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In Loonshots , Safi Bahcall defines them as “widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy.” For example, Pixar’s Ed Catmull refers to early stage ideas for films — loonshots — as “Ugly Babies.” He stresses the need to maintain the balance between loonshots and franchises — “the Beast” — in films.

Bahcall explains that the “Moses Trap” appears when “an all-powerful leader becomes judge and jury deciding the fate of moonshots.”  That is, “When ideas advance only at the the pleasure of a holy leader — rather than the balanced exchange of ideas and feedback between soldiers in the field and creatives at the bench selecting loonshots on merit — that is exactly when teams and companies get trapped.”

How to avoid it?

Catmull saw his job as minding the system rather than managing individual projects. That message got through to Steve Jobs. According to Bahcall, “Jobs had a role in the system — he was a brilliant deal-maker and financier. It was Jobs, for example, who insisted on timing the Pixar IPO with the Toy Story release, and Jobs who negotiated the Pixar deal with Disney. But he was asked to stay out of the early feedback loop on films. The gravity of his presence could crush the delicate candor needed to nurture early-stage, fragile projects. On those occasions he was invited to help near-finished films, Jobs would preface his remarks: ‘I’m not a filmmaker. You can ignore everything I say.’ Jobs had learned to mind the system, not the project.”

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Safi Bahcall received his BA in physics from Harvard, his PhD from Stanford, and was a Miller Research Fellow at UC Berkeley. After working for three years as a consultant for McKinsey, he co-founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s council of science advisors on the future of national research. He lives with his wife, two children, and roughly 37 Gerald + Piggie books in Cambridge, MA.

Moonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries was published by St. Martin’s Press (March 2019).

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