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

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

2011

Epigraphs

Moonshot: (1) The launching of a spacecraft to the moon; (2) an ambitious and expensive goal, widely expected to have great significance. Loonshot: A neglected project, widely dismissed, its champion written off as unhinged

Prologue

I presented “3,000 years of physics in 45 minutes”—the eight greatest ideas in the history of the field

I was asked to join a group developing recommendations for the president on the future of US national research

Our task, he said, was to create the next generation of the Vannevar Bush report.
What Bush did, and why he did it, came right back to one of those eight greatest ideas of physics: phase transitions.

In this book, I’ll show you how the science of phase transitions suggests a surprising new way of thinking about the world around us—about the mysteries of group behavior. We will see why good teams will kill great ideas, why the wisdom of crowds becomes the tyranny of crowds when the stakes are high

we’ll see how small changes in structure, rather than culture, can transform the behavior of groups, the same way a small change in temperature can transform rigid ice to flowing water

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, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries.*
• 3. Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.

Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of phase transitions to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, criminals behave, ideas spread, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. If twentieth-century science was shaped by the search for fundamental laws, like quantum mechanics and gravity, the twenty-first will be shaped by this new kind of science.

eventually I joined forces with a handful of biologists and chemists to start a biotech company developing new cancer drugs

My interest in the strange behaviors of large groups of people began shortly afterward, with a visit to a hospital.

Introduction

One winter morning in 2003, I drove to the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston to meet a patient named Alex. Alex was 33, with the strong, graceful build of an athlete

Two years later, I found myself pulling up a chair next to another bed, in a different hospital. My father had developed an aggressive type of leukemia

same chemotherapy he had prescribed as a resident forty years earlier

There are some technical reasons why cancer drug development is so difficult

But there’s more

MILLER’S PIRANHA

treating cancer patients with a new drug

Miller’s drug, however, didn’t gently attach; it was a piranha (irreversible binder, to chemists). It grabbed hold and never let go. The problem with piranhas is that you can’t wash them out of your system if something goes wrong. If they latch on to the wrong protein, for example, they can cause serious, even fatal, toxicities. You don’t give piranhas to patients

He explained that he knew his patients. Many had only months to live, were desperately looking for options, and understood the risks. The potential, in this context, justified the risk.

Miller shared the early laboratory results from his piranha with a handful of physicians, who agreed to proceed with a clinical trial in patients with advanced leukemias. But Miller’s investors were not convinced. (Miller: “To this day, if you ask them [how the drug works], they wouldn’t know.”) He lost a boardroom battle and resigned as CEO

The results were so spectacular—a nearly ten times higher response rate in patients who received Miller’s drug, called ibrutinib, than in patients who received standard therapy—that denying patients in the control group access to ibrutinib was considered unethical.

There’s something at the core of how large groups behave that we just don’t understand

Articles and books on culture have always felt squishy to me

One of those companies happens to be Amgen, a biotech company I know well. Among the Amgen lessons extracted: “By embracing the myriad of possible dangers, they put themselves in a superior position.” The real story with Amgen is that after a couple of years in business, the company was nearly bankrupt

time was running out on a final project, a drug to stimulate the growth of red blood cells. A handful of companies were pursuing the same goal. Amgen got to the finish line just ahead of its competitors. Much of that was due to a University of Chicago professor named Eugene Goldwasser. Goldwasser had worked on the problem for twenty years and held the key to winning the race: an eight-milligram vial of purified protein, painstakingly extracted from 2,550 liters of human urine. The purified protein contained the code to making the drug. He decided to give that vial to Amgen rather than its main competitor, Biogen. Biogen’s CEO had refused to pick up the check for dinner one night

For the next fifteen years, Amgen was unable to repeat its drug-discovery success. Its poor research output, as measured by number of patents awarded, was noted by the culture-analyzing book, which concluded that being “innovative doesn’t seem to matter very much.”

To liberate those buried drugs and other valuable products and technologies, we need to begin by understanding why good teams, with the best intentions and excellent people, kill great ideas.

WHEN TEAMS TURN

In the 1970s, Nokia was an industrial conglomerate famous mostly for its rubber boots and toilet paper. Over the next two decades, it would pioneer the first cellular network, the first car phone, the first all-network analog phone, and the first wildly successful GSM phone. By the early 2000s, it was selling half the smartphones on the planet. It became, briefly, the most valuable company in Europe

In 2004, a handful of excited Nokia engineers created a new kind of phone: internet-ready, with a big color touchscreen display and a high-resolution camera. They proposed another crazy idea to go along with the phone: an online app store. The leadership team—the same widely admired, cover-story leadership team—shot down both projects. Three years later, the engineers saw their crazy ideas materialize on a stage in San Francisco. Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. Five years later, Nokia was irrelevant

In medical research, for decades, Merck was the most revered company. From 1987 to 1993, it placed first in Fortune’s annual most-admired-company survey

Over the next ten years, however, Merck missed nearly every important breakthrough in drug discovery. It overlooked not only genetically engineered drugs, which transformed the industry (more about that later), but also drugs for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and mental disorders, the three biggest success stories of the 1990s and early 2000s

In every creative field, we see legendary teams suddenly, and mysteriously, turn

In his wonderful memoir of his time at Pixar, Ed Catmull writes about Disney: After The Lion King was released in 1994, eventually grossing $952 million worldwide, the studio began its slow decline

From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office

MORE IS DIFFERENT

The pattern of sudden changes in the behavior of teams and companies—of the same people suddenly behaving in very different ways—is a mystery in business and social science

Entrepreneurs, for example, often say that big companies fail because big-corporate types are conservative and risk-averse

The same person can act like a project-killing conservative in one context and a flag-waving entrepreneur in another.

The change in behavior may be a mystery in business, but a similar pattern is the essence of a strange quirk of matter called a phase transition

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.”

There’s no way to analyze just one molecule of water, or one electron in a metal, and explain any of these collective behaviors. The behaviors are something new: phases of matter.

I will show you that the same holds true for teams and companies. There’s no way to analyze the behavior of any individual and explain the group

When we understand those phases of organization, we will begin to understand not only why teams suddenly turn, but also how to control that transition, just as temperature controls the freezing of water

WHEN SYSTEMS SNAP

Systems snap when the tide turns in a microscopic tug-of-war. Binding forces try to lock water molecules into rigid formation. Entropy, the tendency of systems to become more disordered

All phase transitions are the result of two competing forces, like the tug-of-war between binding and entropy in water

When people organize into a team, a company, or any kind of group with a mission they also create two competing forces—two forms of incentives. We can think of the two competing incentives, loosely, as stake and rank

When groups are small, for example, everyone’s stake in the outcome of the group project is high. At a small biotech, if the drug works, everyone will be a hero and a millionaire

As teams and companies grow larger, the stakes in outcome decrease while the perks of rank increase. When the two cross, the system snaps.

On snowy days, we toss salt on our sidewalks to lower the temperature at which water freezes.

We will see how to apply a similar principle to engineer more innovative organizations. We will identify the small changes in structure, rather than culture, that can transform a rigid team.

This book is divided into three parts

Part one tells five stories of five remarkable lives. The stories illustrate a central idea: why being good at loonshots (like original films) and being good at franchises (sequels) are phases of large-group behavior—distinct and separate phases. No group can do both at the same time

because no system can be in two phases at the same time. But there’s one exception. When the water in the bathtub mentioned earlier is at exactly 32 degrees Fahrenheit, pockets of ice coexist with pools of liquid

The first two rules for nurturing loonshots, described in part one, are the two principles that govern life on the edge. A third rule explains how to hold that edge long-term. It borrows from chess rather than physics: the longest-reigning chess champion in history ascribed much of his success to mastering this idea

Part two describes the underlying science

Putting these pieces together will reveal the science behind the “magic number 150”: an equation that describes when teams and companies will turn

That equation will lead us to an additional rule that shows us how to raise the magic number—a change that will make any loonshot group more powerful

1. How Loonshots Won a War

Life on the edge

Had there been prediction markets in 1939, the odds would have favored Nazi Germany. In the looming battle between world powers, the Allies lagged far behind Germany in what Winston Churchill described as the “secret war”: the race for more powerful technologies

9. Why The World Speaks English

17-year-old student named Johannes Kepler. This is Kepler describing himself in his diary: His appearance is that of a little lap-dog. His body is agile, wiry and well-proportioned. Even his appetites were alike: he liked gnawing bones and dry crusts of bread.… He is bored with conversation, but greets visitors just like a little dog; yet when the last thing is snatched away from him, he flares up and growls.… He hates many people exceedingly and they avoid him, but his masters are fond of him.