Moonshot Thinking. How to disrupt your industry and beat the competition. Inspired by Google X and Peter Diamandis.
Moonshot thinking is shooting for the moon. Moonshots live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; they are 10X improvement, not 10%.
21. After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards
the next horizon. The United States had become a
space-faring nation, but threw it away. We have
sacrificed space exploration for space exploitation,
which is interesting but scarcely visionary.
Eugene Cernan, Astronaut
“
34. Moonshot thinking is shooting
for the moon. Moonshots live
in the gray area between
audacious projects and pure
science fiction; they are 10X
improvement, not 10%.
Google X is leading the 10X
movement.
MOONSHOT
THINKING
52. The first step is to create a Strike
Force of young people. Why young
people? They are smart, hard working,
and naive. All the qualities you want in
someone who trying to reinvent a
system.
They have no preconceived notions
about the way the world is supposed to
work. This gives them the ability to
question everything.
54. So where do you find your strike force?
They may already work for you, or they
might be graduates, or a group of local
entrepreneurs.
Look for passion and curiosity.
Form teams of three to five people
with a background in science and
engineering.
56. Give the Strike Force 4-6 weeks to walk
around your company and examine
everything.
Let them to talk to all employees,
clients, suppliers, and so on. Everybody.
57. Have them document the major
challenges your company is having:
What is unduly hard to accomplish?
Where are we missing quality?
Where are we behind the competition?
What are our clients' biggest complaints?
59. Challenge them to think about how the
biggest challenges could be solved.
Make sure to emphasize that they have
NO LIMITATIONS as to the ideas they
can come up with. This is critical.
60. Good ideas are always
crazy until they’re not.
Larry Page
“
62. Ask the Strike Force to compile their
findings, and write up their top 10 -
20 recommendations.
Rate them with regard to:
Financial impact
Competitive impact
Ease of implementation (time and $)
64. Fund the best ideas and the best
teams to develop the solution either
internal to your business, or as
outside entrepreneurial endeavors.
Either way, you win.
69. Lots of people dream big and talk about
big bold ideas but never do anything. I
judge people by what they've done. The
ratio of something to nothing is infinite.
So just do something.
Peter Diamandis
“
74. We choose to go to the
moon in this decade.
Not because it’s easy,
but because it’s hard.
“
John F. Kennedy
75. I have a very simple metric I use: Are you
working on something that can change the
world? Yes or no? The answer for 99.9999
percent of people is no. I think we need to be
training people on how to change the world.
“
Larry Page
76. In honor of Apollo 11. One giant leap for mankind.