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

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.

Moses Trap: When ideas advance only at the pleasure of a holy leader, who acts for love of loonshots rather than strength of strategy

The less-famous history of an ultra-famous icon captures one person’s evolution toward this balance. During Steve Jobs’s first stint at Apple, he called his loonshot group working on the Mac “pirates” or “artists” (he saw himself, of course, as the ultimate pirate-artist). Jobs dismissed the group working on the Apple II franchise as “regular Navy.

Easily measured, easily understood goals need to be carefully designed and agreed upon. Performance needs to be assessed fairly to avoid violent end-of-year arguments. Difficult messages need to be delivered with actionable suggestions, so an employee sees a clear path to greater rewards in the future. But the most difficult job in redesigning ince

Third: Moses grows all-powerful and anoints loonshots by decree Bush and Vail managed the transfer rather than the technology. They cared for the touch and balance between loonshots and franchises. Land, on the other hand, was the “principal cheerleader and spokesperson” for the Polavision project.

Let’s see what we’ve learned about the Moses Trap and how it seduces even the best of the best. First: The dangerous, virtuous cycle builds momentum

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

In other words, as mentioned earlier, the weak link is not the supply of ideas. It is the transfer to the field. And underlying that weak link is structure—the design of the system—rather than the people or the culture.

Until deregulation. Small changes that improved efficiency and lowered costs—not glamorous, kind of boring—suddenly became the key to survival. Those S-type loonshots, nurtured by startups like Southwest or major carriers like Bob Crandall’s American, spread quickly through the industry. They annihilated every unprepared airline. Pan Am began the s