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

My father did not recover. No treatment I could find, none of the desperate phone calls, none of the expert friends and colleagues, none of the work I’d done, nothing made any difference. He died a few months after he was diagnosed, but for many years after, I felt I was still fighting that battle, that if I worked hard enough, I could find somethi

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, produ

The small-world networks found everywhere, described in the Watts-Strogatz paper, have an intriguing feature. They are both unusually robust and unusually fragile. They are robust against random attacks or random failures. Which is why random server outages, for example, have little effect on internet traffic. But they are especially vulnerable to

One of the things that distinguishes an emergent property like the flow of liquids from a fundamental law—like quantum mechanics or gravity, for example—is that an emergent property can suddenly change. With a small shift in temperature, liquids suddenly change into solids. That sudden shift from one emergent behavior to another is exactly what we

Imagine bringing that bathtub to the brink of freezing. A little bit one way or the other and the whole thing freezes or liquefies. But right on the cusp, blocks of ice coexist with pockets of liquid. The coexistence of two phases, on the edge of a phase transition, is called phase separation. The phases break apart—but stay connected. The connecti

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “Ugly Babies.” They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing—in the form of time and patience—in o

There’s no way to analyze the behavior of any individual and explain the group. Being good at nurturing loonshots is a phase of human organization, in the same way that being liquid is a phase of matter. Being good at developing franchises (like movie sequels) is a different phase of organization, in the same way that being solid is a different pha

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.

Here’s the problem: analyzing markets except for the “notably rare exceptions” of bubbles and crashes is like analyzing the weather except for storms and droughts. We really do want to understand storms and droughts. We’d like to know if we will need an umbrella.

Fires in forests From contained to uncontrolled, as wind speed increases Individuals in companies From a focus on loonshots to a focus on careers, as size of company increases