E23 Nurturing Crazy Ideas That Change the World
In this interview, Safi Bahcall talks about “Loonshots” - what are they, how can we encourage them, and how they change the world. Safi dives into how good ideas are often killed by great teams and how we can develop the skills to nurture and encourage “Loonshots” in our own organizations. Safi also discusses the importance of company culture, understanding the roles of different employees, and the importance of anticipating and learning from failure.
Safi Bahcall worked for three years as a consultant for McKinsey before co-founding a biotechnology company that developed new drugs for treating cancer. Safi regularly speaks with senior executives about how to implement the ideas in his bestselling book Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.
Safi Bahcall:
In the 1970s, when airline deregulation hit, Juan Trippe was flying these big planes, these 747s with no passengers. Fuel costs went up, deregulation hit, and all these startups who were cheaper, faster, better came. Pan Am and 300 airlines went bankrupt. There was only one airline that did not go bankrupt through deregulation, and that was American Airlines.
Don MacPherson:
The world is better than ever. This is an irrefutable truth. And while it's true, there are still problems to solve, big ones. Some of these problems threaten the very existence of humankind: global warming and dying seas; hunger and clean water; intolerance; and 700 million people living in abject poverty. To solve these problems, innovative thinking may not be enough. Loonshots may be required. What's a loonshot? That's what today's guest is going to tell us. Safi Bahcall is a physicist, a cancer researcher, and the author of the best-selling book, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries.
Safi, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
Safi Bahcall:
Thanks. Delighted to be on your show.
Don:
Could you give me a summary of your background and what inspired you to write Loonshots?
Safi Bahcall:
My background is originally in academic science. I was in theoretical physics for many years. I came from a family of physicists, astrophysicists, then I briefly detoured into consulting, management consulting in New York, and then I started a biotech company. I wanted to be involved in something that felt more about building something new and doing something meaningful for the world. My father had been sick with a type of cancer and I thought that would be… It just felt exciting and motivating to be able to get up in the morning and think that if you do your job well, you might give families more time on earth with their loved ones. And so, that got me into running a biotech company. How I got into writing this book, well, it was two questions. One was, I used to give this talk just for fun as a hobby.
I got invited to some conference, and the talk was 3,000 years of physics in 45 minutes. One of the things I talked about is the birth of modern science. Why the world speaks English, why did this kind of revolution in how we see the world. And if you think of the biggest idea in some sense in the history of our species, that changed our species more than any other idea over the last 5,000, 10,000 years, it's this idea that underlying everything we see in the world around us are laws of nature. They could be access, they could be determined by anybody through careful measurement and experiment. That idea was radical because for most of the history of the human species, you'd see something, a volcano, or an earthquake, or a drought, and you'd say the gods are doing this. But the idea that there are laws of nature opened up the ability to tease out those laws of nature to everybody.
And it challenged authority. It challenged this kind of rule of religion or divine leaders. Because if truth was accessible to everyone, why did we need divine leaders? I was just fascinated with this. I couldn't get over this one question, why western Europe? Why Western Europe, 17th century did this idea really take hold when Western Europe at the time was a backwater? It was these tiny, irrelevant, little feuding nations that were inconsequential on the world stage. China, Islam, and India dominated the world GDP, the early science, early technology. There were a million people in Beijing when there were 50,000 people in London. Paper and printing, advanced mining, advanced drilling, advanced irrigation, education systems, currencies, gunpowder, compass, canal locks had all been invent… And mathematics. Much of the important mathematics that was used later in astronomy, in medicine, all came from China, Islam, or India, which had been dominant for a thousand years.
So, why did that crazy idea appear in these tiny little backwater nations? It wasn't like the emperors of China, Islam, and India were sitting there, “How can we lose? How can we lose our role in world history? How can we be dominated by tiny little countries?” I just kept getting stuck. I was giving this talk for a bunch… Just for this kind of fun hobby talk, but I always noticed that just something seemed off about that when these countries were so much more advanced. And of course, it seemed similar to what you see in private industry when you have these large, giant companies miss out on incredibly important revolution. At the time, Microsoft missed out on mobile. It was the dominant software company of its era. And then I was asked to work with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors on the future of national research.
And I was told, “Well, your job is to write the next generation of the Vannevar Bush report.” But then I started reading, I learned that Vannevar Bush was this guy who had been an engineer in the 1930s and helped, rose to the number two position at MIT, and had been working with the military and been working in private industry. In 1939, in the brink of World War, he quit his job, moved to Washington and talked his way into a meeting with Franklin Roosevelt, the president. And he told him, “There's a war coming. We're going to lose this war because this giant franchise, this giant empire, the U.S. military has fallen far behind in the science and technology that's going to make a difference. It's going to turn the course of the war. It has fallen far behind this little startup in Europe called Nazi Germany, and we're gonna lose.” So, he was where China, Islam, and India were right in the brink of the scientific revolution. And he came up with a system for innovating astonishingly fast that ended up dev… within this very big empire of the U.S. military and U.S. franchise and U.S. federal bureaucracy that worked.
Don:
And this system is the backbone behind the book, Loonshots.
Safi Bahcall:
That's right.
Don:
Talk about what a loonshot is.
Safi Bahcall:
Everybody knows what a moonshot is. It's these big ideas that are widely accepted goals that are going to be very important. But if you look at the ideas that have changed the course of science, or business, or history, transformed industries, they rarely arrive with blaring trumpets, dazzling everybody with their brilliance. They're usually neglected or dismissed for years, sometimes decades. They're champions written off as crazy. So, the birth of modern science was one of those things like, oh, well, the earth goes around the sun, not the other way around. That's crazy because anybody can look in the sky and see that the sun and the stars all go around the earth. So, that was dismissed. That kind of thing was dismissed for years or decades. There were these very interesting parallels between what you see in private industry and big companies. Why do they reject these loonshot, these important ideas when everybody there wants to survive?
There was nobody in the military that was saying, “How do we lose to Nazi Germany?” So, there's something strange that happens when people come together into a group that individually they may support some of these crazy ideas, but when they come together into a group, they reject them. All which boils down to this one mystery; why do good teams kill great ideas? Why do good teams with the best intentions and excellent people, why will they consistently kill great ideas? And what makes it really interesting is that once you tease out the answer to that question, which is a very, very different way of thinking about the behavior of groups, once you tease out and you develop kind of a first principle science of it, understanding the incentives in groups, once you tease out, what are those two forces at work? Why does it tip you from favoring, nurturing these crazy ideas? To shooting them down in favor of more of the same, and where tipping point occurs, where that transition occurs, you can begin to manage. You can begin to apply new kind of science on the behavior of groups that allow you to design more innovative teams and companies and see the world around you in a different way.
Don:
Isn't a factor in some of these ideas being killed just default decision or resistance to change? A default decision, it's easier to say no than it is to fund something or to get behind something new that we might not completely understand?
Safi Bahcall:
Well, there's certainly that. There's always a resistance to change. But imagine you are a general in a war, you want the crazy new technology that can defeat your enemies. If you're running a business, you want the cool new product that's going to blow away your competitor. You want that stuff. One example that I use to illustrate this often is like I stick my finger in a glass of water and I can swirl my finger around. And when I do that, the molecules just slosh around my finger. But when I lower the temperature, all of a sudden, at 32 Fahrenheit, the behavior of those molecules completely change. I can't stick my finger in anymore. It becomes totally rigid, the water freezes. But those molecules are exactly the same. So, how did they notice suddenly changed behavior? There was no CO molecules saying, “Oh, it's 33 Fahrenheit, everybody slosh around.”
“Oh no, wait a minute, it's 31.” You can think of culture as the patterns of behavior. The molecules are sloshing around or the molecules are totally rigid. You can think of structure as those things that help drive those patterns of behavior like the small change in temperature. And the reason it matters so much is that no amount of singing kumbaya or getting people to hold hands and watch tour movies about brotherhood ever changes culture. You were an HR for many years, managed a company for many years, no amount of preaching at people is really gonna deeply change their behavior. Just like no amount of yelling at the block of ice, “Hey molecules, could you just loosen up a little bit?” Is going to melt that block of ice. But a small change in temperature can get the job done. Small change in temperature, can melt steel?
So, understanding what causes that transition, when you extend that to teams and companies, you tease out, what are the two forces? In a glass of water, there are two forces acting on a molecule. One is entropy, hey, just run around and be free. Just a fancy word, run around and be free. And the other is finding energy. Let's lock you rigidly in place. When you understand what are the two forces inside companies, everybody's, on the one hand, got a stake in outcome like equity; how well is my project gonna do? And that's what's driving me. But there's also perks of rank, getting promoted. And that teases you, that pulls at you in two different sides. On one hand, you really want to nurture those new ideas. On the other hand, you want to toe the line and do the franchise projects you can… The stuff that'll take you up the hierarchy that'll do well in committee meetings, project work versus politics. Once you understand those two forces, you can actually write down a mathematical equation between sort of cash and equity. And you see what tips you from one side to the other side. You start to identify those little things like temperature. That you can design structures that tip people more towards the nurturing crazy ideas.
Don:
But I'd like for you to talk about phase separation and dynamic equilibrium.
Safi Bahcall:
Whenever you organize people into a group where there's a mission and a reward system tied to that mission, there are really two phases. You can have one, call it a moonshot phase where people are nurturing these crazy ideas and they're really focused much more on their projects than on politics. And the other where it flips 180 and people are much more focused on minimizing risks and maximizing quality and doing the things that'll take them up the chain. And the problem is, a system can't be in two phases at the same time. You can't have a glass of water that's both liquid and solid. It doesn't make any sense. And the same thing is true about an organization. It really comes down to how do you balance the core and the new? That's the billion-dollar question. And what this way of this kind of new kind of science tells you is that there is two phases of organization, just like there's two phases of a glass of water.
And you have a big problem if you wanna do both at the same time, because you can't. you can only do one or the other. Turns out there's one exception to that rule in the world of science, and that's right on the brink of a phase transition, right at 32 Fahrenheit. If you bring a bath up to 32 Fahrenheit, you'll see two things happen; one is you'll see something called phase separation, which is you get blocks of ice, pools of liquid, and they coexist in equilibrium; and the second thing is you have molecules going back and forth. And that's the important part that most companies miss is that you have this thing called dynamic equilibrium, and the molecule's constantly cycle back and forth. They're not static. How can you achieve this state in equilibrium to balancing the core and the new? And the answer is life at 32 Fahrenheit. And so, what I talk about in the book and I talk about with teams and companies is, what does that mean at the more granular level? How do you maintain that delicate balance? What is phase separation and dynamic equilibrium? What does that translate into practical things you can do on the ground, starting on Monday with your teams or companies?
Don:
If I'm understanding correctly, you have your artists and you have your soldiers. Artists represent the innovators, soldiers, represent the executors, the people who are focused on quality, the people who are focused on selling and delivering what the organization is known for. The dynamic equilibrium is that you have these two and there's communication going in between them, and you may be treating them or rewarding them differently. Is that an accurate summary?
Safi Bahcall:
By the high level, I think of it as the ice cube, the garden hoe, and the heart. And here's what I mean by that. The ice cube means creates separate homes for your artists working on the new and your soldiers working on the core. By that I don't mean that people are genetically programmed to be ARP. Actually, you can be both. If you're a solo — I'm a solo writer and entrepreneur now — you have to do both. People can be both. It means, what is the job at hand? And in fact, if you're a really small team, you just have to separate those roles by time rather than by person. If you're large enough, you can separate those into two different groups. So, you have artists working on… The ice cube is artists are working your… You create separate structure for artists working on the new and soldiers working on the core.
The reason is they have different jobs. And this is what so many companies get wrong and say, “Oh, everybody should innovate.” Well, innovating means you want to maximize intelligent risk taking. You want to try 10 things, nine of which don't work. And that one changes how people see the world. It's a completely different job to maximize risks and to minimize risks. What you wanna do is you want that tension, you want both of those guys doing different things. Both of those groups, not only do they not understand each other, they generally don't like each other. A group making the money rarely likes the group spending the money, and vice versa. You want that tension, because if your artists aren't trying 10 things, nine of which fail, they aren't taking enough risk. At the same time, you want your soldiers minimizing risk. You don't want a sales guy knocking on a door, “Here's your toaster.” I ordered a television. You need stuff done on time, on budget, on spec. So, you need that difference. The first rule there is you want that tension and you want to enhance that tension, and that's fine.
Don:
Who's managing the dynamic equilibrium, the communication between the two; the artists and the soldiers?
Safi Bahcall:
There's this myth that a great leader is like a Moses who stands on top of a mountain, raises his or her staff, anoints the chosen project, the holy loonshot, or whatever, the iPod, and so on. But those tend to be myths. The real stories of the great leaders who led organizations that were very good at balancing the core and the new led much more like care for garden. And so, by the garden hoe and the ice cube, I mean create and enhance that tension between artists and soldiers. And by the garden hoe, I mean be a gardener, not a Moses. Your job is to manage the transfer, not the technology. That dynamic equilibrium back and forth. You take early-stage baby stage ideas from the artist and you get to soldiers who don't like it, don't want to hear it, don't want to stop doing their sales calls to listen to some gobbledygook for some engineers they don't understand and think their stuff is the best thing since sliced bread, and obviously it isn't.
You want to manage that process of getting it out there and that transfer to the soldiers, and get them to try it, and even more importantly, since it won't work well the first time, is take the time out of their day to get the feedback back. What worked well? What didn't work well? Because if you don't get the feedback back from the field, the product is going to die. The great leaders focus, not on, is this a particular technology or is this the right one, or that? They focus on the getting that transfer back and forth because it won't work well. The failure point in innovation is never in the supply of new ideas. You put 10 people in a room with stacks of posters, you get a thousand ideas. The failure point is in that transfer. That's the second thing is be a gardener, not a Moses.
Don:
That seems like a very unique skill set. Is there a set of competencies that this person needs to have if they're going to assume the handle of the garden hoe?
Safi Bahcall:
Well, it comes to the third, which I think of as the heart and the ice cube, the garden hoe and the heart. And the heart is love your artists and soldiers equally. And that's maybe the most important of all of them. And it's so difficult because if you grow up seeing yourself, if you grow up, let's say through the creative innovation side, or you buy into this stuff on glossy magazine covers of how the innovator is this great, awesome thing, then you will focus on just those people with new ideas and new concepts, and you will demotivate the 95% of the people who are getting this stuff done and who are turning those concepts into products that you can deliver on time, on budget, on spec, consistently to customers.
So, that skill set you need is to be able to appreciate, celebrate, recognize both your artists and your soldiers. And when people get that wrong, which is very often soldiers grow up as soldiers and they don't want to hear about all these crazy new things. They want to see metrics and risks down and timelines and budget. And if you focus too much on either direction, you will imbalance the ship and it will sink. So, the skill set you need is that heart, it's the ability to love your artists and soldiers equally, no matter what side you grew up on.
Don:
How important is it to be able to speak the language of the artist and of the soldier?
Safi Bahcall:
You could think of it as that bilingual specialist. Their sole job is to take ideas from A to B and feedback from B to A. And the reason that's so counterintuitive and so surprising, and doesn't happen often enough, and is such a failure point is that nobody, on either side, understands the need for that role.
Don:
Can you give an example of an organization that did fail and then another organization, or maybe even the same organization that has gotten it right?
Safi Bahcall:
What most people don't realize is that the principles of radar, the popular history say, "Well, it was discovered in the mid-1930s in England." It had been invented a decade earlier, discovered by a pair of scientists working inside the Navy, the Naval Research Lab. And they had teased out that there was this… They were trying to just detect signals on the Potomac. They were trying to radio signal from one bank of the Potomac to another, seeing if they could communicate. And then a ship, one night, went passed between their transmitter and receiver, and they started picking up this funny blip in their signals, and they were like, “Wait a minute, we can see ships at night. That could change the course of warfare.” Which it did 20, 30 years later. But the Naval chiefs had no idea what they were talking about and dismissed it. For a decade, they rejected their applications to fund pursuing this idea.
And in December, 1941, that eventually they realized you could detect planes at night through fog for far distances. And they rejected it in December, 1941. We lost a couple thousand lives at Pearl Harbor because radar was still just being field-tested. We'd just come around, and so much could have been done if that technology hadn't been buried. But the problem was you had great engineers, you had great military rules, but you had nobody in the middle translating it between why the engineers were so excited about this technology, and putting it in language that the desk chiefs could understand. Until about 10 years later, one guy came along, his name was Dick Parsons, and he was a naval captain who happened to enjoy physics. He liked to read physics journals in his spare time. And he was sort of sent to this backwater office in the Navy where there were some engineers working on stuff, and said, “Hey, what are you guys working on?”
Said, “Well, we got this project, we have some other project. Oh, there was this other thing we discovered. We could see ships and planes for miles away and at night through fog.” He's like, “Wait, what?” “Yeah, yeah, we can see ships miles away and at night and through fog.” He's like, “What are you talking about?” And then they showed him, he was like, ‘Holy shit, this could change the course of warfare.” And then what he did, he understood what they were saying, he understood their language, he understood the science of it. He then translated it in language that the desk chiefs could understand. And he went back and he said, “All right, imagine your enemy can see us coming at night. How good would we feel if our enemy, if Nazi Germany could see a giant flotilla of ships coming from miles away?” And the desk chiefs were like, “Wait, what?” Or if they could see our planes coming in 10 miles away, 20 miles away, 15…” “What are you talking about?” “Well, we have that technology.”
Don:
What is an S-type and a P-type Loonshot, or what are the differences between those two?
Safi Bahcall:
A P-type is a product, a new technology that everybody says will never work. At the time, for example, microwave radar we were just talking, boo. Whether it's the transistor, oh we can make a switch that doesn't involve burning a filament. You're crazy. Or digital cameras or personal computers or lasers. It's a product that people think will never work. An S-type has nothing to do with a new technology. It's just a change in your business model. It's a change in how you reach your customers that everybody says will make no difference or is a stupid idea and will never work.
Don:
In the book, you talk about Pan Am being very much an innovator on the P-type of loonshot, and American Airlines, I think it's American, right? American being very much an innovator on the S-type. Could you tell that story?
Safi Bahcall:
Many people who are too young to remember realize that Pan Am was the glory, certainly the top airline company in the world for decades. And it was also the most recognized brand in the world. Second most recognized right after Coca-Cola. It was the image of glamor. And it was started and run by this guy named Juan Trippe, who was in some sense the ultimate product innovator. He was an engine guy, a plane guy, and he kept designing. He brought jet engines to the United States, to the world when nobody thought you could make a commercial jet plane. Everything was propeller. He brought jet engines, he brought radar navigation. He did the first transatlantic flight, the first transpacific flight, the first cross-the-world flight, all by making planes bigger, faster, better. And he was this ultimate product innovator. Meanwhile, the world was changing in ‘50s, ‘60s. by the time of airline deregulation, Trippe was focused on bigger, faster, better and new kind of engine.
Oh, there's this turbocharged jet engine, let's build something called the biggest plane we've ever built, the 747. Meanwhile, he had this competitor, much less glamorous, named Bob Crandall, who worked at Hallmark Greeting Cards, in the greeting card business. He'd been in banking. He didn't know anything about… He wasn't a plane guy. Crandall came up with these sort of weird innovations that involved no new technologies. For example, instead of flying direct between cities, let's do this thing called hub and spoke, where we have hubs here, and then we'd go off in little spokes. That's just going to make our flying much more efficient. Let's see if we can get turnaround times at airports much faster. There was no new technology there. It's just figuring out ways to get turnaround planes much faster. Oh, here's this idea, how about people who fly a bunch, let's give them some kind of card. Let's call it, I don't know, frequent flyer card. And they did. American pioneered that frequent flyer system. Super saver fares.
There was no technologies, but it built up loyalty. And here was this really, probably his craziest loonshot, which is, “Hey, we've got this system internally that our agents use for taking reservations. Why don't we just give that system that we use internally to every travel agent outside our company in the world?” “You can't do that. That's a crazy. Who would give your internal system to travel agents? That makes no sense at all. And by the way, you are not just going to book American.” He said, “No, we'll book, every airline will be there. Maybe ours will be on the first page.” But everybody, and his competitors said that's the stupidest thing. But did it. In the 1970s, in the late 1970s, when airline deregulation hit, Juan Trippe was flying these big planes, these 747s with no passengers. Fuel costs went up, deregulation, and all these startups who were cheaper, faster, or better came. Pan Am and 300 airlines went bankrupt. There was only one airline that did not go bankrupt through deregulation, and that was American Airlines.
Don:
Let's get back to incentives. We touched on it earlier. Can you talk about the importance of getting this right? Because there's a lot of literature out there that suggests how you just have to pay people fairly and that's it. But in the book, you talk about incentives being used to drive the behavior that you want.
Safi Bahcall:
Almost every company now has a chief technology officer. And it's a strategic role given a fixed budget. How do we make sure we have the best tools for everybody? But how many companies have a chief incentives officer? Which is an equally strategic role given a fixed budget. And whether you're giving stock options or restricted stock or cash bonuses, all of those are equivalent to a budget. They all are company resources. How are you maximizing the alignment motivation of your workforce given that fixed budget? So, here's what I mean by that. If you are a manager or leader, which would you rather have; a workforce that has the best tools and gadgets in your industry or a workforce that's the most motivated workforce in your industry? Well, I'd rather have the second one. I'd rather have the most motivated, aligned workforce. Chief incentive officer is important because it's tricky, it's difficult to create, let's say group rewards.
Different people care about different things, and managers and leaders are so busy with so many other priorities to really reach in and have those conversations about what matters to you, which will be different for Fred than it is for Joe, than it is for Sarah. One might care about choice of next assignment. One might care about being able to work from home. One might really care about the bonus. One might care about recognition among their peers. Do I get to enter my product design in an industry competition? And unless you're spending time with that as your first priority, you won't be able to identify that, and you have suboptimized.
Don:
Let's talk about failure. You cannot talk about loonshots and crazy innovations without talking about failure. And let's focus on one individual and you can tell the story about that. The individual I'd like to talk about is Judah Folkman, what we can learn from him.
Safi Bahcall:
Sure. So, Judah was a surgeon. He was sort of a pediatric surgeon who was chief of surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. I ended up working with him for the last seven years of his life. And when he was a young guy, he came up with kind of a crazy idea for treating cancer. Because he was a surgeon, he operated on patients, including patients with lung cancer. And he saw that their tumors were surrounded by blood vessels. And he had the idea, at a certain point, “I wonder if those blood vessels are actually essential to the tumor, if the tumor is somehow growing those blood vessels, is tricking the human body, the tissues where it's implanted into supplying it with new blood vessels to bring in oxygen and take out, and new nutrients, and take out waste. And I wonder if we can treat cancer by blocking those new blood vessels.”
So, he came up with this idea, and he did some experiments to show that it made a lot of sense. Reaction, you're crazy. Everybody knows cancer's this horrific, rapidly growing thing. This idea that there's a mysterious signal that the tumor secretes into the body that tricks the body into growing new blood vessels. You're out of your mind. I remember him saying he used to get up and give talks. I remember seeing it, he would give talks in auditorium, in big cancer meetings, giant room, a thousand people. He would say, “Everybody would get up and walk out.” And at one point, his research was so controversial that the board of trustees of his hospital convened a committee to say, should he be allowed to continue? Because there's all these sort of rumblings about how crazy his research is.
And they concluded that his work had no value and he needed to resign. And if he wanted to pursue the research, and he thought about it, he went back and forth, actually ended up talking to his wife and wasn't sure. And she said, “You should go for it.” And that's what he ended up deciding. He resigned his position as a surgeon. And he was a star surgeon, the youngest surgeon ever appointed head of surgery at Harvard so that he could focus full time on this research. Fast forward, 32 years after he first published his idea of working tumor blood flow. A guy got up on a stage in Chicago, June of 2003, to report the unblinded results. They’d just opened the results on the largest clinical trial ever conducted to that time in patients with advanced colon cancer. And he showed that patients who received the drug based on Judah’s ideas lived longer than anybody had ever lived in clinical trials before.
“And I have a standing ovation, transformed the treatment of the field.” The guy said, “Oh, if only Dr. Folkman had been alive to see this.” Judah was in the back and turned to his friend and just smiled, and loved telling that story. He lived five years… Had he lived even longer, he would've certainly won the Nobel Prize for that. But even in a way that most cancer research experts don't understand today, Judah's work opened up an entirely new way to treat cancer, which underlies all of cancer work today, all of cancer… There's almost nobody who works on chemotherapy or radiation anymore. Everybody works on the signaling and blocking what tumors signal the body in order to grow and survive. And that was really pioneered by Judah and was considered crazy at the time. So, what did he learn about hits? One of the first things I talk about there is the three deaths of the loonshot.
And that came from an evening with a colleague of Judah named Sir James Black, who did win the Nobel Prize for developing two of the biggest drug categories of the 20th century. So, we started talking, it was just me and him, and he was like, “I was feeling kind of down because the new project that we worked on in the lab had some negative results and might have to shut it down.” And he said, “Oh, Safi, my boy, it's not a good drug unless it's been killed three times.” So, I think of that as the three deaths of the loonshot. In the case of Judah's work, it was killed repeatedly. Sometimes the three deaths turn into five, or turn into seven, or turn into 10. So many times that program looks near death. One of the things you have to learn is to expect the three deaths.
If you're working on something tough, expect the three deaths. The second thing is to mind the false fail. And so by the false fail, I mean where a failure is a result of a flaw in the experiment rather than a flaw in the idea. The second thing that I saw with Judah is that he was incredibly skilled. And this is one thing that I see with the best innovators, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists, over and over. Their skill is not so much in having new ideas. Their skill, their superpower is an investigating failure. So, when stuff failed, he kept asking why, but not why in a defensive way, which takes us to the third thing that I learned from Judah, which since I don't have a good memory, I think of in terms of abbreviations, and that's LSC. Listen to the suck with curiosity. By that, when I saw stuff, negative results hit Judah, he didn't react angrily or defensively or dismissively like, these guys are idiots or these guys don't know what they're doing.
Maybe for the first 10 seconds, maybe for the first few minutes, but he would take off that defensiveness hat and put on a Sherlock Holmes hat and start asking, “Help me understand.” And so, in that particular case, he got on the phone with the guy, and not say, “Why did you tell this reporter this thing before talking to me about it? What's the matter with you?” He just said, “Hey, let's get our postdocs on the phone, and could you just do me a favor? Let's walk through the experiment. Let's just go step by step. Walk me through what you guys did.” And as he did, he found out that, in shipping down the protein, freezing it down to send it across the country, you changed the nature of the protein.
And he learned something about the protein that ended up being useful. He learned something about the shipping process that ended up being useful. He learned something, and he created a friend who turned around. They were able to redo it and reconfirm his results. LSC is so hard because it's, if you've been pouring your heart or soul into a project, and a customer, an investor or partner walks away, you just want to get reassurance. You have to learn how to set aside that defensiveness hat, because it's only when you start pulling on that thread that you learn that there's a little, that you can discover. That little gold nugget.
Don:
I'm sure there are a lot of people who are listening who want to know more about Loonshots and about you. Where can they find that information?
Safi Bahcall:
Just go to my website, looshots.com. I can tell you two phrases that Judah left me with, I can leave your listeners or audience with. When I asked him towards the end of his life, I said, “How did you persist for 32 years with all these people telling you, you were crazy and there's no way you can do it?” One phrase he told me at one point was, “You can always tell the leader from the arrows in his.” That's one. But the thing that really hit home was, especially when I asked him, all these experts, because he was an MD and a surgeon, so he was sort of looked down upon from his PhD research. There's sort of, unless you're in the field, you don't really know, but there's a little bit of this sort of, “Oh, well you're not a real PhD. You're just an MD, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” “What made you persist when all these experts told you, “There's just no way your idea could work”? He said, “There are no experts in the future.” That's always stayed with me.
Don:
That's fantastic. Awesome conversation. Thank you for spending the time with me, and Safi, thank you for being a genius.
Safi Bahcall:
I don't know about that, but very glad to be on your show. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Don:
Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses. Thanks also to the amazing team that makes this show possible: Devon McGrath is our production assistant; Brian Bierbaum is our research and historical consultant; Toby, Tony, Jay, and the rest of the team at GL Productions in London make sure the sound and editing are top-notch. To learn how 12 Geniuses can prepare leaders for a rapidly changing business world influenced by shifting demographics, new technologies, and innovative business models, please go to 12geniuses.com.