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“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.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“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.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“People may think of Endo and Folkman as great inventors, but arguably their greatest skill was investigating failure. They learned to separate False Fails from true fails.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“When groups are small, for example, everyone’s stake in the outcome of the group project is high. At a small biotech, if the drug works, everyone will be a hero and a millionaire. If it fails, everyone will be looking for a job. The perks of rank—job titles or the increase in salary from being promoted—are small compared to those high stakes. 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.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. 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.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Let’s call it the Moses Trap: When ideas advance only at the pleasure of a holy leader—rather than the balanced exchange of ideas and feedback between soldiers in the field and creatives at the bench selecting loonshots on merit—that is exactly when teams and companies get trapped. The leader raises his staff and parts the seas to make way for the chosen loonshot. The dangerous virtuous cycle spins faster and faster: loonshot feeds franchise feeds bigger, faster, more. The all-powerful leader begins acting for love of loonshots rather than strength of strategy. And then the wheel turns one too many times.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“On the creative side, inventors (artists) often believe that their work should speak for itself. Most find any kind of promotion distasteful. On the business side, line managers (soldiers) don’t see the need for someone who doesn’t make or sell stuff—for someone whose job is simply to promote an idea internally. But great project champions are much more than promoters. They are bilingual specialists, fluent in both artist-speak and soldier-speak, who can bring the two sides together.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Keeping the forces in balance is so difficult because loonshots and franchises follow such different paths. Surviving those journeys requires passionate, intensely committed people—with very different skills and values. Artists and soldiers.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Bush wrote, he learned “how not to fight a war.â€� In the high-stakes competition between weapons and counterweapons, the weak link was not the supply of new ideas. It was the transfer of those ideas to the field. Transfer requires trust and respect on both sides.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Peter Thiel and Ken Howery at Founders Fund, however, reached out to their friends behind the scenes at Friendster. They dug into why users were leaving the site. Like other users, Thiel and Howery knew that Friendster crashed often. They also knew that the team behind Friendster had received, and ignored, crucial advice on how to scale their site—how to transform a system built for a few thousand users into one that could support millions of users. They asked for and received a copy of Friendster’s data on user retention. They were stunned by how long users stayed with the site, despite the irritating crashes. They concluded that users weren’t leaving because social networks were weak business models, like clothing brands. They were leaving because of a software glitch. It was a False Fail. Thiel wrote Zuckerberg a check for $500,000. Eight years later, he sold most of his stake in Facebook for roughly a billion dollars.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“S-type loonshots are so difficult to spot and understand, even in hindsight, because they are so often masked by the complex behaviors of buyers, sellers, and markets. In science, complexities often mask deep truths: mountains of noise conceal a pebble of signal.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“The collapse, for example, of IBM’s legendary 80-year-old hardware business in the 1990s sounds like a classic P-type story. New technology (personal computers) displaces old (mainframes) and wipes out incumbent (IBM). But it wasn’t. IBM, unlike all its mainframe competitors, mastered the new technology. Within three years of launching its first PC, in 1981, IBM achieved $5 billion in sales and the #1 position, with everyone else either far behind or out of the business entirely (Apple, Tandy, Commodore, DEC, Honeywell, Sperry, etc.). For decades, 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 Dwarfsâ€�). IBM jumped on the new PC like Trippe jumped on the new jet engines. IBM owned the computer world, so it outsourced two of the PC components, software and microprocessors, to two tiny companies: Microsoft and Intel. Microsoft had all of 32 employees. Intel desperately needed a cash infusion to survive. IBM soon discovered, however, that individual buyers care more about exchanging files with friends than the brand of their box. And to exchange files easily, what matters is the software and the microprocessor inside that box, not the logo of the company that assembled the box. IBM missed an S-type shift—a change in what customers care about. PC clones using Intel chips and Microsoft software drained IBM’s market share. In 1993, IBM lost $8.1 billion, its largest-ever loss. That year it let go over 100,000 employees, the largest layoff in corporate history. Ten years later, IBM sold what was left of its PC business to Lenovo. Today, the combined market value of Microsoft and Intel, the two tiny vendors IBM hired, is close to $1.5 trillion, more than ten times the value of IBM. IBM correctly anticipated a P-type loonshot and won the battle. But it missed a critical S-type loonshot, a software standard, and lost the war.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Bush and Vail understood that the doomsday cycle is not inevitable, and that the best chance for sustainable, renewable creativity and growth comes from bringing an organization to the top-right quadrant: separate phases connected by a balanced, dynamic equilibrium.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Trippe’s strategy of nurturing P-type loonshots and betting on bigger, faster, more—with a dash of marketing glamour—worked brilliantly. Technology improvements lowered costs, providing more money to invest in more technology improvements. Larger planes flew more customers farther, faster. That virtuous cycle continuously grew his franchise, propelling Trippe far ahead of competitors, attracting fame and celebrity, just as a similar virtuous cycle would propel leading technology companies for the rest of the century, from Polaroid to IBM and Apple. P-type loonshots feed a growing franchise, which feeds more P-type loonshots. And as the momentum builds, so does the tunnel vision: keep turning the wheel, faster and faster.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Like Vannevar Bush, who insisted, as described in chapter 1, that he “made no technical contribution whatever to the war effort,â€� Catmull saw his job as minding the system rather than managing the projects.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“The graveyard of unexplained experiments, as Land would soon show, is a great place to find a False Fail.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Both Bush and Vail saw their jobs as managing the touch and the balance between loonshots and franchises—between scientists exploring the bizarre and soldiers assembling munitions; between the blue-sky research of Bell Labs and the daily grind of telephone operations. Rather than dive deep into one or the other, they focused on the transfer between the two.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Had the technology race been lost, Churchill wrote, “all the bravery and sacrifices of the people would have been in vain.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Just because a theory might be a bit wacky, however, doesn’t mean there isn’t something to the observation.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“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 Bush and Vail. As we will see, failing to understand the surprising fragility of the loonshot—assuming that the best ideas will blast through barriers, fueled by the power of their brilliance—can be a very expensive mistake. It can mean missing one of the most important discoveries in medicine of the century.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Although every person, individually, may enthusiastically believe in innovation, collectively the Invisible Axe emerges.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“And dozens of stories hailed Jobs as the master P-type innovator of his generation. Just like Edwin Land and Juan Trippe before him. Abandon hardware? Not this Moses. In fact, Jobs had already doubled down. Not long after he left Apple, Jobs got back in touch with the team of engineers in Marin County developing a graphics computer. Why bet on just one bigger, faster machine if you could have two? He bought their business and left them alone to build an even more powerful computer than NeXT. Jobs had no idea that those engineers held the key to rescuing him from the Moses Trap. And it would have nothing to do with their machine.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Trippe heard about a new kind of engine. One more loonshot. A technology that quadrupled maximum takeoff weight. A plane with the new bypass jet engine, with its extra propeller in front, could carry nearly 500 passengers, two and a half times as many as the Boeing 707. The music of the Jazz Age, now the Jet Age, keeps playing. The wheel in the sky keeps on turning. The franchise feeds the P-type loonshots that feed the franchise. Bigger, faster, more. Trippe had to have it.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “piratesâ€� or “artistsâ€� (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.â€� The hostility he created between the two groups, by lionizing the artists and belittling the soldiers, was so great that the street between their two buildings was known as the DMZ—the demilitarized zone. The hostility undermined both products. Steve Wozniak, Apple’s cofounder along with Jobs, who was working on the Apple II franchise, left, along with other critical employees; the Mac launch failed commercially; Apple faced severe financial pressure; Jobs was exiled; and John Sculley took over (eventually rescuing the Mac and restoring financial stability). When Jobs returned twelve years later, he had learned to love his artists (Jony Ive) and soldiers (Tim Cook) equally.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Drugs that save lives, like technologies that transform industries, often begin with lone inventors championing crazy ideas. But large groups of people are needed to translate those ideas into products that work. When teams with the means to develop those ideas reject them, as every large research organization rejected Miller’s piranha, those breakthroughs remain buried inside labs or trapped underneath the rubble of failed companies.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Vannevar Bush rescued a large organization, dominated by a powerful franchise, in a crisis caused by a failure to innovate: the US military.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Trippe applied this strategy over and over. He designed and demanded bigger and faster planes that no one thought could be built, from his three-seater taxi all the way to the Boeing 747. Pan Am launched the Jet Age, brought international travel to the masses, and became the largest airline in the world. Trippe was a quietly dominant P-type innovator.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“Both Genentech and Pixar—like any good drug-discovery company or film studio—learned how to balance both loonshots and franchises because they had to. There are no other kinds of products in movies and drugs.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

“The pattern of many connections within one tight community, punctuated by occasional ties to distant communities, describes a vast range of systems. Neurons in the brain mostly connect within one cluster, but occasionally their axons extend far outside, to an entirely different cluster. Proteins in a cell mostly interact within one functional group, but occasionally they connect with receptors far removed. Sites on the internet mostly connect within one tight group (celebrity news sites link to other celebrity news sites; biology sites link to other biology sites), but occasionally a site will connect far outside its cluster (TMZ will link to a study on neuroscience). The Kevin Bacon game had shown that there are surprisingly few steps between any two nodes (actors) in these kinds of networks. So Watts and Strogatz called a system with mostly local connections but occasional distant ties a “small-world network.”
― Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries