* Instant Wall Street Journal bestseller * Translated into 18 languages * #1 Most Recommended
Book of the year (Bloomberg annual survey of CEOs and entrepreneurs) * An Bloomberg Financial
Times Forbes Inc. Newsweek Strategy + Business Tech Crunch Washington Post Best Business
Book of the year * Recommended by Bill Gates Daniel Kahneman Malcolm Gladwell Dan Pink Adam
Grant Susan Cain Sid Mukherjee Tim Ferriss Why do good teams kill great ideas? Loonshots
reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges
everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs. Safi Bahcall a physicist
and entrepreneur shows why teams companies or any group with a mission will suddenly change
from embracing new ideas to rejecting them just as flowing water will suddenly change into
brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small
shifts in structure that control this transition the same way that temperature controls the
change from water to ice. Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the
hunt for terrorists online and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings Bahcall shows how a
new kind of science can help us become the initiators rather than the victims of innovative
surprise. Over the past decade researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of this
new science-the science of phase transitions-to understand how birds flock fish swim brains
work people vote diseases erupt and ecosystems collapse. Loonshots is the first to apply
this science to the spread of breakthrough ideas. Bahcall distills these insights into
practical lessons creatives entrepreneurs and visionaries can use to change our world. Along
the way readers will learn how chickens saved millions of lives what James Bond and Lipitor
have in common what the movie The Imitation Game got wrong about World War II and what really
killed Pan Am Polaroid and the Qing Dynasty. If The Da Vinci Code and Freakonomics had a
child together it would be called Loonshots. -Senator Bob Kerrey
