Loonshots Book Summary - Loonshots Book explained in key points

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Loonshots summary

Name: Loonshots
Rating: 4.5 (190 reviews)
Author: Safi Bahcall

Safi Bahcall

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

4.5 (190 ratings)

26 mins

Table of Contents

Loonshots
summarized in 8 key ideas

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Key idea 1 of 8

What’s in it for me? Get insight into innovation in action.

What do Renaissance scientists charting the movement of the planets, military planners battling Hitler’s U-boats and an American airline getting to grips with a newly deregulated market have in common? Well, their successes were the result of pursuing loonshots – ideas that seem downright crazy right up to the moment it becomes unthinkable that anyone ever did things differently.

But here’s the thing: for every world-changing idea, there are dozens – if not hundreds or thousands – that don’t pan out. As Thomas Edison once put it, progress is measured in failures: each defeat rules out one possibility and brings you that much closer to the solution. On the one hand, that makes experimentation vital. On the other, it means that real progress is expensive, time-consuming and ultimately risky.

Those three words fill every risk-averse, efficiency-maximizing organization with an eye for the bottom line with dread. That’s why they often end up missing out on the next big thing. So what’s the answer? Well, as you’ll learn from the examples in these blinks, there is a way to balance innovation and what the author, Safi Bahcall, calls franchising – keeping the already successful parts of an organization ticking over. The secret is to separate the two activities and provide a sheltered, protective space for creatives to work on their ideas. Think of it as a loonshot nursery.

So read on to learn how the most successful organizations do that, and

why the US military took a pass on an early radar prototype;
how even proven innovators can end up in blind alleys; and
what loonshots can tell us about the history of the West.

Innovation is a key part of organizational success, and it needs to be carefully nurtured.

Innovation takes time, money and work. The greatest ideas fail a thousand times before they succeed. But here’s the rub: organizations often get cold feet before path-breaking projects ever get off the ground. What could have been the next great thing ends up as little more than a pipe dream. In other words, they fail at nurturing loonshots – ideas that seem positively unhinged right up to the moment they turn the world on its head.

So what’s the right way to foster innovation? Well, it’s sometimes argued that it comes down to culture – the informal rules governing organizational life. There’s a problem with that explanation though: it’s wrong. Take Nokia. The Finnish multinational enjoyed a three-decade hot streak between the 1970s and the early 2000s. Its innovations included the world’s first cellular network, car phone, all-network analog phone and the GSM phone, making it one of Europe’s most profitable businesses.

Experts attributed the company’s success to its culture. Magazines like Businessweek ran features on Nokia’s egalitarian ethos while the CEO put it down to the fact that employees were encouraged to have fun and think outside the box. Fast forward to 2004. Internally, nothing had changed. In fact, the engineers behind all those hits had just had another eureka moment: an internet-ready touchscreen phone with a state-of-the-art camera and an online app store to go with it. Nokia’s leadership shot the project down. Three years down the line, Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone. The rest is history.

What went wrong? Well, Nokia’s structure had changed. That’s often part and parcel of growth. When organizations start out, employees have a high stake in success: if a small biotech firm produces a wonder drug, for example, everyone involved won’t just be incredibly rich – they’ll be heroes! Failure, on the other hand, means they’ll be out of a job. Perks like fancy titles and promotions don’t mean very much in such a free-flowing, high-stakes environment.

As organizations grow, that changes. Those bonuses become ever more attractive, and individuals’ stakes in projects decrease. That breeds a conservative mind-set, and companies become franchise operations dedicated to protecting the parts of their businesses which are already successful. The outcome? Innovation falls by the wayside as decision makers come to view loonshots like Nokia’s proto-iPhone as intolerably risky. But that isn’t a law of nature – organizations can put structures in place that encourage innovation. Let’s see how.

The US military was unprepared for the Second World War because it hadn’t supported innovation.

The Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany was a century-defining moment. But if there’d been prediction markets in 1939, the odds would’ve favored Hitler. Why? Well, the Allies lagged behind in what Winston Churchill called the “secret war” – the race to develop more effective weapons.

That wasn’t because they didn’t possess the necessary know-how. In fact, the Americans held the key to winning the great aerial and naval battles of the future decades before they entered World War Two – they just didn’t know it. Unlike their Axis counterparts, who were developing a new generation of submarines and planes, they weren’t nurturing breakthroughs.

Vannevar Bush created a structure which fostered innovation and helped turn the war in the Allies’ favor.

So what were military planners doing that was so important they couldn’t free up resources to pursue research into radar? Well, they were running a classic franchise organization: producing ever-greater quantities of tried-and-true conventional weaponry. Generals were convinced that tomorrow’s wars could be won with yesterday’s tools – infantry, guns and bayonets.

That was an attitude the engineer Vannevar Bush had seen firsthand while working with the US Navy after the First World War. Nothing, he believed, was more damaging to the nation’s long-term interests. His answer? A military research department run by non-military men like himself and given free rein to explore the seemingly bizarre. After a meeting with President Roosevelt in June 1940, Bush got what he wanted: a new, civilian-led unit called the Office for Scientific Research and Development or OSRD for short.

Loonshots don’t only win wars; they’re also great for business.

Vannevar Bush rescued a large organization whose focus on its franchise operations and neglect of innovation had landed it in an existential crisis. But nurturing loonshots isn’t solely about winning wars – it’s as vital to success in business as it is on the battlefield.

Take it from Theodore Vail, a boardroom pioneer who did for a struggling telecommunications giant what Bush would later do for the US military. But before we get to that, let’s rewind a little. In 1907, the financier JP Morgan bought the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, or AT&T. A direct descendant of the world’s first telephone company, AT&T had an illustrious past, but its future was less certain. The original patent for the telephone had expired, and thousands of competitors had eaten into its margins.

The Bush-Vail Rules provide a blueprint for sustainably balancing franchising and innovation.

Innovators are often viewed as lonely geniuses single-handedly translating their brilliant visions into reality. In truth, innovators need someone to champion their work. Like careful gardeners, these loonshot enablers tend their plots to ensure the best ideas take root and thrive. Doing that, as both Bush and Vail realized, is all about applying a couple of basic principles – call them the Bush-Vail Rules.

Here’s the first rule: shelter the people responsible for high-risk, early-stage ideas – the artists – from the soldiers responsible for managing the already successful parts of an organization. Embryonic ideas usually come covered in warts, and soldiers – like the military planners who dismissed radar – often struggle to look beyond these. They want products and projects ready for instant roll-out, and that means they’re likely to bury loonshots that don’t fit the bill. The result? Well, ask the film studios that passed on an incomprehensible screenplay called The Adventures of Luke Starkiller – the prototype of Star Wars, one of the most successful movie franchises of all time!

Purely product-driven innovation can land companies in hot water when the business environment changes.

So far we’ve explored the importance of balancing innovation and franchise operations and the rules that effective loonshot nurturers have adopted to do just that. In this blink, we’ll take a closer look at two different types of loonshots in action: game-changing products and strategies.

Let’s start with product-driven innovation. Few companies in American business history relied as heavily on cutting-edge products as Pan Am airlines. Founded by JT Trippe in the 1920s, Pan Am started out as a taxi service flying wealthy New York couples to Long Island. It was a popular route, but there was a problem: the repurposed World-War-One-era planes Trippe was using only seated one passenger. His solution? Import state-of-the-art French engines, move the fuel tanks to the outside of the fuselage and add another seat.

Leaders who fail to take a backseat risk leading their organizations down blind alleys.

We’ve discussed a couple of reasons organizations miss loonshots, but there’s one culprit we haven’t gotten to yet: overweening leaders who champion their favored loonshots come hell or high water.

Call it the Moses Trap – the reliance on holy leaders. Let’s take a look at one of the most innovative companies of the twentieth century to see how it works. Established in 1937 by Edwin Land, the consumer electronics giant Polaroid was responsible for a breathtaking series of advances in photography. Over 30 years, Polaroid pioneered sepia and black-and-white prints, automatic exposure, instant color printing, the SX-70 all-in-one foldable camera and sonar autofocus.

The West’s rapid development was a product of the ultimate loonshot – the Scientific Revolution.

So far we’ve looked at organizations’ internal structures. In this blink, we’ll zoom out and take a look at loonshot nurseries on a macroscale to see what we can learn about the context in which they operate. To get us started, let’s think back to that Luke Starkiller script. In a parallel timeline the Star Wars franchise wouldn’t have ever seen the light of day. So how did “Jedi,” “lightsaber” and “Sith” become household names?

Here’s the short answer: Hollywood had more than one studio. Put differently: all the scriptwriters had to do to get Star Wars off the ground was keep asking until someone said yes. And that’s true of loonshots in general. As long as there’s another door to knock on, every crazy idea has a chance. That’s why the context outside an organization matters so much. The best example of that is the ultimate loonshot – the Scientific Revolution.

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What is Loonshots about?

Loonshots (2019) explores a subject that’s as important to the success of the US military as it is to companies duking it out on the metaphorical battlefield: innovation. Drawing on a host of illuminating historical examples, Safi Bahcall shows that path-breaking discoveries and inventions aren’t the product of isolated geniuses plowing their lonely furrows but rather a result of organizational structures which foster out-of-the-box thinking.

Best quote from Loonshots

The essence of a sound military organization is that it should be tight. But a tight organization does not lend itself to innovations. – Vannevar Bush

—Safi Bahcall

Who should read Loonshots?

Tinkerers with an idea so crazy it might just work
Managers struggling to keep their companies ahead of the curve
Anyone who’s ever wondered how the Allies won World War Two

About the Author

Safi Bahcall is a physicist and bioentrepreneur. He received his PhD from Stanford in 1995 and continued his academic career at UC Berkeley as a Miller Fellow in physics. After a three-year stint at the consultancy firm McKinsey, he cofounded Synta Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company specializing in the development of new drugs to treat cancer. Loonshots, Bahcall’s first book, has been heralded a a must-read title by the Washington Post, Inc and Business Insider.

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