#206 Safi Bahcall – Transcript

Sean Delaney: Safi, welcome back to What Got You There. How are you doing today?

Safi Bahcall: I’m doing great, Sean. Delighted to be back on you show.

Sean: Yeah, you’re one of those people that just spark new ideas in me, so I was so excited when we scheduled this round two. So it’s been about a year since we last had you on, and if you were gonna sum up this past year with one word, what would that be for you?

Safi: Amazing, unexpected. So many surprises, so many interesting new relationships, interesting new problems to think about, interesting companies and groups and organizations that I’ve engaged with, not only in the private sector, but in the national security side, in the US military and intelligence agencies and congressional committees. It’s just totally unexpected. 

I think when we talked last year, it was not long after I came out of the cave. And when you’re reading a book, you’re just sort of in a cave, or at least for me, just going into this zone of disappearing and disconnecting and trying to go deep in some new universe that you’re creating and you have no idea. You find things are funny and you start laughing out loud. And then you realize, oh, oops, I just laughed out loud. And your wife is over there in the kitchen like, what is this guy doing? And you’re daughter’s like, I think he’s crazy. Anyways, you’re in this cave and then you’re like, well, I have no idea if anybody else will find this funny, it seems funny to me and interesting and surprising and bizarre connections between all these different things from 17th century astronomy to Steve Jobs, to Isaac Newton, to polaroid, to U-boats and World War II and how they’re all connected by this one idea seemed interesting to me, but who knows, might be just my mother and who ends up reading this stuff and then… Yeah, it was just totally unexpected how many CEOS reached out and large companies, small companies, hyper-growth companies, and saying that the ideas resonated with them. Industries that I had not spent a lot of time on before, companies that I didn’t even really know very much about. There was this guy who called me from a company I’d never heard of, and I looked at their website that said, we make cameras, and I was getting 20 or 30 or more calls a week to go talk to companies or CEOS or groups. And so I sort of blew off for quite a while, and then his name was Evan, and I kept getting these calls from people around him and like, alright, finally take the call, and it was a company called Snap, ’cause I didn’t really know what that was, in terms of they make Snapchat. And I’m not, I’m not a customer, I’m not a user of Snapchat. But I ended up spending time with them and learning about all these new fields and industries that were new to me, new industry, from media and journalism, to the US Navy and the US Air Force, to film studios, to tech companies, to Amazon, to Google, to Snapchat, to all sorts of stuff, many of whom are struggling with the exact same issues. So for me, it’s been kind of an amazing year of connecting and meeting and getting to know all sorts of interesting people, and new organizations, and new industries, and what they’re thinking about, what they’re struggling with, what they all have in common and how I can help them.

Sean: When you go into a company, we’ll call it XYZ, not knowing much about them at all, what are you first doing? How are you learning more so that you can help them?

Safi: Well, it starts with being curious, I think we talked about that a little bit the last time when I was on your show, but for me, if there’s one word, one super power that has made a huge difference in my life, one word or idea or concept that can improve your professional relationships, improve your personal relationships, improve your ability to lead, or improve your ability to innovate and prove your ability to help others improve or even life choices. It’s curiosity.

And curiosity is not something you’re the genetic that you’re born with, you either have it or you don’t have it. It’s something you cultivate. You keep at the forefront of your mind this question. Keep asking why. Keep asking why.

Why do you say this? Why do you think that? Why do you believe that? What are the underlying assumptions that make you say that? So for example, let’s say a CEO calls me up or a colleague or a friend and they’re struggling with X, well, what is it exactly, what is it that’s the real challenge for you there? What is it? What have you tried before? What worked about it? When has it… When have you done something that actually helped with that? Why do you think it worked there? What do you think is stopping it that’s not working there? By asking a lot of questions, you really tease that, begin to tease out what’s different, what’s interesting, what’s surprising, what might work, what might not work.

There’s some common themes, some of the themes that we… I wrote about and we talked about, that have resonated with a lot of leaders, and they call me up and they would like me to talk more about those themes with their teams and their leadership teams and their companies, or just privately one-on-one, which I enjoy a lot. But it’s not as effective unless you really keep asking why. What made you wanna reach out and call me up? What is it that you’re seeing inside your group or organization or your company that you wanna get better at that made you wanna reach out right now?

And so part of the secret or the power of really helping people and really helping yourself is to keep asking why. It’s not only when you’re helping others, but you can help yourself by forcing yourself to be incredibly honest, by keep… By persisting and asking why, to yourself. What am I really upset about here? This person said something to me that really pissed me off, whether it’s a person on my executive team or a person on my board of directors, or one of my investors, or one of my customers. Why am I particularly angry here? Is there something about this that is raising an issue in me that I am not comfortable with? That I haven’t resolved? Something that’s bothering me about… What I don’t like about what we’re doing or what I don’t like about myself? And you just keep asking why, and you start teasing out these surprising answers.

I mean, I can give you a simple example from personal life. Would that be helpful?

Sean: Yeah, that would be great.

Safi: Alright, so this is sort of less about business strategy or business innovation, but more just as an example of why it’s useful to keep asking why, not only for those you interact with, but even for yourself. So when I was a teenager… And this is a habit that I got into over the last 30 or 40 years, it has actually been incredibly helpful in keeping me calm and collected rather than getting really angry when difficult things happen or when people do things that are not consistent with how we would like to see the world around us. So when I was a teenager, I played a lot in the juniors in tennis, competitive tennis, and had a family friend… She was a big star. girls, in the women’s… Well, actually we were 14 years, and so it’s young or young players. And I saw her a couple of years later, we lost touch and we reconnected and she was lying on a couch, she was feeding herself some chocolate and snacks and muffins and stuff, and you know lost I think a lot of her athletic ability and she had gained a bunch of weight. And she was telling me she had spent the summer with her cousins and how pissed she was, how lazy her cousins were because they were… I forgot what small town they lived in, but any time they wanted to go get the mail. The mailbox was like a 100 yards walk or something from their front door. They would get in the car and drive to the mailbox and pick their mail and drive back home, whatever the distance was, wasn’t that long, and how that really, really pissed her off.

I was saying, that’s so interesting, because if I had cousins that did that, I would find it curious, but it wouldn’t piss me off, so why does it really piss her off? I didn’t raise it directly with her, but I just started thinking about that, and I started realizing, Well, it’s a mirror, because she sees something in them that she doesn’t really like. She was a competitive athlete. And she’d grown, to be honest, kinda lazy, and has gained a lot of weight and had really given up on a lot of stuff. And she was seeing that in someone around her, and it reminded her in a way that she hadn’t connected with, of something in her that she didn’t like, that she was struggling with. And because of that, she got really angry at them. 

And I’ve seen that over and over. It’s like people who are struggling to quit something, let’s say smoking, and then you see somebody else lighting up and you get really pissed at them. Well, if I saw somebody lighting up, I would think, well, that’s really unhealthy and it’s too bad, but I wouldn’t get pissed at them. Yet people who have struggled with addiction or giving up smoking, will get really pissed at someone who has failed to persist in their giving up smoking.

And so over the years, whenever I find myself, it’s a little habit, whenever I find myself getting angry, I say, well, what is it about me that I’m seeing reflected here that I don’t like? Because if I’m seeing a certain behavior, and it may not be a favorite behavior, I may not like it, and I may choose to do something else. But normally, if it’s like giving up smoking… It doesn’t bother me, I don’t get angry. Generally speaking, if I see something that makes me really angry, I just immediately say, well, what is it about me that I don’t like that I’m seeing here?

And that makes me pause and my anger goes away, I was like, oh, this is what I don’t like. And I’ve had that happen to me many times now, and each time I’ve learned something from that about myself, and each time that’s helped me improve something about myself, and then the next time, or a third time, or fourth time I see it. I don’t get as angry.

Sean: You mentioned that’s been a 30 or 40-year progression for you. If you were to rewind a while ago, ’cause that takes an extreme amount of patience and pause in order to do that, what were those conversations in your head like early on? Did you initially start to get angry at these things?

Safi: I’ll give you a simple example also from a long time and go. It was a graduate student and there was another guy, another fellow graduate student who had kind of a way of not sucking up to the older professors, we were both pretty young, but a way of speaking very differently to more senior people and more senior professors than speaking to his friends and his peers, and that just really pissed me off. What a brown noser or what a suck up. And then I paused and said, well, why does that make me angry?

I’m like, oh, am I concerned that I’m that way? Because I was… A lot of professors sort of had taken me under their wings and really seemed to enjoy talking to me and confiding to me, even though I was half their age. And I was worried, am I acting in a way to very senior people than I am to people who are like me, or my age?

Am I a brown noser? Or, am I a suck up?

And as soon as I realized that it was about me and not about him, that I was worried that I was doing that, and maybe I was, and maybe I wasn’t, but maybe… Or maybe I had some slight tendency for that, but as soon as I did that, the anger dissipated. I was no longer angry at him, and I’ve learned something about, listen, this is something that’s kinda important to me, and I really don’t wanna be doing this, I don’t wanna be speaking differently or in different ways to people who are much more senior to me, and people who are sort of my level or less senior than me. I wanna be speaking the same to everybody, and I learned that, and so over the years, personally, I don’t get angry, and I don’t make it about that person that I’m seeing that behavior, but I also improve my own behavior. I speak to people who are a generation older than me, or much more famous or much more wealthy. I remember when I was an entrepreneur and raising money for my company, like the first time I was out there with my passing the hat around to raise money for a seed round for the company that I started, there was this one very successful investor who would written a really pretty big check to get us started and he had a colleague who was, you know, 10x, and a very famous, very well known, very wealthy and also very private investor, but a very powerful personality, and he said, I think your company is doing pretty well. You’ve gotten some good traction. I think I’d like to introduce you to this other very well-known person. And I remember it was so interesting when he introduced us, he was pretty nervous. He was a generation older than me and a super successful guy himself, but he was kind of nervous talking to this ultra famous person, but I wasn’t. 

I had just learned over the… I just treat everybody equally. Talk about the facts and the ideas and where things could go and why I’m excited about and kinda doesn’t matter who they are. I talk to the same… Someone who’s 70-year-old billionaire and someone who’s a 25-year-old friend or colleague, kind of exactly the same. Didn’t phase me one way or the other, and I think that has served me well. It’s been a very useful skill to learn to speak this way with the same ideas and the same points that you’re excited abou. Regardless of the level or the status of the person you’re talking to, you treat them all with respect, assume that they’re intelligent, assume that they’re thoughtful, assume that… Try to communicate your ideas and your excitement in ways that they can get and they can understand, and all the other stuff about who they are, how famous they are, who cares? So that has served me well, and it came from this concept of keep asking why if you find yourself angry, why? If you’re angry at your spouse, why is that you’re really angry at your spouse? Is there something there about yourself that you’re not comfortable with? If you’re angry at your friend, at your colleague, at your boss, it’s someone who works for you, keep asking why. And then you may learn something surprising?

Sean: Safi, this is already so helpful, so useful.

I’m sure you have a treasure trove of some of these personal growth, I’ll just call them techniques, but I’m wondering, are there other actions you see the majority of people taking that create bad behavior, and if so, any other clear examples? Like you just articulated to help us understand those?

Safi: Well, obviously, following your curiosity has been something I think of as a incredibly useful guiding principle that can improve, ’cause we just talked about not only your ability to understand what you’re doing and why, and then tease out some of those internal dynamics, which allow you to get better, but also improving your personal relationship. So as an example, I’ve started a new habit or routine recommended by a friend, a colleague of mine, which I ask myself, a little spreadsheet where I have 10 questions. Have I done my best on X, Y or Z every morning and then you just sort of grade yourself on a one to 10. And it keeps certain important questions to ask yourself in your mind. Have I done my best on setting clear goals? have I done my best in sort of achieving those goals? But for me, have I done my best to listen with curiosity to my, for example, spouse, or to my kids, or to my colleagues? So the curiosity in terms of behaviors and relationships, whether it’s personal or professional, curiosity can help those relationships a lot too, because once you start listening with curiosity, there’s so many benefits to that that are surprising. 

Firstly, people understand that you really care about them. If you’re listening to them just to wait until their lips stop moving and you can argue your point or persuade them to come in your direction, which is a fairly common thing that I have stumbled into over the years as well, but if you’re listening with curiosity after they tell you something, you don’t just repeat it back, but you probe. What made you say that? What’s behind that? If they say, I can’t do something, you say, have there been times in the past that you actually were able to do that? What made those times different?

As soon as you start listening with curiosity, number one, people appreciate that you care about them, which is fantastic. Number two, they may learn something totally surprising and unexpected, they’re expecting to just… They’re gonna argue their side and you’re gonna argue your side and each one’s just gonna raise their voice and repeat the same stuff, which is not a very productive conversation. But if you start listening with curiosity, you can tease out new angles. You didn’t know that what they really cared about. You thought that what they really cared about was X, but actually underneath it, what they really cared about was Y, and even though it’s tough for you to satisfy X, it’s not that hard for you to satisfy Y.

So in terms of… You asked about what characteristics or behaviors or habits can help, that curiosity helps you not only with your internal stuff and understanding what are your habits that you wanna change, or what are things that you’re uncomfortable with yourself, that you’re not really thinking through, but it helps you in your personal and professional relationships. It’s not only at work by keep asking, by persisting and asking why, you really tease out what’s going on underneath, but also in your personal life. People feel cared, people feel like you wanna help them, you really engage, and that creates loyalty, it creates trust, it creates validation. So the curiosity kinda helps in many of these dimensions, that’s kind of one factor. 

I think you asked about other factors, is that right, Sean?

Sean: Yeah, I just wanna highlight the importance of the depth element there and teasing out those different angles. I’m just thinking about personal relationships and when you approach them with the methodology and the framework you just laid out, you really do discover so many new things, and I just love that. So I just wanted to highlight that ’cause it’s something that really resonates.

Safi: Yeah, and this is a shelter in place time, so we’re all having a lot more intense relationships with a smaller number of people, and it’s easy for that to escalate into tension. But learning to listen with curiosity is… Helps diffuse tensions, because instead of you’re arguing your side, you’re putting on a detective hat in saying, hmm, that’s interesting. Help me understand better X. Help me understand better Y. Help me understand better Z.

And that becomes a much less tense discussion than I want X, you want Y, I want X, you want Y, just over and over. It becomes a learning discussion, a curiosity discussion, an exploring discussion. So it definitely helps on the personal side, it definitely helps on the professional side. It helps in your ability to innovate because so many people try something new and then get some negative feedback and give up, and then move on to the next thing. In fact, that’s very popular in Silicon Valley with this whole sort of fail fast and pivot mantra.

Well, if you look at the invention of the transistor, the invention of digital cameras, or the invention of integrated chips, or the invention of almost every important breakthrough. Let’s take even search, right? There was 20 search companies before Google became successful, and pretty much every investor, by the time Google came around and said, oh, there’s 20 of these things. It never works.

What really makes a difference is learning to listen with curiosity, but in that particular case, if you’re trying to innovate, it’s something I called LSC, listen to the suck with curiosity.

Well, what is it that everybody is rejecting search for? Same thing with social networks. Why is it everybody when Mark Zuckerberg first came around with his idea in 2004, I wanna build a social network that connects people in this and that way. Well, it was maybe the 15th, or 20th, or 25th social network. There had been Friendster in MySpace and dozens of others, none of which had gone anywhere. So there was one investor who said… Almost every investor passed except for one who followed that listen to the suck with curiosity. So people said, well, there’s this company called Friendster right now. And it built up into a community, and it went from a few thousand people to a few hundred thousands, getting close to a million. And then it started to tank and everybody was leaving it, and so most investors said, yeah, yeah, I see. That’s what happens with every social network, they build up, and then everybody goes on to the next one, it’s just like a clothing fad. Well, this investor, who’s name was Peter Thiel said, is that really the case?

Let me do LSC here. Let me listen to that suck with curiosity. So he happened to have friends at Friendster behind the scenes, and he went and he got the data, asked them for the data of user retention, as he knew that they were having some trouble with their website.Now the website was crashing. So he went and got the data and user retention, and he analyzed the data and he said, wow, people are staying on the site for hours. They log on and then they stay for hours, and that’s despite the fact that they have kind of a flaky website that keeps crashing. I don’t think it’s a bad business model. If people are staying on a website for hours, even though that website is crashing all the time, they might have a real business model here. And the reason people are leaving is because they have a bad website, and there’s someone with a better website.

So he wrote a check to this guy, Mark Zuckerberg, and he said, I don’t think this social media, I think everybody else is wrong on the social network stuff. I think if you just get the website right, what they had not done is learn how to scale up to create a back-end robust database, when you go from a few thousand to a few million people. So if you get that back-end database right, you could have a real winner here. So I read a check for $500,000, and he sold it eight years later for a billion dollars.

Now, that’s the power of listening to the suck with curiosity. When you see something that other people are rejecting and they say it could never work, keep asking why. Are they really right, or are they missing something here? Is there something behind that suck that’s fascinating, that’s interesting, that’s different? And that’s what curiosity can unleash. So bottom line, curiosity is number one good free growth. If you’re getting angry, why? What’s there that you’re struggling with and not comfortable? Two, in your personal or professional relationships, it defuses tensions. It engages people, it creates trust, it creates bonds, it creates loyalty. They understand that you really care about them and care about their growth, and it allows you to find ways of working together that neither of you might have expected. And number three, if you’re trying to innovate or create something new, listening to that suck with curiosity, well, there’s an example of how it made one guy, billion dollars.

Sean: I know you’ve been in the cave working on your most recent project, so I’m not sure how much you’ve been exposed, but are there things of recently that have just been peaking year antennas a little bit when you’ve been listening to the suck with curiosity? Anything you think most people are wrong on right now?

Safi: Anything most people have wrong on right now… Well, one of the things that I find is interesting, and you sort of asked me about what are some frameworks that are helpful for thinking about the world around us, and one of the things that I’ve noticed is, that has been very helpful for me, it’s just the principle, in addition to following your curiosity, it’s just the principle of keeping it simple.

So, I had spent quite a while with some CEOs, and management teams, and executive teams, and it’s really surprising how many create complexity and leave things in sort of a pretty complicated state. Like let’s say you’re running a media organization and you’re thinking about what should your next strategic move should be. In the sort of outline, here is the 17 forces at work, and here’s my competitors, and this is why we wanna do this strategy. If you… Can’t explain what you’re trying to do and why you’re gonna go there and why it makes sense, in a way that your mother can understand it, you have a problem. You need to… The people who are most successful are the ones who can take a really complex situation and boil it down and make it simple, not simplistic, and the key to that is finding the right balance. You wanna keep it simple, but not simplistic.

You wanna say, here’s the three reasons we need to go in here. Our competitors are doing X, the customers want Y, we have advantage Z, that means if we move now in the next three months, we can burn our competitors and do a great job for our customers, bottom line. And that turns out to sound simple, but be much more complicated, much trickier than people understand, and actually, that’s where curiosity can help you. If you feel like you have an explanation that makes sense, you wanna ask yourself, is there a simple way to understand this? Is there a simple way to get to the essence of this? Is there something that I’m missing here? And that’s a lesson that I got from working in science, from actually one of my advisors when I was a graduate student, his name Lenny Susken, who worked a lot with Richard Feynman. My father had worked with him as well, and it was a lesson that came from Richard Feynman, who was a famous 20th century physicist who won the Nobel prize and made many important discoveries, but one of the things that people didn’t know as much about him and how he worked, and I learned from Lennie was he would figure… And I’ve seen in myself now, so many times, he would figure something out, maybe solve a difficult problem or come up with an idea, and the first… And then rather than just go present it or write it up as a paper or go tell people about it, he would do it over. And then he would do it over, and then he would do it a fourth time, and then he would do it a fifth time, and what happens is you have an explanation that might take 12 pages to go from start to finish. And then the second time you do it is like, well, actually it’s really not that complicated, it takes me… I can do the whole thing in five pages, and then the third time is like, actually, it’s much simpler than that. I can do the whole thing in two pages, and then finally he would get to the point where like, actually, I can do the whole thing in a paragraph. But it’s only if you keep forcing yourself to ask why. What is the real truth here? Is there a different way to see the same thing? So we’re being a little abstract in terms of talking about, let’s say a scientific idea, but it applies very much the same way in business, when you ask somebody or you’re talking about what’s the right strategy. If there’s a very complicated answer or it takes a long time to formulate, you say that might be the right answer, but let’s see if there’s a more… A different way to think about it. And in the process of trying to boil it down to here’s how I would explain it, I probably shouldn’t use the example of how should you explain it to your mother, because my mother is a tenured professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University, so there’s a lot of things that I could explain to my mother that wouldn’t work for your average person, but another way to say it is to an intelligent 12-year-old. You have to be able to explain your idea to an intelligent 12-year-old in a way that they get your idea and they get why you think it’s important, and why you think it’s the right idea. And if you can’t do that, if you rely on all sorts of fancy frameworks or theories or whatever, then you probably don’t really understand it. So that’s kind of one of the lessons that I got both from doing science and from running a business is a lot of your power, A lot of what makes people… Distinguishes people who are really successful is their ability to cut through the clutter and keep it simple.

Now that it doesn’t mean, you have to be very careful here, that doesn’t mean just ignore a lot of stuff and say, do this, or be really quick and sloppy about your idea. Yeah, we should go here. ’cause it’s a big market. 

What you wanna do, being simple, keeping it simple is really hard work. It’s like that whole line, the old line about writing from Hemingway, the dignity of an iceberg comes from the 90% of it, I actually forget the exact quote, but it’s something like the power and dignity of an iceberg comes from the fact that 90% of it is submerged under water, right? And it’s the same thing with seeing a duck going on a lake looks very common, you don’t see all of the legs turning super fast underneath it, you see it floating along. Keeping it simple is just like that.

You wanna be able to speak to your people or communicate with those that you work with and saying, here’s the bottom line, but behind those two or three things that you say in 10 seconds is a lot of work, having thought through a lot of angles, and then said, this is the most important thing to say in 10 seconds.

And people appreciate that.

So a lot of your power as a leader comes not… The first thing we talked about is tapping into curiosity on relationships, on strategy, on your own stuff that you’re struggling with. The second part, the second part is in your ability to keep it simple, to provide clarity for the people around you, and that’s not easy. People don’t invest enough in that. People say, oh, okay, here’s something short, and that should be good enough.

Well, if it’s short, but you haven’t done a lot of work in boiling down the really deep thinking to making it short, then people know that it’s just very superficial thinking.

On the other hand, if you haven’t… If you’re just giving them a lot of facts and a lot of data, then they’re overwhelmed, and they don’t get the clarity. So you have to do both, you have to do the hard work, that’s the dignity of the iceberg, all the stuff that’s underneath the water that they’re not gonna see. You have to do all that hard work, and then after that, boil it down into something simple. So then they just get the tip of the iceberg, and that’s like the writing in Hemingway. You just get a few chosen words, mostly nouns and adjectives, and you’re kind of blown away with the imagery that he creates. But what you don’t see is the fact that he wrote 10x of that and took out 9x. So he left just 10% of what you actually see and that I actually took that when I was doing on a separate field, that’s how I would write. Not like Hemingway style actually didn’t resonate for me, but the principle of writing 10x and then cutting out 9x is kind of how I write, and how I wrote the last book and how I’m thinking about the next books as well. 

So that was, to summarize, to keep it simple, number one, the power of curiosity, use that in relationships, and yourself, and thinking through strategies, listening to the suck with curiosity, that’s number one. Number two, invest in simplicity and providing clarity and simplicity for the people around you.

Sean: Yeah, Safi, I mentioned this to you before, but it’s one of the things I appreciate most about our conversations is your ability to take 90% of that iceberg and just distill that down. I was laughing a minute ago when you were mentioning Richard Feynman. I went down one of those rabbit holes this weekend watching some of his explainer videos, and one of the great ones is him explaining how fire works and you nailed it. Any intelligent 12-year-old can perfectly understand how fire works after watching that video, so I just love hearing about that.

You even hit on just the different fields you’ve been able to pull from because of whether direct access in terms of working in those fields or even just learning, just that whole multidisciplinary approach to learning, so I’m wondering on a daily, on a weekly basis, what is that additional 10x work you’re doing that you distill down? Where are you pulling from?

Safi: Reading.

So there’s a phrase that I keep in mind, which is, let’s call it a third secret super power, which anybody can work on. And that has helped me enormously in coming up with some really creative stuff that in hindsight, it doesn’t seem very difficult, but I think it’s surprising to people like when you mix physics, business, and history in a way that actually brings things together. And the phrase I keep in mind is the power of border dwellers, the power of border dwellers. And by that I mean placing yourself at the border of different fields, or different disciplines, or different industries.

So, just as an example, there are a lot of business books, many of them are written by, let’s say someone who’s been in one industry for a long time and they’re right about their industry, that can be good depending on the kind of book. There are a lot of science books. Those can be good if they’re engaging, fun, lively surveys or like Feynman’s books where he really thinks of things in fresh, simple ways, ’cause he keeps trying to find more interesting and more fresh ways of understanding the same question. There are science, sort of survey books, and there are sort of history books, but rarely are there books that bridge science described as new science idea. 

With business, let’s says CEOs experience running a public company with history, let’s go back into, you know, 17th century astronomy. And so the book that we spoke about, that I wrote and came out last year, Loonshots, mixes being a CEO of a public company or a private company, or trying to manage a business or be a leader, and trying to balance the artists and the soldiers and the creativity and innovation on the one side, the operations in the execution and the other side, and some fresh ideas about that with an idea from science. Take a glass of water and you stick your finger in it and you swirl it around, molecules just slash around your finger. But as you lower the temperature, all of a sudden that behavior completely changes. You can’t stick your finger in it anymore. The molecules go from slashing around to lining up rigidly. Why? There’s no CEO molecule telling them to all change their behavior at 32 Fahrenheit when the water freezes. They just do it.

And so that’s called a phase transition in science, so can one of these things help the other? Can understanding what happens when you stick your finger inside a glass of water help you think about how to manage a business as it’s growing?

In other words, the reason a lot of people have called me up over the last year, whether it’s in the US military, or Snapchat, or any of the… Spotify, or film studios, or media companies. Small companies that have started to experience hyper growth or have grown really big in the case of the US military, of course, it’s a very established 2 million person organizations, they start to feel that same phase transitions, the molecules, instead of slashing around the people, instead of being wildly innovative and coming up with creative new ideas, start to get very rigid and reject those ideas, even though it’s the same people and has nothing to do with the CEO telling them, Hey, innovator, Hey, focus on execution. There’s something about the inherent dynamics that’s going on.

So power of border dwellers, living on the border, or learning about what happens in that glass of water can give you fresh ideas about how to manage your business. So the power of border dwellers is once you place yourself on a border, once you start reading outside your comfort zone, once you read ideas in science or now, let’s go into history. When you really understand, I wrote about the rise and fall of Pan Am. Now you think, let’s say I’m running a tech company, or let’s say I’m running a manufacturing business, or a consumer business, what do I need to know about Pan Am? That happened 50 years ago, but they were the number two most recognized brand in the world after Coca-Cola. They were the most successful airline company, and then the history of that industry, widely loved, widely admired.

Why did they disappear?

And how does that tie to what happened to Polaroid which was the Apple of its day, the most successful consumer company? And how does that tie to what happened, what Steve Jobs did his first time at Apple, which was headed towards disaster in bankruptcy? And what did he learn from those two examples, the way you see that pattern and those two previous examples, what did he learn when he came back to Apple the second time around. How had he changed? And why did that make Apple succeed? 

So going into history and seeing those patterns can give you fresh ideas if you’re running a business. And so coming back to this third thing, the power of dwelling on borders, so for me, where that resonated as well, I’ve been in that business world with sort of blinders on running a business, taking care of all the people issues and fires yet to put out, and board member calls, and investor calls, and customer calls, and you know, somebody’s going off for pregnancy leave, and how do you fill that thing, and someone’s having this disaster and this thing’s blowing, all the usual fire drills that happen when you’re running a company day-to-day. To thinking about sticking your finger in a glass of water, to thinking about what happened with Pan Am, or Polaroid, or Steve Jobs, or even 17th century astronomy. What happened with Kepler, and Galileo, Newton, why did Kepler succeed and why did the others around him fail, and is there a common thread there that can help you with your current life or problems?

So what has helped me enormously and what I’ve seen a number of leaders who are very successful do is positioning yourself on the border between industries, between fields, between disciplines. So for example, we just mentioned Steve Jobs, the first time he was at Apple, it was kind of a disaster, and he was a young guy, he had created… Working with Steve Wozniak, the Apple 2 computer, one of the earliest personal work computers, and that was a big hit for about 12 months or 24 months until Commodore came around with their pet and Radio Shack came around with the RS80. And within a year or two IBM came with their first PC, and that was it. That was the end of Apple. They had lost pretty much all of their advantage and their market share was going down the toilet, and Steve Jobs said, well, I’m this awesome artist and we’re all about innovation, so lets… Here’s this project that this guy has been working on in the corner named Jeff Raskin that’s called the Macintosh project, where we have this user interface or graphical interface.

So Jobs after trying to work on the franchise projects that the next version of the Apple 2, the Apple 3, and the Lisa, it didn’t do very well in fleshing out this franchise project. So he took over the Macintosh project, got rid of Jeff Raskin and sai, alright, here’s our Macintosh Project. This is the awesome thing all you people who are working on the franchise projects, the Apple 3 and so on, or bozos. Well, the Macintosh, when it launched, was a flop as a product. It was a great publicity campaign with a famous 1984 ad, one of the legendary ads of all time, but as a product, it was too hot, it was too expensive, it overheated and sales after a few weeks, went crashing down close to zero, and the company was headed for bankruptcy and Steve Jobs was asked to leave.

What had he done? He really created this tension and exacerbated the tension between the artists working on something new and the soldiers who were delivering on the franchise at an unnecessary level. Calling all the soldiers bozos and creating so much hostility between those two groups at the street, between their two buildings was called the DMZ, the demilitarized zone. So people on both sides started leaving, and the company was headed for bankruptcy.

What had he learned 12 years later? Well, in those intervening 12 years, he had bought in part actually by accident to get back at Apple, after he’d left Apple he said, h, there’s this company, George Lucas has been doing this film stuff and he’s… For Star Wars and he’s built up this technical group that does some of the computer graphics for him, and they built this really great computer called the Pixar image computer, the Pick, and let me buy this little company, ’cause actually, George Lucas was getting divorced at the time and needed the cash, so let me buy this little company and see if we can build a computer and I can take on Apple sort of independently.

And so he worked on this computer, he bought this small company called Pixar to get an access to a new computer that he could do this sort of computer battle with his former company, with Apple. It turns out the computer part of that didn’t work out. The Pixar image computer was rapidly replaced with workstations and units, but they started doing this little thing on the side called movies, 3D animation. And then they came out with the movie called Toy Story, and he had originally actually tried to kill that movie business on the side, but that movie Toy Story became this huge hit. Steve Jobs took the company public, that was a brilliant financial move, and became a billionaire and made all of his money on Toy Story, actually not from Apple, the first time around, but from Toy Story and going public.

So when he got back to Apple the second time around, he was a different person, instead of saying, oh, all you people who are working on something new and innovative or great, and everyone else is a bozo, he had understood from being the previous few years in the film world, that you can’t do that. He had learned from the film world how people who are making movies are forced to balance the creative art, wildly creative artists who are filmmakers and actors, with the operators and producers that are focusing on time, on budget, on spec, delivering something consistently to customers, and in the film industry, you have no choice. You have… Everything’s a Loonshot, everything is a crazy idea that nobody will think will work, just like Toy Story, nobody thought you can make a 3D graphics movie. It was the first one. Everybody thought that was a crazy idea, but to do that takes artist and soldiers, the creatives and the operators working together hand-in hand. And he didn’t learn that in the tech industry, he learned that from the film industry. From those 12 years where he watched a guy named Ed Catmull build up Pixar into what it eventually became one of the most successful film studios in history, maybe second to Disney or comparable to the early days of Disney.

That’s the power of border dwellers. 

When Steve Jobs got back to Apple the second time around, he had learned from the film industry something that his other colleagues in tech had never had the advantage of. They had stayed in tech their whole lives, and they never got to see how another industry works.

So that’s the third thing you asked about frameworks, we talked about number one, the power of curiosity on so many dimensions, number two, the power of keeping it simple, like Richard, Feynman who finds fresh ways to think about older subjects and communicate that so an intelligent 12-year-old can understand it.

But number three is the power of dwelling on borders. So Jobs’ example is what he learned from the film industry, he went and brought back to Apple the second time around, and he brought in… First thing he did was promote a wild, beautiful, wildly inventive creative artist named Johnny Ives, who is this designer who designed all the Apple products, if you have them, iPhone and iPods, and the original iPods, and he was the original designer on any of those. But the second thing he did was import a guy from Compact Computer named Tim Cook, whose title, whose nickname when he was in charge of operations and inventory at Compact Computer, his nickname was The Atila the Hun of inventory.

We are the ultimate soldier, and Steve Jobs led not by saying, Oh, this is the great project I’m the Moses on the mountain and I’m raising my staff and I’m anointing the chosen project. He led by managing the touch and the balance between those two. Between the Johnny Ives artists and between the Tim Cook soldiers. Understanding that those two groups generally don’t like each other and generally don’t understand each other. The group that’s making the money rarely likes the group that’s spending the money and vice versa. So Jobs led not like this mythical Moses screaming upgrade product, but he led by balance. By being a gardener, managing the touch and the balance between these groups coming up with the new ideas, wild new ideas and the groups that are de-risking them and turning them into products and managing the touch and the balance between those two. And where did he get that model? That model came from the film industry.

That’s my view, and actually I’ve spent a lot of time with people who knew him during the intervening years, and I think that was a consistent view as well. But when people ask me over the last year about all these wacky ideas and Loonshots, and how you apply this idea of what happens when you stick your finger in a glass of water, to getting fresh new ideas about how to manage a business. In other ways the idea of the phase transition and applying that to a company, and then how do you tie that all into the rise and follow Pan Am or the hunt for U-boats in World War II and Nazi Germany and the Battle of the Atlantic between the Allies and the Germans, or the birth of modern science and the rise of the British empire and the fall of the Jin dynasty, and how do you connect these things? Well, that’s the power of being a border dweller.

And anybody can do it.

Again, I’m not a believer that there is stuff in your genes that tells you you can do X or Y, with some exceptions, I’m never gonna be a great basketball player. But you do it by reading, and you do it by stretching outside your comfort zone, you do it by… If you normally… Let’s say you’re in industry X, and most of your reading is consumed with trade journals about X, which is pretty common, I actually did that when I was running a company, I mostly read stuff in my industry. You get the power of dwelling in borders by reading things outside your industry, reading provocative ideas, provocative, it may be from science, it may be from history. Things that your competitors are not reading, that’s how you get a competitive advantage. You read about things that your competitors are not reading, which gives you ideas they may not have.

Sean: I love the insights and the power of these border dwellers. I wanna hit on that a little bit further. I would just love to get your insight though, you mentioned Pan Am and Kodak. Were they unaware of what was going to happen? Meaning today’s companies, they seem to have a much better grasp on this and what they need to do to continue to innovate. Do you think the companies today will be able to last and continue to evolve further into the future, or is this some inevitable evolution and that they’re gonna have and meet their destruction at some point? What’s your take on that?

Safi: What happened to Pan Am and what happened to Polaroid, they had these brilliant leaders, Juan Trippe in the case of Pan Am, who was an entrepreneur that started as a kid with… Who loved planes, and he got his hands on a tiny little plane and he began a little jet service from New York to the Hamptons. He could put one or two people at a time and started carrying people back and forth, and he grew that into this Pan Am International, the most successful airline ever. And Polaroid was something very similar, was a guy named Edwin Land, who was an equivalent, unbelievable entrepreneur, who just had an idea when he was a young guy of literally19 years old about how to create a filter that would separate the two kinds of light, the two kinds of polarization of light, which is a 100-year-old problem that no one had solved. And he solved it as a 19-year-old kid. Created a cheap inexpensive filter, the Polaroid filter, and that launched this whole company that became kind of the Apple of its day, and he came up with that as a young kid as well, and then continued to innovate, so these are examples of phenomenally innovative leaders.

The problem was not that they lost their hunger, the problem was not that they grew fatter or complacent. The problem wasn’t that they said, well, it’s enough innovation now. They stayed hungry their entire lives. They loved innovation. 

The problem was what I called the Moses trap. The problem is when you have a very strong leader at top, and this is exactly what happened to Steve Jobs the first time around, and why Steve Jobs coming back to Apple the second time around was escaping the Moses trap, an example of how to use the power of being a border dweller to escape the Moses trap. But the Moses trap is this, you have this incredible… And you asked about a will to keep happening or companies escape this, and I think it will keep happening unless you, and until you understand this Moses trap, what happened with Juan Trippe and Pan Am, what happened with Edwin Land, what keeps happening over and over. So the Moses trap is when you have a person on top who is a product person. When we think about innovations or new ways of doing something, people typically think about products, oh, you created the iPod, that’s a great new product, or, oh, you graphical user interface on Macintosh, that’s a great new product. Or with Edwin Land, oh, you created instant film printing, well, that’s a great new product. Or with Juan Trippe, oh, you brought jet engines to the masses, which is true, he was a guy who created jet travel, that’s a great new product.

The Moses trap is when you have somebody on top who’s a powerful leader like Moses, and they have a blind spot. They’re product people, they think of innovation as product and they miss the other kind of innovation, which is in strategy, which is in different ways to reach your customers that don’t involve or make subtle changes that don’t involve any new change in product. 

For example, and here’s how it played in Pan Am. Juan Trippe was, as I said, this huge product guy, he loved engines, he would cut up planes and work with plane designers and make bigger planes, faster planes, and every time, every cycle, he would just work on making bigger, faster planes with bigger, faster engines. Anytime there was a new engine, he put it into his plane. It’s a lot like tech people who see, oh, our job is to make a bigger faster computer, or a more powerful faster computer, or a chip that works 10% better or faster. When you have someone at the top who’s focused, who thinks innovation is just product, product, product, like Juan Trippe, thought about Pan Am was just bigger, faster planes, bigger, better engines, that’s when you’ll lose to a competitor who thinks about the other type of innovation. So I call the first one, P-type, product type. The other one S-type for strategy type.

So what happened was, there was another guy named Bob Crandall, who was running another airline called American Airlines, and this other guy, Bob Crandall didn’t know anything about engines. He was not a plane guy, he was a CEO, but he had never taken apart engines like Juan Trippe had. He had worked at Hallmark Greeting Cards, he worked at a banking company, he was a finance guy. But one thing he really did like is finding creative strategies, finding creative things that didn’t make… That would increase business, but had nothing to do with new products. So he started something called frequent flyers. It doesn’t take any new product, no new technology, but that was a big hit. Turns out that people love frequent flyer miles. He started something called… He began using on American Airlines, something called hub and spoke, instead of trying to fly our planes everywhere all over the map, let’s create a local hub and then fly in and out of that hub. That turned out to be incredibly helpful. And then he came up with this wild idea, which everybody said was crazy, it was a crazy idea, he said, you know what, we have this reservation system that all our internal agents use to do bookings. Why don’t we take the internal reservation system that has the American Airlines logo on it, and just give it away for free to everybody. Just like that. People say, are you crazy? You can’t give your internal system that you built and cost you money for free to everybody, to every travel agent outside your company in the country, in the world. Who does that? If you have a product, you charge money. If it costs you this much to build a system, you charge. He said no, I think I’m gonna give it away for free.

And he did. That grew into the save a reservation system that every travel agent used, and guess what, American Airlines booking went way, way up, and everybody else’s went way, way down.

And when deregulation came, Pan Am was out, they had these big expensive airlines and they couldn’t compete, but American Airlines had come up with these subtle changes in strategy that made a huge difference. Giving away their reservation system, frequent flyers, started to collect all this data from these reservation systems that they didn’t expect, and they could use that data, that was the beginning of what was called the yield management or big data.

Moral of the story, you would ask me, will I see this happening over and over? Yeah, because the Moses trap is very tempting. If you have a powerful leader who loves innovation and has a blind spot, thinks innovation equals product, that’s what happened to Pan Am. Juan Trippe just kept wanting bigger and bigger engines, and when the seven… When he saw a new kind of engine, he went to Boeing and said, I want you to put this in a plane, and that became the Boeing 747, that cost billions and billions of dollars. So he was spending money and building bigger, better planes with bigger, newer engines. And his competitor was just doing the subtle changes in strategy that involved no new products, and Pan Am disappeared and the only airline, there were 300 major airlines that went through deregulation, all of them went bankrupt except for one within the next 10 years, and that was American Airlines. Subtle changes in strategy. 

So if leaders understand this point of the blind spot and avoid the Moses trap, they can avoid some of these problems. So for example, back to Steve Jobs, when he went back to Apple, he had been a pure product guy. He had been absolutely following the same path as Juan Trippe at Pan Am, and Edwin Land at Polaroid, just wanted awesome new cameras and awesome new products, and got completely lost down the rabbit hole of better, faster product and missed subtle changes in the market, stuff like digital cameras. He understood the technology but didn’t understand that there was a new business model, a new strategy that made sense there, and so Polaroid disappeared and Steve Jobs started the same way as both of those. It was all about building a bigger, faster computer, he started with Apple 2 and then he went to a different kind of computer, and then he bought the Pixar image computer, ’cause it was a bigger faster computer, and then he started his next company called Next. What was the point of the Next? Build a bigger, faster computer. What happened to Next? It was a disaster. Nobody wanted it. Just like the 747. And what happened to the Pixar Image computer, which the Next computer was maybe $10,000 when everybody was paying $1,000 for computer, the Next computer was maybe $10,000. Well, the Pixar computer was $100,000. They were just like the 747. That’s how we talked about power of border dwellers. This is how you see history repeating, and you see the patterns. Steve Jobs was headed down that path, of the 747, headed down the path of Edwin Land, and it’s like instant film printing or building some wild new product, because they were all Moses’ on top of the mountain, and they all had that blind spot of innovation equals product.

What happens? He started to see… He came back to Apple and yeah, he helped… He managed his artists and soldiers and got the Johnny Ives and the Tim Cooks and he balanced that internal organization and internal design, but he also looked at… Started to understand strategy type innovations, again, picking up from seeing things differently in the film industry, because when he’d been in the tech industry, the Next didn’t work, the Pixar image computer, he’d been completely down that bigger, faster, better… Going down that bigger, faster, better path. And so when he got back, he helped create some new products, he brought simplicity instead of doing 50 different products, we’re gonna do four, but the other thing he did is he came up with some strategy choices. He said, well, Apple has gone down the same path as IBM, of opening up their operating system for a lot of… Sorry, as the IBM clones of opening up their operating system for everybody to use. He said, we’re gonna create a closed model. That didn’t involve any new products or any new technology, just said, our system is gonna be closed. I know you don’t like it, but we’re gonna make it a beautiful closed system, and that’s gonna be different than our competitors, where everybody’s doing the same thing and they’re thousands of clones. We go off, we can offer our customers something different. That was a strategy choice, not a product choice. 

Same thing was putting songs online. There were a lot of songs online, they were by that point, a lot of shops online, but everybody said you can’t put songs online in charge 99 cents for a song. Nobody does that. And besides music piracy is everywhere, nobody’s gonna pay for songs when they can just search and get mp3s online and download wherever they want from Napster or whatever.

And he said, I think there’s some value here.

There was no new product, no new technology shops were online, songs were available. He just said, let’s try a different strategy. We’ll do a closed system and we’ll charge people for the songs. Boom. It worked. 

So what happened, and the way Steve Jobs escaped that Moses trap and he was in there, he was absolutely headed down that direction is number one, he led like a gardener rather than a Moses, managing the touch and the balance between those artists and soldiers, shepherding the ideas and the feedback back and forth between those two, and number two, he learned to be ambidextrous. He learned to watch his blind side, watch for the blind spot. He had been a product, product, product, product, product, product person, and now he expanded, well, let’s actually think about for our new products and really different creative strategies for this wild new product called an iPod, let’s do this weird little strategy of closing the system and putting songs online, which nobody had done before.

So that’s kind of the how you apply the power of border dwellers to thinking differently as a leader and escaping this Moses trap, ’cause you started this with the question of, do I think it’s sort of inevitable that companies will follow down this path. No, I think companies that have gotten it right, Google as an example, they created a great product, they had a very new interesting technology for search, but then they found a very different way to monetize it. So they have… One of the things that’s helped them succeed is that they’ve been good at both product and strategy, giving away their operating system and right for free. Didn’t involve creating Android. It was a surprising strategic move that worked very well for them.

Sean: I absolutely love these stories. It was funny, you were mentioning American Airlines and just their booking system and what they did, it reminds me of Rich Barton, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him and his framework of power to the people, so he started an Expedia, Zillow and GlassDoor, and the same thing, he took all these back-end systems and just made them open to the people, but it has me wondering, along the lines of smaller companies that I know you took a two-person company all the way up from start-up to IPO. How does this apply to those really small early startups?

Safi: So number one, one of the things I talked about is that you wanna balance your artists and the soldiers and the creative innovative urge with focusing on time, on budget, on spec, and the reason that it’s so difficult is that they’re opposite activities. In one case, you’re trying to take risk, in another case, you’re trying to minimize risk, one case you’re trying to do… Try 10 different things, nine of which should fail. You’re trying to maximize risk, ’cause not if you’re trying to create something new and you’re not failing, you’re doing a bad job because you’re not taking enough risk. You are trying… If you aren’t failing the problem ’cause you have to typically go through… You have to go through those nine things that don’t work to find that 10th thing that changes the world, whether it’s a new technology and new algorithm, a new business model, a new strategy, you have to try nine things. Really push the boundary before you discover that 10th thing, why? Because if there weren’t nine failures in front of that 10th thing, somebody else would have been there already.

So if you’re not maximizing risk on the one side, on the one hand, on the one side with this group of artists, and I’ll come back to what you asked about how you do this as a small company, and this is where I’m going with this, the point is, you need to try those nine things, you need to fail and get comfortable with failing, and that’s a very different mindset. If you’re not doing that, your competitor, who is doing that, will discover that 10th thing before you, and then you’ll see it too late when it’s a bullet coming to your head to take out your business. So on the one hand, you wanna maximize risk and fail a lot to get to that 10th thing that’s fantastic. On the other hand, and this is the challenge, you need to minimize risk. 

If you have a sales guy knocking on a customer’s door, opens the door, customer opens the door and you hand them a tester and you say, here’s your toaster sir. And the guy says to the toaster, I ordered a television. Okay, you’re not gonna have a business for very long if you can’t get your basic operations on time, on budget, on spec, consistently with quality to customers, you won’t have a business.

So doing that right means minimizing risk. You can’t have nine out of 10 things fail, you can’t knock on 10 customer doors and nine of them we give them the wrong stuff. It’s exactly the opposite.

So your question was, what about a small company? Well, that’s a great question, because in a large company, as we just talked about, let’s say Steve Jobs, when he came back to Apple, on the one hand, you had the Johnny Ives of the world working on wild crazy stuff, trying lots of different ideas and lots of different experiments and failing a lot until they come up with something that really works. On the other hand, he had Tim Cook whose job to minimize risks. And this is the tension, this is, I call it the beautiful baby problem.

If you think of it as your artists are working on something new, when an artist works on something new and they finally find that thing that they’re really excited about to them, it’s like a beautiful baby full of potential. To the soldier, it’s a shriveled up rasisin and covered in vomit and poop, and that’s the tension.

One side sees it iass a beautiful baby, the other side sees it as a shriveled up raisin covered in vomit and poop. Beautiful baby, vomit and poop. And you want that tension.

This is where people go wrong. I say, oh, let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya. No. You want that tension, you want your artists excited about the potential of that beautiful baby. If they’re not, what are they doing? They’re not creating something really interesting, it’s the wrong artist. You want them excited. You want that attention. They’re both right. It is a beautiful baby and it is covered in vomit and poop, both are right. You need both to succeed, you need that beautiful baby, potential, excitement and energy, and you need the soldiers that are there to say, well, that’s great, but let’s figure out where are the flaws? What’s the poop? How do we clean it up? How do we mitigate the risk? How do we operationalize it? Just having the idea, to use a sports analogy is getting the ball from your goal line to your five-yard line, okay. Turning that idea into a product that you can deliver consistently is the soldiers working with the artist to get it from the 5 yard line, the 95 yards down the rest of the field, so you need both. 

Now, large company, you can create separate groups that are specialized in A and B, and that’s fine, but a small company, if you’re two people, if you’re five people, even if you’re just one person like me, now I’m writing and advising working with companies, or a small number of people on my team, how do you do that? When you can’t, if you’re a small company, and you can’t hire Johnny Ives to do X, and Tim Cook to do Y. When you’re a small company, you need to separate that role, those roles in time. That means if you’re the leader or the manager, you need to work, guide your team, be mindful of which mode you are in, at what time. 

For example, you say, listen, we are gonna take two days this week, and we are going to take off our operation on time, on budget, on spec hat, and we’re gonna put on our wild creative artist hat. And I want you guys to come up with the craziest, dumbest ideas that you thought may never work, and we’re gonna put them all on the table and instead of saying, why are they stupid? We’re gonna say, how might we make this work?

Not only how might we make this work, but even more importantly, how might our competitors make this work and use this crazy idea, which we don’t think is worth much, under what conditions or scenarios might a competitor actually weaponize this idea? Turn it around and use it against us and take our business. So you take off your operation on time, on budget, on spec hat, where you’re de-risking everything, then you focus on the stuff with the biggest risks, and you say, how might they work? What might our competitors be doing that could come in to kill us? And once you understand that, say, wait a minute, how about if we did that? How about if we did that to them? How about if we turned this weapon around and used it against them? How about if we came up with this crazy idea? How might we make that work?

So you start with maybe a 100 ideas, you boil it down to 30 ideas, and at the end of the day, maybe three wacky crazy ideas or a Loonshots that you wanna pursue, and they may be both on the product side and on the strategy side, and at the end of that one or two day period, you say, okay, team, we are now gonna take off the wild crazy artist hat and we’re gonna put back on our soldier hat and we’re gonna march these three ideas down the field. We’re gonna de-risk them, we’re gonna mitigate them, we’re gonna use metrics, we’re gonna measure on time, on budget, on spec. So if you are leading or managing a small team, you have to be very good at taking on and taking off hats and being very clear with your people. Now we’re gonna be in artist mode and we’re gonna work on creative wild new ideas, which are very high risk, and now we’re gonna maximize risk. I want you all to suspend this belief of what might or might not work and let’s just explore and go into dreamland.

Okay, it’s the end of the day or the end of the two-day period, the three-day period at the end of the retreat, and we’re gonna take that off and now we’re gonna minimize risk. That’s how you do it on a small team, but the key there is to be mindful of the mode, to be really good at what hat you’re wearing when, because if you don’t, you’re gonna completely confuse your team. Everybody maximize risk, now everybody minimize the risk, now everybody maximize risk, now everybody minimize risk. You’re gonna be a fluid now, you’re gonna be a solid, you’re gonna be a fluid, now you’re gonna be a solid. You just get mush. 

So when you’re a small team, you can’t afford to build one group doing this and one group doing that, but what you can do is separate those roles and times. You have a lot of other advantages that it’s easier to motivate your people when you’re a smaller company. Easier for you to engage people and connect with them with the big mission when you’re a small company, but the challenge is exactly what you just asked, which is, how do you do this in a small company setting? And the answer is, you separate those roles in time. Was that helpful?

Sean: You have no idea actually. How helpful, both personally, and I’m sure, for plenty of people listening. One thing I’d like to pull out of that though is thinking about the early teams, and I know you’ve discovered some untapped talent in the past. What are you looking for when you’re trying to build out that team?

Safi: So I would say three things, one, there’s a certain level of raw intelligence and problem solving horsepower. You don’t need to be a nobel laureate, but you need to enjoy problems and have a reasonably good skill at thinking through problems and solving problems, and that… One thing I learned the hard way is you might like a lot of other things about a person and really connected with them, and be very charming and charismatic, but if they are not really interested in solving problems, if they haven’t spent a lot of time and solving problems, if they’re not good at it, you can’t make them better at it. It takes too long. It’s too hard. I don’t believe people are genetically… There may be some genetic predisposition, but you can learn that, and I’d rather have people have learned that somewhere else. So number one, there’s a certain raw intelligence and problem-solving ability that you wanna see, number one. Number two, you wanna see curiosity, you wanna see do they get curious about stuff? What are some examples of where they’ve hit some roadblocks and used curiosity in the past to help identify new solutions? So that’s, again, some things depend on the role you’re looking for, if you’re looking to hire an accountant, you don’t really need a lot of innovation and creativity, you need someone who’s gonna be a good account, so again, you need to be mindful of are you hiring for an artist? Are you hiring for a soldier? What role are you hiring for? But let’s say you’re hiring for someone, you’re looking for working on products or strategy or business model, for example. Number one, there’s sort of raw intelligence, number two, there’s curiosity. Number three, there’s… Personal impact, personal relationship question, would I wanna sit on a plane next to this person for six hours… Actually, that’s a different question, COVID times, would I wanna be on the Zoom call with this person for an hour?

Because so much of working together effectively depends on trust and depends on teamwork, and so if you don’t have that, you have someone who just feels very shifty or feels untrustworthy or feels like maybe they have real integrity issues or ethical issues. It’s just gonna poison the whole organization. 

So you want a certain level of raw intelligence, one, you wanna see that curiosity, number two, number three you want that… Do I wanna sit in on a plane next to this person for a long time?

You wanna be very careful about that. You don’t wanna just hire people who talk good… Talk good. That’s not a good example… People who are just great talkers and charming, because that’s a very easy trap in interviews. So you want that raw intelligence, you want the curiosity, but you do want some ability to work well in a team.

And then I would… I think those are certainly… Again, it depends on what role you’re looking at, you’re looking for, but those are sort of generic, problem solving skills, curiosity, personal impact, and I guess a fourth thing is a level of energy and passion. If you… Especially, again, it depends on the role. If you’re hiring an accountant, you may not need someone who’s jumping through the roof, but if you want somebody to lead product or lead business development or lead customer relationships, you need somebody with energy and passion, so that’s kind of the four things.

Sean: Incredibly helpful once again. I’ve mentioned this already, but your ability to distill down to make things so clear and simple is incredibly helpful, so I wanted to thank you for that.

I know we’re gonna wrap up here in a minute, you’ve gotta get back to the cave and the projects you’re currently working on, but I would just love to see if you have any recommendations with that multidisciplinary approach to learning with border dwellers. If you were only gonna be selecting a handful of books to read or articles, are there certain ones you think would provide some good context for people trying to understand these borders a little better?

Safi: Well, let’s see, I… One thing I could tell your audience that if you want more, you can email me. First name at last name dot com, safi@bahcall.com, and I’ll send you for free a PDF for the first chapter of Loonshots, which captures a lot of the stuff we’ve just been talking about. I decided to make that free just a few months ago, because especially now fighting COVID and what we need in the biomedical world, we need Loonshots more than ever. And especially for businesses, we were thinking about how do we come out of this crisis? How do we lead in crisis? How do we come out of this crisis stronger and faster than our competitors? What you need to do is balance the sort of operational efficiency stuff of lowering your cost and getting them under control with the new Loonshots that you can develop during this time while your competitors are just trying to save their ships. If you can actually develop really impressive, creative new ideas at the same time as you are putting out fires, you can come roaring out the other end of this crisis. 

So one thing is just send me an email, or if you go on my website, loonshots.com, and there’s a place you can enter your email to get these ideas email to you once or twice a month. And then that will have a link, you put your email there that will give you a link to getting this first chapter as well. 

It’s a little… I actually haven’t… I love books so much. There’s so many, it’s hard for me to think right off the top of my head. I learned a lot by… There’s actually so much you can learn from World War II on strategy and products and technology and managing innovation. One thing that I found was a good starting point for me was just reading Vannevar Bush’s memoirs, pieces of the action. He was a guy who got a two million person organization in the US military to turn around and innovate astonishingly fast without dropping the ball on execution. And he wrote, you can get it on Amazon, it’s out of print, but you can… I think you can still get it on Amazon or… Actually, I think I might have actually put it online on my website somewhere, just ’cause I mentioned it before, and it’s difficult to find ’cause it’s out of print, I just put the PDF on my website. But his personal story of how he went from an engineer to joining the largest organization, largest organization in the world, and making them unbelievably innovative during a time of crisis, and then use that innovation to help turn the course of World War. It kind of makes whatever little problems we’re facing with our 10-person, 50-person 100-person and even 1,000-person company, seem pretty small by comparison. If he was able to do that with the 2 million person organization during the course of World War, we can probably all do that. So if I had to pick one book, and actually that’s the story, part of that story is what I tell on that first chapter of Loonshots, which I can email or you can get if you go online. If there was one book to read, I would probably pick Vannevar Bush’s memoir Pieces of the Action.

Sean: I love it, recommendations we’d never gotten before, and I’ll make sure we have that linked up in the show notes, they can receive the first chapter there. One final one here for you, if you could sit down for an evening of interviewing anyone dead or alive, but not a family member or close friend, who would you choose?

Safi: That’s a good question.

Well, we talked about Richard Feynman, but I actually… If I were to go back in history, I would love to speak with Johannes Kepler. People don’t realize they give so much credit to Isaac Newton for launching Modern Science or really transforming our species from thinking about, oh, the world works based on Gods and things inside nature, things inside the heavens are being… Controlling what we see in nature, and they give credit to Newton for helping launch what’s probably the most transformative single idea in the history of our species, which is that underlying these things that we see around us, what we now call laws of nature. And people give credit to Newton. But in fact, if you look back and you had had to pick one person who really drove that idea, it would be Johannes Kepler. And that’s because for 2,000 years, people had said, well, the planets and the stars in the sky, they all move the way the gods tell us… And they move in these circles, and he just looked and he said, it just doesn’t work. That’s just not… Even though he was a religious person, and of course those were different days, everybody was very religious, he said, what all these religious leaders and divine rulers have been telling us and the ancient Greeks that we worship have been telling us, it doesn’t work. And I think there are these laws of nature, and they’re telling us the planets move in this very different way, and he wrote down those laws. It took him many years, but he really broke the bonds of this legacy of 2,000 years of thinking, and in fact, it was to explain Kepler observations, that Newton came up with some of the basic principles of gravity with a few other people who helped along the way. 

So I’d love to talk to Kepler and under… That would be just an incredible experience and going back in history, because that was a turning point… Maybe the biggest turning point in the history of our species.

Sean: You mentioned an incredible experiences, and I really feel like that every time I’m fortunate enough to talk with you, and the word that I think is gonna sum up this conversation was the word that summed up your previous year, and that’s around curiosity. Safi, I know you’ve got a lot you’re working on right now that we weren’t even able to tap into, so I think we’re not a dot a round three at some point. Anywhere else you want the listeners staying connected with you? Of course, we’ll have the website linked up and a lot of the articles you write in addition to the book Loonshots, which it was one of my favorite books that I’ve come across over the last decade so we’ll definitely have that linked up, but anywhere else you want the listeners staying connected with you?

Safi: No, they can email me directly. As I said first name at last name on my website, they can get the first chapter, and I think it’s been kind of interesting for me is with a small handful of people, I started to develop a close one-on-one relationships, like CEOs and people who are leading companies and that’s been very satisfying. So I’m exploring taking on a few more of those in balance with the research projects that I’m doing right now. So people, email me or go on the website, they can see all the latest articles or stay in touch directly.

Sean: Great, well, once again, Safi Bahcall, I can’t thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There.

Safi: Thanks a lot, Sean, thanks for having me.