Insight
Bahcall: Market projections kill early-stage innovation, especially in drug discovery
“Nothing kills a great idea faster and has been more of a disaster to innovation, certainly in my industry in drug discovery, than the idea of market projections.”
Opinion
Bahcall: Companies reliant on top-down visionary leaders eventually fail
“So all the companies across history that have done that have failed spectacularly. They may survive for a while, you know, when there's a Moses on the mountain with a staff anointing the next holy loon shot. They may survive for a while, that's the hysteresis …”
Insight
Bahcall: Ancient empires stifled innovation much like modern big pharma
“China, India, and the Islamic empires were a lot like the Merck, Pfizer, and Novartis of today. They were global, everywhere, dominant. They're phenomenal at franchises. So in India, you've had the Taj Mahal. You know, in China, they built the Great Wall and j…”
Insight
Bahcall: Corporate innovation fails in transferring ideas, not generating them
“Because where innovation fails is not in the supply of new idea. It's in the transfer of those new ideas to the field.”
Insight
Bahcall: Sustained tech success requires valuing operators and creators equally
“And only by evolving and learning to love his artists and shoulders equally, that's when Things really took off. And that's why Vannevar Bush succeeded, and so many scientists before him failed, because soldiers love soldiers, artists love artists. He not only…”
Assertion Supported
Bahcall: The transistor was originally an incremental innovation at Bell Labs
“It was developed at Bell Labs, although it was based on a lot of federal research, but it was developed at Bell Labs while they were looking for better switches. By every definition, it was an incremental innovation, not a quote disruptive.”
Insight
Bahcall: Leaders control company behavior through four structural design parameters
“It turns out when you work out the mathematics of this, of the incentives, the two forces, there are four control parameters inside organizations, elements of organizational design, and that the CEO, the executive team, the board has control over, just like yo…”
Insight
Bahcall: Company growth shifts employee incentives from innovation to corporate politics
“So somewhere between small and large, as you grow and you grow and you grow, all of a sudden the balance of incentives suddenly shift, and the same person, the same sonal, Would go from pounding the table, this is the most awesome idea, to kind of making fun o…”
Insight
Bahcall: Prioritize innovative ideas that threaten your core belief system
“I think you want to find the ones that challenge your belief system, because those are the ones Which are most dangerous to you and your business.”
Assertion Supported
Bahcall: Google and McKinsey remove promotion decisions from direct managers
“Some companies, actually Google does this, and McKinsey does this, and others, they take the promotion decisions completely away from the manager.”
Insight
Bahcall: Innovation teams need wide management spans; operational teams need narrow spans
“If the group that's assembling planes, you want one kind of system, one kind of metric, you want narrow spans, you want high quality controls, the group that's creating crazy new technologies for those planes, you want those spans as wide as possible with very…”
Assertion Supported
NYT retracted its 1920 Robert Goddard mockery after Apollo 11 launched
“About 49 years after the Times printed that, the day after the successful Apollo 11 launch to the moon, the Times printed a retraction and said, apparently rocket flight does not violate the laws of physics and quote, the Times regrets the error.”
