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

Nobel laureate Phil Anderson once captured the core idea underlying the answers to these questions with the phrase more is different: “The whole becomes not only more than but very different from the sum of its parts.”

Endo’s story is more than a wild anecdote. The twisted paths leading to great discoveries are the rule rather than the exception. And so are their revisionist histories: victors don’t just write history; they rewrite history.

Although American was not the first to develop a computerized reservation system, it developed the most functional one, which listed all fares, and then gave that system, Sabre, to travel agents all over the country. One study showed that American got at least 50 percent more business from travel agents who used Sabre than from other bookings. In a

organizations. We will identify the small changes in structure, rather than culture, that can transform a rigid team. Leaders spend so much time preaching innovation. But one desperate molecule can’t prevent ice from crystallizing around it as the temperature drops. Small changes in structure, however, can melt steel.

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

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.