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

Malcolm Gladwell could have written this book. It’s exactly like a Gladwell book – dozens of seemingly unrelated anecdotes and stories, ostensibly in support of a central thesis… but not really.

Like, Gladwell, I’m convinced this author just wanted to tell stories. To do this, he needed an idea, which is supposedly how to support crazy projects at your organization. To explain this idea, he just piles on history after history, story after story, anecdote after anecdote.

Does all of this history help explain the central idea? ….eh. Maybe? I don’t know, the ideas got kind of lost.

But here’s the thing: I didn’t really care, because the history and the stories were so interesting. He writes well. He tells a good story. I could have read them for hours (and I did, just like I do with any Gladwell book).

But am I any closer to understanding the concept of what he calls a “loonshot”?

I’m not sure.

A “loonshot” is a crazy project, that’s dismissed as nonsense, but goes on to be wildly successful. To nurture these projects, you need to:

1. Separate the groups working on them from the groups working on the “franchises,” which are the solid performers that just get incrementally better
2. Maintain balance between the two groups – make sure one isn’t favored over the other
3. Be careful with incentives, because they will dictate whether something will do more loonshots or franchises

And there are some more rules, but honestly, a lot of this was basic business advice. And that got lost under the weight of storytelling.

What’s funny is that there’s an appendix at the end of the book that distills the actual business advice down to a couple of pages. That’s all it took to explain what he really wanted to explain.

Still, I can’t dislike the book. I like history, and I like stories. This book was full of them.

Book Info