Leadership Notes #55

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Interview: Safi Bahcall

Safi Bahcall is a former public-company CEO, physicist, award-winning entrepreneur, author of the international bestseller Loonshots, and frequent speaker and advisor on innovation and strategy.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries – which combines physics, business, and history – has been translated into 21 languages and was the #1 most recommended book of the year in Bloomberg’s annual survey of CEOs and entrepreneurs. Loonshots was an instant WSJ bestseller; was selected as a best business book of the year by Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, Inc., the Washington Post, and others; and has been recommended by Bill Gates, Daniel Kahneman, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Ferriss, Gen. (ret) Stanley McChrystal, and more.

Safi received his BA from Harvard summa cum laude, completed his PhD in physics at Stanford, and served for three years as a consultant at McKinsey and Company. In 2001, he founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led the company’s IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years. In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s council of science advisors (PCAST) on the future of national research. He currently works with CEOs and leadership teams on innovation and strategy, and is completing the research for his next book.

Below is a partial transcript of Safi’s interview as part of the a webinar series of the Center for Global Leadership.

Potolicchio: You graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, the highest honors possible there, and you earned your PhD at Stanford. What are some of your secrets to mastering complicated information and synthesizing a wide array of disciplines? For instance, in writing this book we are discussing today, you read over 5000 journal articles in at least 14 different disciplines, yet you weave in this capacious knowledge with such agility. In order to pull something off like this, you have to be a really good learner. What are some of the tactics that you have to learn effectively?

Bahcall: One thing I’ve found helpful is actively cultivating curiosity. There’s an old Mark Twain line: “Whenever I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.” Some people are like that with curiosity: “Oh, this is something I don’t understand, it will probably be difficult to figure out, that’s uncomfortable, so I’ll just wait until that feeling goes away.”  Doing exactly the opposite is what helps with learning. You notice when you spot something that’s new or surprising or doesn’t make sense, and then lean into it that feeling: “Ooh here’s something new I get to play with and explore.” And then you dive in and have fun.

A second thing that stops people not only in learning, but in their careers, is failing to act when their learning curve in their job has plateaued. I've always taken a plateau as a sign that it's time to think about a change. One reason many people don't consider a switch, aside from financial issues, is that they visualize a big mountain of new stuff to learn in front of them. They think “I’ve mastered my field, I’m at the top of the hill, and if I switch, I’ll be starting at the bottom.”  When I was in science, for example, I switched from particle physics to mathematical physics to condensed matter physics. Every time I switched, I started at the bottom. It was the same when I switched into business, then when I switched into starting a company, then when I switched to writing, and more recently when I switched into my current project. But I love going up those hills. You’re asking new questions, finding new puzzles, discovering new ideas, everything is new. Learning to enjoy that climb, to look for new hills, will keep you curious, energized, having fun – at any age.

Potolicchio: When you were at Stanford, you studied under a lot of legends who were your advisors, Lenny Susskind, who did Particle Physics, the Nobelist, Laughlin who did Condensed Matter Physics. Now, you are working on something, it might be a bit secret, so I cannot say too much about it. It is in a totally different field and I know a Harvard professor thinks you are going to win the Nobel Prize in that field for some of the breakthroughs that you have worked on and you are compelling people in that new field to support your work. How do you find a way to attract patrons, supporters, and mentors in your field? Do you have any tips for us on how we can try to attract this support?

Bahcall: By coincidence just last week I reached out to a well-known figure in a field where I am an outsider, economics. Like most elite academic disciplines, it’s fairly closed to outsiders. Despite that, my cold email got a very warm reply. So rather than give you generic answers, let’s get specific. I’ll find the email and deconstruct it for you; that’s more like real science: looking at data and trying to extract patterns. None of this was consciously planned, I just typed it out in a minute or two – but it may be helpful for students. OK here it is (a few things redacted for privacy):

“Hi [name omitted], We have not met but I will be in town for …”  I start by acknowledging a possible negative (“I don’t know this person emailing me”) and address it. Good sales is about anticipating the questions going through the mind of the person you are talking to and answering them before they ask. Here, the first thing you may think when you get a personal email is “Do I know this person?” So I answer that right away. Then I mention I will be passing through town. That sets a more casual, not desperate, tone; I’m not stalking him. As soon as somebody feels you are desperate, it’s like in dating, it’s a turn off.

My next sentence is: “Although my training is in theoretical physics (with a subsequent career in business), I have spent quite a bit of time going through the past 60 or so years of academic [specialized subfield] economics literature“.  A key to good writing, especially non-fiction, is surprise. Successful people tend to be very busy. So every sentence should make them want to read the next sentence. That next sentence is surprising. First, you don’t see a theoretical physics background every day. I also knew the recipient had some interest in that field, so that’s a bit more hook. And it signals I’m probably not a crank (the extra adjective ‘theoretical’ is something usually only academics use). The ‘subsequent career in business’ adds a bit more surprise and hook (what business? It’s not revealed.) And finally more surprise and hook: A reader may be thinking “Why the hell would anybody slog through 60 years of literature?” (also not revealed). Now there are two more things going on with that sentence. First is another key to good writing: the slow reveal. You don’t pour forth all the background details at once. You omit (see Hemingway’s ‘theory of omission’). Finally, I’m anticipating a negative, a reason to ignore, and addressing it. The negative has to do with physicists’ well-deserved reputation for being arrogant. There is a long history of physicists telling economists what economists should be doing. Which does not go over very well, as you can imagine, especially because the physicists usually have not taken the time to truly understand the topic and are making silly claims. Because of that, economists are justified in being skeptical when physicists reach out. Saying that I had a career in business creates some distance from that history, and saying that I have invested in trying to understand their literature shows respect for his profession.

Then I wrote “I very much enjoyed and found your textbooks and many of your papers helpful.” That signals I have done homework, and won’t be asking him to give me a free lecture on the basics, stuff I could get just by reading what he’s written elsewhere.

Finally: “I have a handful of questions about the literature and wondering if you will be in the office on the following dates and available for a few minutes, I promise I will not take much of your time.” Here’s what that does: it eases the fear that I’m trying to sell him something, it shows that I respect his time, and it makes an easy ask: answering a few questions about what he has written. A common problem for busy academics (or authors) is that people who read and like what you’ve written decide for some reason that they want to meet you and tell you their life story. That sentence reassures him that’s not why I am reaching out. And then I end there. Which also shows respect: no wasting his time with oversharing. I said my training is in physics and business and I had some questions, but I didn’t say what kind of physics or or what type of business or why I had those questions. Or why I have been reading through 60 years of academic literature.

I closed with something I think my literary agent first suggested to me. He said when you’re reaching out for blurbs, always offer as your final sentence an easy way out. It’s counterintuitive, but it helps. It lowers pressure. So I added: “If you are not around or available, no problem at all, perhaps on my next visit .”

Potolicchio: That is wild because the usual success rate, particularly when you are writing to Nobel-caliber academics, would probably be close to zero at that stage. Obviously, you have a leg-up, your name is a boldface name and you have an established and rarefied pedigree. So you have an in-built advantage at this point in your career. So this technique you just shared is the hook, a way to garner attention. Let’s now assume that you have now had the coffee with this prospective mentor. Are there any do not harms? Are there any must-dos? For instance, one thing that a mentor told me was “Never ask anyone Will you be my mentor?”, what you should do is just talk about discrete problems that you need advice on instead of coming to some sort of formal agreement because, again, as you say, it is too threatening, too much of an obligation. Any lessons that you have after you have had that first meeting?

Bahcall: First, try to add value. After we met and spoke, which was a great meeting by the way, very helpful and enjoyable, he sent me some papers. There are a few things that I have read that I realized he may not have and might enjoy, so I included those papers in my reply. Second, be very clear in your words and actions that you respect every minute of their time. The most precious resource for anyone who has been around and has had some success is usually time. Finally, make it clear how they can help. If they spend time with you, they want it to be productive. I notice this in working with boards of directors of companies. People who are on boards are generally very smart and very busy. If they attend a board meeting and end up just signing documents, they feel like they have wasted their time, that their time isn’t being used efficiently, and they are less likely to want to stay involved.  

Potolicchio: Safi, we talked about your academic career. You are in a whole other field right now where you are potentially going to change a paradigm. This book you wrote, obviously was getting plaudits all over the leadership space, combining many unique facets of Physics, chess, and Psychology. We have not talked about the fact that Malcolm Gladwell wrote about your path breaking attempt to cure cancer. How do you get paradigm-changing ideas? Where do you get your eureka moments? What has been the secret to your personal creativity that we can learn from?

Bahcall: No secrets, just working hard to balance speed and depth. For example, Loonshots mixes an unusual collection of stories -- World War II, the rise and fall of Pan Am, the discovery of the statin drugs,  Steve Jobs, James Bond, the scientific revolution – and ties those stories together with one idea. What helped me find those stories and make those connections was speed and depth. Speed means moving quickly while I’m learning and searching. I visualize a forest. My goal is to make it into the heart of the forest, which is the main idea or theme, but I don’t know the path in. So I run fast around the edge of the forest, reading quickly, not wasting time. I’m looking for a path. Then you spot something. You see a little red bird, you slow down and say “What’s that doing there?” You’ve found something that is a surprise. It doesn’t make sense. And that’s where you go. That’s a possible path to the heart of the story. You commit to that path, follow it deeply, see where it leads you. If you give up in the first couple of steps and just keep looking for new red birds, you’ll never get somewhere interesting, somewhere undiscovered. There are a lot of bloggers who read and summarize and quickly move on to the next thing. That’s not for me. So you balance speed with going deep down a path. Next, and very important, is figuring out if this is the right path for your story. I’ve found that if you know yourself well enough and your personal voice well enough (which means how you like to tell stories) and what you’re looking for well enough and you’ve worked hard enough, then when you find the right path, bells will ring. 

Potolicchio: Safi, it seems as if you have had your own transition phases. Every 7 to 10 years you have transferred to an entirely different field or challenge. Was that more intentional, knowing that you wanted to be at the bottom of the hill? Or did that happen more organically? Is there any kind of zoom-out advice in scientific endeavors that you might be able to give?

Bahcall: Switching fields was never a goal. It was an outcome of what was driving me. What has always driven me is curiosity. When I was in my 20s or 30s I realized I was most fired up when I was burning with curiousity to see what would happen next in whatever I was working on. In particle physics, for example, after a few years, I found it hard to stay curious. Which meant it was time to try something new. When you’re exploring transitions, the thing to do is to keep experimenting. Keep trying stuff that pushes you a little bit outside your comfort zone. But not galaxies away from your comfort zone. There’s no need for me to experiment with professional basketball, for example. I’ll never make it to the NBA. I accept that, sadly. The transition from physics to business or writing or economics are all a bit more likely, and have all been worth some experiments, some of which worked, some of which didn’t, and that’s fine.

Potolicchio: What is the question that I should ask you that I did not ask you or what would be a supplemental chapter to the book that you are only going to share with us and nobody else?

Bahcall: I’ve spent a lot of time with different executive teams and boards that have called me in to work with their companies. There’s definitely another book or two that I will eventually write based on the patterns I’ve seen across many companies. I’ll share two quick things.

The first matters especially for smaller companies. When I wrote in Loonshots about balancing artists and soldiers, loving them both equally, people often took that to mean everyone is either A or B and you need to divide teams into groups. Which is especially hard if you’re at a tiny company. But that’s not the case. No one is born either artist or soldier. You can be either. The bigger picture is not about dividing your teams into 2 groups, it’s about managing your time across 2 jobs. You want to be strategic about balancing the time you and your team spends on the artist's job – creating the new, taking risks -- with time you spend on the soldier’s job -- reducing risk, delivering. Too much time on one or the other and your project or company will suffer. You want to understand how to gauge the right balance, why those two jobs are so different, what are the right questions to ask and how to structure your environment and org to make the time spent on each most productive, and especially how to track and manage the handoff between the two, which is where most innovation efforts fail.

A second chapter I would add is about the third zone of leadership. Many very good business leaders miss this. It’s why for example, for many years, Google and Microsoft lost the race for a trillion dollar market, a race that Bezos and Amazon won.

You can think of the first zone of leadership as operations, managing your franchise. That zone is metric-driven. What’s the sales pipeline? What’s the conversion  rate? What are the margins? Anyone who has had some success in growing a business understands this zone.

A second zone of leadership is managing the pipeline new ideas. If you focus just on pleasing your customers and growing your franchise and optimizing metrics, you’ll miss the crazy ideas, the loonshots that could become big businesses in the future. The ones your competitors might use to take you out. Managing the two zones requires applying different skills, different systems, different structures.

What I did not get to in the book is the third zone, which is about what happens after a new idea starts to succeed. Take cloud services for example. If you are a cloud provider it means businesses take their IT budget that used to pay for servers and subscriptions and give it to you to do all of that for them in the cloud. That’s roughly a trillion dollar market.

Years ago, people might have bet Google would win that race, since Google had the best cloud engineers. Or Microsoft, since everybody in business used Microsoft products. Well, those two were beaten in the first seven or so years by a company that sells diapers online. Amazon. Why? I’m simplifying a much more complicated and interesting story here, but bottom line is that leaders missed the third zone, which is about what happens when an idea starts to work. Leaders think “If an idea or a new business is good, it will succeed on its own merit”.  But imagine you’re running the business inside Microsoft supplying servers and someone comes to you with a crazy idea: “Instead of selling servers, let’s tell our customers to give us all their private data and we will hold it for them” . What do you say? “You mean we’re going to ask IBM or Bank of America to give us all their customers' emails and phone numbers and bank accounts and strategic plans? Forget it, it will never work.” At the beginning, the idea seemed stupid. What nobody understood at the time, even after the idea began to show promise, are the reasons why cloud services would eventually succeed, or how much it could transform the entire business model of a company, and how much internal resistance there would be to those changes.

So that third zone is about leading transformation. And the lesson there is that when something is going to transform your business, you cannot delegate. That’s what Bezos understood and why Amazon succeeded so well. And it’s what Satya Nadella realized when he eventually took over at Microsoft. Nadella took total ownership of transforming the company. He got Microsoft back into the race, where they are now neck and neck with Amazon. He reinvented the company. And created a trillion dollars in value along the way.

There’s a lot more to that story and how to set up organizations to deliver on these jobs – but that is for another book!