Brigham Young, Bill Gore, Malcolm Gladwell, and Robin Dunbar may have been onto something. For typical real-world values of the control parameters there is, in fact, a sudden change in incentives around the magic number 150. At that size, the balance of forces in the tug-of-war changes, and the system suddenly snaps from favoring a focus on

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

CEO must be the CIO—the Chief Innovation Officer!”). This usually results in chaos, the top-left quadrant. Not every phone operator has to be a champion innovator. Sometimes you just need them to answer the phone. The most common trap, however, is to head straight to the bottom-right quadrant. As mentioned earlier, leaders proudly draw a box on an

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.

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

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

The greater your skill on the projects to which you have been assigned, which we can call project–skill fit, the more likely you are to choose project work. The lower your project–skill fit, the more likely you are to choose politics.

being good at franchises and being good at loonshots are phases of organization. And the same organization can’t be in two phases at the same time, for the same reason water can’t be both solid and liquid at the same time—under ordinary conditions.

In 1988, a fire in Yellowstone National Park burned 800,000 acres, 36 percent of the total park area—the largest fire in the park’s history. Analyzing park policy is where percolation theory first showed what it can do. Until 1972, Yellowstone policy required rangers to put out every small fire immediately, whether it was caused by humans (a