Moonshot Thinking E-Book

Ivan Bofarull

• Herausgeber: Arpa
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 316

Beschreibung

Innovation Book of the Year Award 2021 "Absolutely indispensable for all global leaders." Cecilia MoSze Tham, award-winning futurist "Strategic thinking to create the future of your company." Paul Almeida, Dean, Georgetown University "If disruption is of interest to you, you should read Bofarull." Soumitra Dutta, Dean, University of Oxford "Provides real models to turn challenges into opportunities." Natalia Olson, former SME advisor to President Obama "A new habit that you can systematically apply in your company." Pablo Rodriguez, Director of Google's office of the CTO With recent developments in the technology market, it may seem like the age of the Silicon Valley moonshot is over for now. Disruption and corporate resilience have become the new normal. In this book, originally written at the beginning of the pandemic, Ivan Bofarull, Chief Innovation Officer at Esade, the global business school, had the foresight to anticipate a period of retrenchment of grand corporate moonshots. Instead, he focused his research on how to embed Moonshot Thinking as a mindset in each company, putting this at the core of an operating system for decision making and business transformation. After reading this book, you will be better at:  - Adopting an entrepreneurial mindset with Moonshot Thinking, a mental model that aims for 10x improvements that force you to rethink your foundations from the ground up. - Becoming a disruption "pro": understanding its actual meaning, which signals it emits, how to anticipate it, and how to make the most of it. - Being systematic as an innovator, by designing an operating system for continuous transformation.

Leseprobe

‘Ivan Bofarull turns moonshot thinking into a habit that every manager and entrepreneur can systematically apply in their company.’

PABLO RODRIGUEZ, Director, Google Office of the CTO

‘Innovations are the stepping stones to our future. Ivan's insights and thought leadership take them even farther beyond. Absolutely indispensable for all startups and global leaders.’

CECILIA MOSZE THAM, futurist

‘When you believe in your dream, you have to have courage and take real action on making it a reality. Moonshot Thinking provides real world models in turning challenges into opportunities to achieve our entrepreneurial successes.’

NATALIA OLSON, Plug & Play, former SME advisor to President Obama

‘An indispensable and inspiring synthesis.’

XAVIER MARCET, Drucker Society

‘Ivan Bofarull has put together some provocative ideas for your company to anticipate patterns of disruption and to leverage emerging disruptive spaces. If disruption is of interest to you, you should read Moonshot Thinking’.

SOUMITRA DUTTA, Dean, Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

‘Ivan Bofarull applies analytical and strategic thinking to anticipate disruption and create the future of your company’.

PAUL ALMEIDA, Dean, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University

‘Understanding the complexity and diversity of innovation is paramount to the future of organisations. In this book, Ivan Bofarull does it in a magical way.’

FERRAN ADRIÀ, Chairman of elBullifoundation

‘The best book on disruptive innovation ever written in our country. It will be a reference not only for innovation, but also for managerial leadership.’

TELMO PÉREZ, Chief Innovation Officer at Acciona

‘Silicon Valley is not a place, but a way of thinking. The methodology and habits that Bofarull presents in this book are a magnificent guide for every entrepreneur, employee or manager to use in their daily lives.’

MAR HERSHENSON, co-founder and managing partner at Pear VC

‘In this book, you will find a synthesis of the world to come and gain an extraordinary ability to anticipate the next waves of disruptive innovation.’

JAVIER SOLANA, Chairman of the Esade Center for the Global Economy and Geopolitics

‘Enlightening and methodical. Ivan Bofarull succeeds in unleashing every person and organisation’s potential to change the world’.

ALEXANDRA MITJANS, Planet & Climate Global Leader, Ashoka

‘Ivan Bofarull masterfully combines inspirational elements with insights and concrete actions for a company’s journey into exponential times. He has been able to create a must-read for managers and entrepreneurs alike. You will come back to read it again and again.’

PASCAL FINETTE, founder & CEO, be radical

‘Entrepreneurs and companies that understand and apply the moonshot thinking concepts presented in this book will gain a decisive advantage.’

CARLOS TRENCHS, Managing Partner at Aldea Ventures

‘Ivan Bofarull has achieved something incredibly complicated (and important): to synthesise the transformative energy that drives the entrepreneur and share it so that all businesses can benefit from it.’

ISAAC CASTRO, technology entrepreneur and co-founder of Emerge

‘Moonshot Thinking explains how to systematise disruptive innovation in a practical and precise way. Ivan Bofarull has written a guide to turn to every time you find yourself lost in the middle of the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) storm.’

JAIME MARTÍN, Executive Director, Refining & Chemical Division at Repsol

‘When I read Ivan Bofarull’s book, I thought that now, at last, many of the lessons learned from moonshot thinking will be available to all companies.’

TOBIAS DUSCHL, former COO of Tesla Motors and Relativity Space

‘Ivan Bofarull has a deep understanding of the why and how of disruptive innovation. His book —a real must-read for established companies and new players alike— offers unique insights and tools.’

JORGE JUAN FERNÁNDEZ, Venture Partner, Nina Capital

Moonshot Thinking

© of the text: Ivan Bofarull, 2020, 2023

© of the foreword: Henry Chesbrough, 2020

© of this issue: Arpa & Alfil Editores, S.L.

First edition: March 2023

ISBN: 978-84-19558-13-8

Legal deposit: B 5638-2023

Collection design: Enric Jardí

Cover design: Anna Juvé

Cover image: © Adam Miller, Unsplash

Layout: Àngel Daniel

ePub production: booqlab

Arpa

Manila, 65

08034 Barcelona

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All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted by any means without the permission of the publisher.

Ivan Bofarull

Moonshot Thinking

Turn disruption into opportunity

Foreword by Henry Chesbrough

CONTENTS

Foreword by Henry Chesbrough

Introduction. Creating the future

Part One. Become a manager with enhanced capabilities: moonshot thinking

Part Two. Become a disruption pro

Part Three. Become a systematic explorer: moonshot innovation

Anticipate

Launch

Land

11 habits for turning disruption into opportunity

Afterword by Javier Solana and Patrick Schneider-Sikorsky

Acknowledgements

‘My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style.’

MAYA ANGELOU

Foreword by

HENRY CHESBROUGH

Living in Silicon Valley as I do, I am surrounded by exciting new developments on a daily basis. And there is a wonderful optimism here about the power of new technologies and new ideas to help us move towards a better future. One widespread observation from Silicon Valley is that so-called ‘exponential technologies’ are leading us into a future of abundance. One example of this is Moore’s Law, which claims that the density of semiconductor circuits will double every 24 months. Another might be the myriad possibilities of advancing human health through genomic data sequencing (and notice that the cost of sequencing is dropping exponentially over time). Such trends demonstrate that technology is on the march and that in a surprisingly short period of time we will see some of these technologies become exponentially more important (much cheaper, more powerful and more useful)1.

Here in the Valley, frankly, you cannot escape this parade of exponential possibilities. And yet, if one steps away from Silicon Valley and looks at the wider world, troubling signs quickly arise that suggest that all is not well in this world of exponential technology. Productivity in our economy is growing only very slowly, and this growth rate has actually declined in the last thirty years, both in the United States, the European Union and the advanced economies as a whole.

This creates a puzzle: if all this wonderful technology is growing so rapidly, why are we seeing such a slowdown in productivity growth? The slow rate of productivity growth is the opposite of what you would expect to see in an exponential world. In an exponential world, productivity growth should be accelerating. Instead, not only is it not trending up, it is actually slowing down. This is troubling. I call it the Exponential Paradox, which I explore in depth in my latest book, Open Innovation Results2. Yet my technophile friends out here in Silicon Valley take little or no notice of this, of course!

However, in this book you are about to read, Ivan Bofarull reminds us all that a crucial factor is needed for the potential of exponential technology to be realised. That factor is Moonshot Thinking in the minds of those who have the privilege of leading organisations. The opportunities provided by exponential technology improvement are just that: opportunities. They only become new realities if alert leaders Anticipate, Launch, and Land those opportunities. Without a moonshot thinking mindset, company leaders may fail to perceive or to act upon these opportunities.

Moonshot thinking is essentially about considering improvements that have a 10x impact rather than a 10 % impact. In this book, Ivan Bofarull reminds us of the tremendous value of incremental improvements as well, because, as he points out, if they are steadily compounded, they can produce a 10x impact. This balance between 10x and 10 %, between the possibilities of the future and the goals of the present, seems very relevant to me, and I have to say that for me and the environment in which I work, in Silicon Valley, this way of thinking and wisdom is not common in the innovation field. Ivan Bofarull manages to make us see moonshot thinking and the 10x mindset, not as a way to replace what already exists, but as a way to increase it.

The book also contains numerous, wonderful examples of this perspective in action. These examples will help leaders in all types of organisations, large, medium and small, to understand the promise and the peril of exponential technologies, and help that leader chart a better course forward. Even startups will see new ideas that may help them in their journey to disrupt and transform the world. I am confident that everyone who reads this book carefully could well reach the moon!

HENRY CHESBROUGH

coined the term Open Innovation, about which he has written six books since 2003. He is a professor at UC Berkeley and director of the university’s Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation

______________

1 Peter Diamondis of Singularity University is perhaps the most prominent advocate for the impact of exponential technologies upon society. His 2012 book with Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (The Free Press, 2012), is a great introduction to this thinking

2Open Innovation Results: Going Beyond the Hype and Getting Down to Business, Oxford University Press, 2019.

Introduction

CREATING THE FUTURE

‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it.’

ALAN KAY

FROM WAYMO TO FORD

We are in Mountain View, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. In this city of around 75,000 inhabitants about an hour south of San Francisco is the headquarters of Google, a global company that employs around 100,000 people, generates about 250 billion in revenue and is set to ‘organise the world’s information,’ as its mission statement puts it.

Google has succeeded, by means of an algorithm, in revolutionising access to information, as well as an industry, that of advertising, from which 81 % of its revenue comes. If in the 20th century Coca-Cola’s recipe was elevated to the status of a myth, that role has been given to Google’s algorithm in the 21st century and the comparison is not random since a recipe is essentially an algorithm, and vice versa.

Today is a day like any other in Mountain View, but for those less accustomed to its wide streets that merge with neighbouring Palo Alto, the true epicentre of Silicon Valley, there is an element of the landscape that in most parts of the world would be an anomaly: white Chrysler Pacifica minivans are seen, with a certain frequency, driving peacefully through its streets. They do so smoothly, strictly observing the canons of good driving and basic road manners. They are easily distinguishable by their head: a device on the roof of the vehicle that rotates on its own axis continuously.

This highly visible device is one of the building blocks of Waymo’s autonomous driving system, a company that was spawned in Google’s innovation lab and has been operating as an independent company since December 2016. Waymo, like most self-driving vehicles, is powered by Lidar (light detection and ranging), a detection technology that uses sensors to measure the distance to an object, after pointing a laser at it.

As the as-yet human-assisted Waymo cars roam the streets of Mountain View, they collect millions of pieces of data every day. According to a study by Intel, the legendary processor company, a self-driving vehicle needs to process about four thousand gigabytes of data every day. To put this figure into context, just compare it to the 0.5 to 1 gigabytes that on average a person consumes every day with their smartphone, counting all the files we view, download and send. In other words, in terms of capacity, each self-driving vehicle is equivalent to at least a fleet of about 5,000 smartphones on wheels.

In today’s context, companies that can access the maximum amount of quality data with maximum speed and scalability can create increasingly reliable and personalised products, whether personalisation means ‘adaptation to the customer’ or, in the case of Waymo, ‘adaptation to the specific physical context’. According to data from the companies themselves and from the various state DMVs (Department of Motor Vehicles), Waymo vehicles had already logged more than 20 million miles by early 20201. Companies such as Baidu, Yandex and Cruise, the ones immediately behind Waymo, had travelled one million miles by the same date. This huge difference has given Waymo a very visible reliability advantage: while a Waymo requires only one human intervention for every eleven thousand miles driven, most other manufacturers and artificial intelligence companies require at least ten times that number of interventions.

Waymo’s 10x advantage over other competitors has not come from being the first one in the market (the much-mythologised first-mover advantage), but from being the fastest to scale its product and, therefore, move quickly along the learning curve. In any case, Waymo’s curve shows typical behaviour in the implementation of artificial intelligence: it is able to achieve breakthroughs very quickly, in this case surpassing human driving in most situations, up to a certain point where to reach a level of completeness and precision similar to human driving, the effort and dedication is very high.

Ratio of human intervention

Per thousand miles

Source: Waymo

Before reading on

Look at the Waymo learning curve. It is like an exponential curve but in reverse because what we are measuring are the errors. Ask yourself: Are there any technology applications in your sector that are following a similar shaped curve? If such an application were to achieve the highest level of reliability, what would be the implications for your business?

In any case, the level of reliability achieved by Waymo was good enough to be able to launch Waymo One in 2019, the first commercial service that operates with real passengers paying for the robotaxi service (the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area, a very low-density district, was the pilot city chosen for the launch). This service will, at the same time, be a further step to accelerate the learning curve.

The feeling of building the future that emerges from the various projects related to autonomous driving contrasts sharply with the news on traditional automotive manufacturers as a whole. Although there are exceptions, the industry is in the midst of a major transformation, which has its origin in three vectors of change that converge in the same industry: the process of electrification, the evolution of the usability elements of the vehicle towards the so-called ‘connected car’ and, finally, the successive incorporation of driverless technologies.

The uncertainty surrounding the industry is now so great that it has led to major moves, such as the failed thirty-three billion dollar merger of the FCA group (Fiat Chrysler Automobiles) with the Renault-Nissan group. That is to say, a merger of two companies, both of which were already the result of a merger of two companies. A few days after the failed attempt, in summer 2019, Nissan announced 12,500 job cuts worldwide. At the end of 2019, both Audi and Daimler (Mercedes) announced cuts of ten thousand jobs each, mostly in administration, in order to free up resources to adapt to the electrification process led by Tesla Motors.

Mergers and acquisitions between established companies are the usual tactic for dealing with disruption. It is often thought that the larger the size, the greater the financial muscle to make the investment needed to undertake the transformation, but it is often forgotten that startups have become a threat precisely because of their agility, and that established companies that manage to navigate disruptive waters are able to do so in large part because they have created more agile units to complement their main ship.

However, as Lou Gerstner, the CEO of IBM between 1993 and 2002, said, ‘transformation of an enterprise begins with a sense of crisis, or urgency,’ and that therefore ‘no institution will go through fundamental change unless it believes it is in deep trouble and needs to do something different to survive’. John Kotter, the Harvard professor and most prolific theorist on change processes, set out eight steps to successful transformation, the first being to ‘create a sense of urgency’2.

So, how do we innovate and change without having to push ourselves to the limit when time is of the essence? This is the usual paradigm in which thousands of managers around the world are trapped: they are terrified to move too fast, and to move too slow, to be in the picture, and not be in the picture. So, in order not to go too fast and not to give the impression of going too slow, for the most part, managers and executives around the world tend to replicate the best practices of other companies. In other words, they neither invent the wheel nor stop doing what others have done. It is very likely that this debate has come up in your management team on recent occasions.

This mental model often omits the fact that each company and its circumstances are unique, and although some very basic patterns of success can be identified, there is no formula that can be considered a universal law of transformation. Apple and Google are very paradigmatic cases in this respect: two companies that have adopted complementary innovation models that have led them, on parallel paths, to be considered very striking cases of change. One more top-down, more cohesive, more proprietary in its ideas (Apple). The other more bottom-up, more dispersed, more open with its ideas (Google).

In the case of Apple, the reinvention of a company that has been able to contribute to the reinvention of an entire industry since the iconic introduction of the iPhone in 2007. It was not for nothing that Steve Jobs spoke the famous words that have gone down in history: ‘Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.’ In the case of Google, we are currently witnessing the transition from a company focused on the online search business to a company that puts artificial intelligence at the centre of all its business activities.

There are also cases of companies that did everything the basic handbooks on change said and failed. General Electric (GE), the industrial conglomerate that between 1981 and 2001 increased its stock market value by 4,000 % under the leadership of the legendary Jack Welch, is undergoing one of the most disturbing processes of change in its history3. Having been at the centre of one of the most celebrated cases of digital transformation in the last decade, and with CEO Jeff Immelt saying in 2015 that ‘we can say that GE is now a software company,’ the foundations of GE’s business began to crumble. Immelt was unable to translate his innovation model into tangible results and GE shares lost a third of their value during his tenure. During Immelt’s time as CEO of GE, to which we will return later, the company followed some of the canons of change: it hired Eric Ries, the founder of the Lean Startup movement, to implement the principles of entrepreneurship in the company; it launched Predix, a service platform, which illustrated the company’s shift towards software.4

In the same vein as General Electric, another legendary company, Ford, announced a few years ago its strategic transition to become a ‘mobility services’ company. It set up a quasi-secret innovation centre in Palo Alto, far from the Detroit headquarters, from which the transformation process was piloted. However, under Mark Fields, its visionary CEO, Ford’s shares lost 40 % of their value. The case of Ford is particularly paradigmatic, being the company founded in 1903 by Henry Ford, the entrepreneur who said that ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses’. Ford had a vision that the competitive terrain of mobility was going to change radically, and that the competition would be in a huge new pie that would form beyond the current competitive landscape, which was the horse-drawn carriage market.

Cases such as General Electric and Ford lead us to a study that the consulting firm McKinsey carried out at the end of 2016 in which it concluded that the life expectancy of a company listed in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index was sixty-one years in 1958 and only eighteen years in 2016 and, moreover, predicted that by 2027, 75 % of the companies in the index would have disappeared5. Hard as it is to accept this prediction, there is evidence that we are entering an era in which the increasing longevity of individuals contrasts with the declining longevity of companies, and on the latter aspect we certainly know what the main cause is.

DISRUPTION

In recent years, according to the Google Trends service, there is only one business term that has surpassed ‘digital transformation’ in terms of searches: ‘disruptive innovation’. How many times have you talked about disruption in your company in the last three years? Have you thought about what disruption really means? The word disruption is etymologically derived from the Latin word disrumpere and can be roughly translated as to alter the previous structure or to shatter it. When we talk about disruption, we are referring to those types of innovations that make what has existed until now obsolete.

Clayton Christensen, who unfortunately passed away while we were editing this book, was one of the most celebrated professors in the history of business schools. After several years as a consultant and CEO at a technology company, he did his PhD at Harvard Business School, where he would go on to become a professor and from where, in 1997, he would publish The Innovator’s Dilemma6, in which he introduced the concept of ‘disruptive innovation’.

Clayton Christensen studied the fledgling hard disk industry in the 1980s in depth. He observed that this was an industry in which leadership had a high level of obsolescence, with new entrants continually replacing established players. He found that there was a consistently repeating pattern: the established players had continued to produce incremental innovations based on their winning products, trying to satisfy the demands of their core customers, so that they gradually neglected certain (lower value) adjacent market segments, which were systematically taken over by new players with simpler products who saw this slight neglect of a part of the market as a great opportunity.

Christensen argued that it was precisely because established firms were doing their job well and focusing on the customer that they had no incentive to explore other technologies, which might offer new opportunities in new markets. The innovator’s dilemma lay in this sort of boomerang strategic decision, where, precisely because we were doing things right, we opened the door to potential disruption.

This work is unquestionably one of the most important books in the history of management. However, in recent years, as the concept of disruption in its broadest sense has become popular, it has led to a bifurcation in the academic world between those who speak of disruption in the strict sense of how Clayton Christensen defined ‘disruptive innovation,’ and those who speak of disruption in the broader sense, marked by the etymology of the term and by the philosophical orientation of the concept, which was defined by the Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter in the 1950s.

In his iconic book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter said that capitalism is ‘by its nature a continuous process of change’ and that the engine of that change is what he coined ‘creative destruction,’ a process by which new entrepreneurial ideas replace what already exists. Interestingly, although often forgotten, Schumpeter warned of the risks of the creative destruction process, pointing out as one of the most important the fact that this process of destruction would not only sweep away the barriers and monopolies that impeded progress, but would also break down what he called the ‘buttresses’ that guaranteed the stability of the capitalist system. It was a point of view that would prove almost prophetic: today, the possibility of splitting the big tech (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) into smaller companies has been introduced into the public debate since, according to some, they are creating new monopolistic positions, albeit in a different format from the traditional monopolies of the 20th century.

In a study conducted by Bloomberg in 2019, all the world’s listed companies were grouped by sector, and for each sector, the market value of the top 10 was calculated. The study concluded that the market value of the top 10 in the technology sector was 2.5 times higher than the market value of the top 10 in the banking sector, and about three times higher than those in the pharmaceutical sector. This is one of the reasons why, with some of the largest technology companies based in Silicon Valley, this region of Northern California accounts for 5 % of the total market value of all listed companies, while the population of the region represents only 0.05 % of the world’s population, i.e. an over-representation of two orders of magnitude (100x).

Technology makes other sectors small

The data are based on the top 10 companies in each sectorSource: Bloomberg, FT

Before reading on

Look at how technology companies, especially the so-called big tech companies, have the ability to enter virtually any sector. Ask yourself: Is there a particular area in which your industry would function much better or more efficiently if it were designed or operated by a big tech?

In a very similar vein, the end of January 2020 saw a milestone of broadly symbolic scope in terms of the market capitalisation of big tech relative to large traditional industrial and service companies. Apple’s market value reached $1.4 trillion, a figure higher than the market capitalisation of the thirty largest companies in Germany, which make up the Dax 30 index. Even if this comparison were to be altered in the near future in favour of German companies and against Apple, the main message would still have high significance. It is clear that, fundamentally in the last decade, there has been a shift in the sources of value in business.

Back in 2011, Marc Andreessen, the former founder of Netscape and today possibly one of the leading venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal that would become a reference for a whole generation: ‘Why Software Is Eating the World’7. In the article, Andreessen anticipated some of the trends we have seen in recent years, notably that any company in any industry would eventually become, in whole or in part, a software company or, alternatively, would be disrupted by a software company. We don’t know if this will be the fate of companies like Waymo, the disruptor, and companies like Ford, perhaps the disrupted this time around. In any case, that is most likely the reason why, in your company as well as in others, in addition to disruption, you talk about how to approach your transformation.

TRANSFORMATION

The feeling that technology companies can disrupt any sector of the economy is one of the factors that creates the most uncertainty and concern among managers, and it is also the main reason why they start transformation processes in their respective companies. Part of these transformation processes involves organising excursions to Silicon Valley so that managers and also entrepreneurs from all over the world hear first-hand about the different success stories we are used to.

At best, these delegations engage in quality tourism, where instead of visiting cathedrals they visit company headquarters, where the prized trophy is a selfie next to any visible logo of that company. Certainly, without detracting from the relevance of this type of delegation, I have seen in recent years that it is precisely this mimicry that widens the gateway to disruption. There is no worse transformation strategy than one that starts by announcing that company X is going to become the Uber of this or that sector. If you have been on a trade mission to Silicon Valley in recent years, you will know what we are talking about.

Paul Graham, a celebrated Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of Y Combinator, the world’s leading start-up accelerator, said recently: ‘If you had asked me when I was younger to make a list of valuable skills, I probably wouldn't have included the ability to notice anomalies, but I'm increasingly convinced this is one of the most valuable skills of all’. We tend to think of all companies that have recently disrupted an industry, or that have successfully transformed themselves, as representing a standard to follow, a leadership style to emulate, an organisational model to import, but in general they tend to fall into the category of an anomaly. There is actually a survivorship bias, where we do not see those other companies that did the same and failed.

It is therefore the manager’s task to adapt the disruptive context to their own subtle interpretation of reality, which will sometimes be found in the synthesis derived from different perspectives. Today we navigate in an abundance of information and knowledge, which also applies to competitive information and potential disruptions in sight: the scarcest skill at management level is an ability to synthesise that allows us to separate the signal from the noise, the disruptive blah blah blah from what is specifically relevant to our case and our industry. As a manager, you may have often wondered whether this loud external noise is pushing you to make decisions that are not appropriate for your company and that even distort part of your organisation’s identity.

In recent years, thanks to my participation as academic director and lecturer in tailor-made courses for companies, mainly in Europe, the United States, Latin America and the Middle East, I have been fortunate to be able to interact and share learning processes with some three thousand managers from dozens of companies (global, multinational, family-owned, large and small), as well as with founders of radically innovative startups. For some, the big leap is that of transformation, reinvention, while for others, their big leap is growth, knowing how to scale their business model to a higher magnitude, which is also, in short, a way of transforming themselves.

Arturo Bris, professor at IMD Lausanne (Switzerland), one of the world’s top business schools, says that an incumbent firm has only one way to survive, which is to transform itself into a startup (reinvent itself); while a startup has only one way to survive, which is to become an incumbent (scale up). As early as 1991, sociologist James March pioneered the concept of the ‘ambidextrous organisation,’ 8the ability of a company to combine current business exploitation activities with future business exploration activities, the field in which Arturo Bris invites established companies to become —metaphorically— startups.

One of the most important lessons I have been able to draw from conversations with managers is that despite the relevance and impact of March’s theory (also on myself) over the last decade, it is nevertheless astonishing how easy it is for any company to settle into the habit of permanently resorting to exploiting the current business, which is the familiar terrain, and in general, the domain by which we will measure our performance in the short term.

It should not be forgotten that without payrolls at the end of the month, which usually derive from our core business and incremental improvements that some would consider boring, there is no exploration possible, and in the face of this irremediable reality, the temptation to remain anchored in exploitation will be very high. Look at your schedule: you will see how the exploitation component overwhelmingly dominates your Google Calendar or Outlook, and how difficult it is for you to change that inertia. Therefore, we will have to ask ourselves how we can continue to do our job well as managers while maintaining a robust core business and communicating objectives that are understandable to our teams, generally in the incremental category, while at the same time being able to find a systematic way of exploration that fits into our agendas, that addresses the new disruptive normal that every company lives in today but which does not undermine our core business capabilities.

In Psychology of Money, Morgan Housel, a partner at The Collaborative Fund, recommends always being optimistic and exploratory about the future, while at the same time being a little ‘paranoid’ in order to survive (core business) and build the optionality to benefit from that desired future. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s legendary consigliere at Berkshire Hathaway, has always said that ‘the best way to be smart is to not be stupid’. Moonshot thinking, disruption, innovation and transformation start with protecting our core business and not doing too many stupid things, as Housel and Munger suggest.

THE THREE LESSONS OF THIS BOOK

To ensure that disruption is no longer a headache or a cause for panic in your company, but a catalyst for an exciting journey of transformation, I have organised the content of the book around three major learnings that you can apply in your day-to-day business.

Firstly, this book will help you to become an entrepreneurially-minded manager. Disruption is a new normal because the entrepreneur of the 21st century has at their fingertips a set of tools, which we will call the ‘superpowers platform,’ that make tackling large-scale, high-impact solutions less costly than ever before.

For this reason, you will learn to employ a new mindset, moonshot thinking, the ability to prioritise 10x improvements over 10 % improvements. With moonshot thinking, the aim is to become a manager with enhanced capabilities, i.e. that you can put on an augmented reality lens with which to raise your level of sensitivity to potentially disruptive opportunities. Note that I speak of ‘augmented reality’ and not virtual reality, a nuance that I consider important because the aim of moonshot thinking or 10x thinking is not to lose sight of reality or of 10 % thinking, but to complement it, like a layer that is superimposed on what already exists.

Secondly, in order to develop enhanced capabilities, you will need to better understand what disruption is in your competitive environment. Picasso said that you must ‘learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist’. In this book, you will be able to approach disruption in a systematic way, because if you are not able to anticipate disruptive signals, you will not be able to turn them into an opportunity, let alone be the disruptor. Therefore, the second lesson is how to get closer to being a disruption pro.

Thirdly, one of the most important observations of recent years is that the most disruptive innovations do not happen in your usual competitive terrain, but in a new pie that grows away from where you compete, sometimes even in a blind spot from your position as an established company. For example, in the automotive industry, Volkswagen competed until a few years ago with companies such as Toyota, but today it competes with Uber and Google (Waymo), technology companies that are far removed from the usual competitive dynamics of the sector. But it also competes with companies like Tesla, a hybrid between a technology and traditional company that was born to rewrite the rules of its industry from scratch.

This observation, which applies to all sectors, requires established companies to develop their exploratory capability, and to do so, a systematic model for exploration needs to be designed that allows us, in addition to exploring, to be able to implement it in our organisation. From this book, you will take away a systematic model, the moonshot innovation model, which, as the name suggests, uses moonshot thinking as a catalyst, and consists of three phases: anticipation, launch and landing.

Most of the managers with whom I have shared courses, sessions and conferences over the last few years tend to say that their main obstacle to innovation and transformation is not the most explicit part of innovation, which is technology, but that which is not visible to the naked eye, i.e. a set of habits that we tend to frame within the blurred landscape of business culture and which are embodied in a particular way of thinking or mindset. This is why I like to say that the real exponential technology of organisations is not the technology itself, the accessibility of which is increasingly open, but the mindset with which decisions about technology are made.

HOW TO READ THIS BOOK

Although this book is born in the age of Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, in the age of landscape books with lots of illustrations and little text, in which we can jump randomly from one chapter to the next, this is, nevertheless, a book to be read in the proposed order.

John Hagel, chairman of the Center for the Edge in San Francisco, explains that the big challenge for organisations is how to turn threat-based narratives into opportunity-based narratives9. Along the same lines, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes in detail in her latest book Thinking Outside the Building (Nicholas Brealey, 2020) how the ability to tell good stories has become the main skill in the field of innovation and transformation, since, especially for the latter, it requires whole teams of people embarking together on a journey fraught with uncertainty.

Mathematician and professor emeritus at Esade, Eduard Bonet, one of my references in the world of education, has spent much of his career researching epistemology in management sciences, as well as the value of narrative, rhetoric and metaphors in business. For Eduard Bonet, rhetoric plays a central role in management and innovation, and this is essentially an exercise in persuasion, which includes argumentation (logos), credibility (ethos) and emotions (pathos).

This book makes a narrative effort, it tells a story about a journey (from disruption to transformation), connects with the credibility that comes from the experience of thousands of managers, and unleashes a set of emotions, as moonshot thinking does not leave us indifferent. I hope, therefore, that the words contained in this book are persuasive enough for you to evolve from narratives of threat to narratives of opportunity, as John Hagel suggests.

Finally, you’ll see that this is not so much a book about moonshots, about which there was an abundance of literature on the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11’s moonshot, but rather about how to apply the lessons learnt from these types of milestones to your business and your way of thinking. The only way to exponentiate what we’ve learned from moonshots is to translate it into a way of thinking and a methodology, so that moonshot thinking becomes an essential part of every manager’s, or entrepreneur’s, day-to-day decision-making. I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I have enjoyed planning it for you.

MOONSHOT THINKING, A “HORMESIS” FOR YOUR COMPANY