Loonshots

Safi Bahcall, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (2019).

Why it’s on the list: Bahcall — a physicist turned biotech CEO — models organisations as phase-transitioning systems, and argues that the fix for a company that stops producing breakthroughs is structural separation of the loonshot group from the franchise group, not a culture memo.

Where I saw it: In the replies to Sarah Guo’s March 22, 2025 question on X — “is there a book / essay about environments that best support scientific discovery? Not about specifically bell labs, cavendish, xerox parc, los alamos - but why these places were so productive?” Kyle saved the link and reconstructed the full reply-thread list on 2026-09-17; the whole recovered list is on Is There a Book… (tweet).

Metadata checked: Open Library (2019; 368 pages).

Connections

• Company Building — the portfolio idea.
• Xerox PARC · Bell Labs — Bahcall’s worked examples of the separation done badly and well.
• Organizational Culture — the thing he argues is downstream of structure, not upstream.

Not yet read.