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Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
Summary
This program includes a prologue and introduction read by the author.
What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? What can we learn about human nature and world history from a glass of water?
In Loonshots, physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs.
Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall reveals why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.
Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall reveals how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.
Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of phase transitions to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, criminals behave, ideas spread, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. If 20th-century science was shaped by the search for fundamental laws, like quantum mechanics and gravity, the 21st will be shaped by this new kind of science. Loonshots is the first to apply these tools to help all of us unlock our potential to create and nurture the crazy ideas that change the world.
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Reviews
Great read. It was eye opening and I gleaned a number of insights.
Excellent insights into why ideas succeed or fail. Highly recommended to both entrepreneurs and corporate managers.
Great resource for anyone in creative and research driven industries. This book presents a fresh and thought provoking look at how and why potentially game changing innovations can be nurtured (or killed) within teams and organizations. In positive contrast to many current business books, which pump up one or two interning concepts or ideas to hundreds of pages with boring and redundant "story telling", Bahcall illustrates his ideas with well written examples from the real world of industrial and biomedical innovation. I am working in the biotech field myself and this book is grounded in real world problems and offers a great approach to think about solutions. Listened to the audio book and will buy a print version to revisit a number of important ideas and details. My most valuable read to date this year.
It's a superb blend of history, business, technology and wit.
It makes my top five greatest books list this year.
It makes my top five greatest books list this year.
Weaves science, history, Economics, courage, failure , irrelevance, significance into a well researched latticework of human achievement
Great read. Systems approach to solving complex dynamic systems problems
A must read. Safi Bahcall has done me, an entrepreneur, a solid. He's created the grand unified theory of innovation, culture, and management. The author with great narrative skill takes you through a history of world wars, visits the greats like Vannevar Bush, Theodore Vail, talks about their skills in enabling structures that balanced innovation, moonshot projects along with execution. He talks about the fallacies about betting on only one kind of innovation and the importance of strategy. He combines management, history and physics narrative which is highly resonating. This book will answer those lingering questions you've had about why companies like Google are organized the way they are, why they allow failure, why they are able to succeed at long odds, etc. This book also is a testimony of how glorious a book about management principles can be if told from the voice of an entrepreneur, scientist, and a philosopher all at the same time.