On the fifth day of Christmas –
Ars chats with physicist and biotech guru Safi Bahcall about his bookLoonshots.
Jennifer Ouellette
-Dec (**************************************************************************************************, 6 : 47 pm UTC
Jennifer Ouellette
Enlarge/Vannevar Bush seated at his desk, circa 1945 – 1945. During President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, Bush built a national science policy based on a new structure for innovating quickly and effectively.According to Bahcall, the most significant breakthroughs comes from what he calls “loonshots,” as opposed to ” franchises “: ideas that seem a bit crazy and are hence often dismissed outright, with anyone championing it labeled unhinged. There are two types. An S-type loonshot introduces a novel strategy or business model that no one believes can ever make money. When Sam Walton founded Walmart (in) , for instance, he did so in a small town far away from major cities, bucking conventional thinking about the best locations for major retail. Walmart is now the largest corporation in the world by revenue, per theFortuneGlobal (list.) ************************************Enlarge/Sam Walton’s original Walton’s Five and Dime Store in Bentonville, Arkansas, now serves as the Walmart Museum **********************************
/ Robert H. Goddard, bundled against the cold weather of March (********************************************************************************************************, 1926, holds the launching frame of his most notable invention – the first liquid-fueled rocket, an example of a “P-type” loonshot.
NASA / Public domain
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St Martin’s Press (**********************************************
Ars: You also talk about how having a “system mindset,” versus an “outcome mindset,” can help an organization maintain the balance between radical innovation and operational excellence. **************************** (Bahcall) : I took that idea from one of [chess grandmaster]Gary Kasparovs books. The process that helped him achieve world champion status is that, when he lost a game, he wouldn’t just analyze why a particular move was a bad one. That’s an outcome strategy. Why did my outcome not achieve what I wanted? A more interesting level is one step up, where you look at the process behind the decision. Why did you make that decision? What set of rules were you following ?? That has leverage far beyond that one move. It could apply to hundreds or thousands of games in the future.
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