to three failures. Some take years, even decades to see through all the way, and many don't come back from a single death. With them can go any respect or credibility previously accorded their backer(s), making it better to be the person who poo-poos novel ideas in meetings. In career terms, it's the safer route. To this and more Safi Bahcall offers a handful of solutions and strategies that can foster loonshots, but to get those you'll just have to read the book for yourself.

Safi provides a fresh perspective with lots of insights in this book. The arc of his narrative covers huge grounds with delightful details and twists along the way. However, like many of the ideas during their infancy that he reports on, this book too feels ill-formed and nascent, still in the process of becoming and not necessarily in a bad way. His attempts to formulate conclusions and take-aways for such a vast field feels incomplete. I sense a body of work to be followed before we can truly digest this weighty food for thought. Enjoyed it, looking for more.