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

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.

Loose goals and dream sessions might help artists. But they will harm the coherence of an army.

In the previous two chapters, we saw the needs behind the Bush-Vail system. We need to protect and nurture loonshots, because of their surprising fragility. We need to balance loonshots and franchises, because they strengthen each other. Those needs gave rise to the first two rules: phase separation and dynamic equilibrium. In this chapter and the

Beware the False Fail The Endo and Folkman stories illustrate not only the Three Deaths but also a specific type of death, one common to loonshots. The failure of Endo’s drug in rat models (Death #2), for example, nearly terminated his program at Sankyo.

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.

Earlier I mentioned that Newton and Jobs were great synthesizers. Newton brought together planetary astronomy, laws of motion, differential mathematics—ideas developed by others—and synthesized them into a coherent whole the world hadn’t seen. Jobs brought together design, marketing, and technology into a coherent whole, as few others could do. But

I think of it as Listening to the Suck with Curiosity (LSC)—overcoming the urge to defend and dismiss when attacked and instead investigating failure with an open mind.*

“No division, department, branch or group can be either ignored or favored at the expense of the others without unbalancing the whole.”

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 break