
Researchers (for decades) have been using phase transition techniques to understand how birds flock together, brains work, criminals behave, and ideas spread…
Now, for the first time, physicist, and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall, applies phase transitions to business helping us all to unlock our potential, which is detailed in his book ‘Loonshots’.
Loonshots is on one side, about those crazy ideas (when nurtured correctly) that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries.
But it’s also about those business leaders that can’t stop themselves from launching the next big product (P-type) loonshot, when the most sensible thing to do is create a series of breakthroughs in strategy (S-type) loonshots.
Examples of P-type loonshots would be the telephone, the first passenger airline, the jumbo jet, radar, and the internet.
You might think it would include the iPhone, Google, and Facebook. But you’d be wrong.
The technology behind the iPhone had already been invented by Nokia engineers, Google didn’t invent search and Facebook weren’t the first social media company.
What Apple, Google and Facebook all did very well, was to take the original idea, and make it better, with continuous improvements along the way, which are called S-type loonshots.
In the book Bahcall details some of the fantastic product advancements (P-type loonshots), such as Statins to treat heart disease and cameras which printed an instant picture.
But also shows where leaders such as Edwin Land (founder of Polaroid) created another P-type loonshot rather than focused on a strategy breakthrough.
Land should have focused on commercialising digital camera technology, which he had already developed for the government for use in spy planes years before any others, rather than creating Polavision, which eventually brought Polaroid to its knees.
Read this book, as you’ll learn lots of great things. Both what to do and what not to do.
‘Loonshots’ gets a thumbs up & 5 stars.
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…thank you & see you next week.