To Korean readers
Prologue | Will You Be a Leader or a Victim?

Introduction | Structure is more important than culture, design is more important than innovation

Part 1: The Designers of Chance

Chapter 1: Runeshot, Leading to Victory in World War II
"A Wild Idea" | Vannevar Bush, the Man Who Designed America | Office of Scientific Research and Development
Balancing at Zero | The U-Boat Appears! | The Loonshot Counterattack | Why America Invested in Basic Science
Luck is a trace of design
Whoever designs the core organizational structure dominates.

Chapter 2: Conquering Disease After Three Deaths
Three Deaths | Dr. Fungus, Akira Endo | The New Drug Saved by Chickens | A $300 Billion 'Luck'
A leader is someone who counts the arrows stuck in his butt.
Key Takeaway: Beware of Fake Failures

Chapter 3: The Great Company Illusion
Two Types of Loonshots | Pan Am vs.
American Airlines | The Opportunity of Deregulation
Bigger, Faster, More | The Virtuous Cycle of Success | War and the Cuckoo Clock | The Jet Age
The formula for success that stopped at some point
Key takeaway: Face your blind spots.

Chapter 4 The Blind Prophet
The Man Steve Jobs Loved | The Lost Fish | The Prophet, Edwin Land
A Chance Question Turns Business Around | "Wonderful, but Useless" | When Love Blinds You...
Key Summary: Moses' Trap

Chapter 5: Escaping Moses' Trap
8-megabyte sexual satisfaction | The failure of leadership | What you didn't know about Newton
The First 3D Animation | Jobs Meets Pixar | Days Like a Fire Hydrant | "Infinite Space Beyond"
Between Ugly Babies and Beasts | The Mindset of a Chess Champion | Balancing
The core organizing leader is the gardener.

Part 2: The Design Principles That Lead Accidental Discovery to Great Success

Interlude Story Creative Thinking

Chapter 6 Marriage, Wildfires, and Terrorists: The Transition I
The Critical Point of Marriage | Humphrey Bogart's Cigarette Smoke | A Drop That Makes a Crack
The Power Law | How Do So Many Crickets Harmonize? | The Power of the Tail | Signs of Terror
Key takeaways: A very subtle tug-of-war

Chapter 7: The Magic Number 150: Phase Transition II
Mormons, Murder, and Monkeys | Invisible Axe | Salary or Equity?
Motivational Design Formula 1 | Motivational Design Formula 2
The equation that makes the core organization dance

Chapter 8: Design an organization that explodes with runeshots.
The Little Ball Launched by Sputnik | There Are No Crazy Ideas | Designing Creative Organizations
Soft Equity | Improve Project-Capability Fit | Misaligned Incentives Destroy Organizations
Bring a gun to a sword fight | Fine-tune your control range
The more key points you have, the more different it becomes.

Part 3: Runeshots that Changed the Flow of World History

Chapter 9: Why English and Not Chinese?
Joseph Needham's Questions | Kepler's Answers | Why the West Won | Hollywood, the Embodiment of Phase Transitions
The Insulin Story | Why China Collapsed | The Runshot Incubator | Who Will Take Over?

Epilogue: At first, no one knew

Key Summary of the Bush-Vale Law
The Equation of Innovation
Key Terms

★★★ An Amazon, Wall Street Journal, and New York Times bestseller immediately after publication.
★★★ Translated and published in 18 languages ​​worldwide
★★★ #1 Most Recommended Book by CEOs and Entrepreneurs in 2019, according to Bloomberg
★★★ 2019 Book of the Year Selections: Amazon, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, Newsweek, TechCrunch, The Washington Post, Management Today, Business Insider, Inc., Medium, The Wall Street Journal

The power of design to overcome crises such as war, disease, and recession.
"Why do we succeed and why do we fail? We've uncovered the principles at a level never before seen." (Robert Laughlin, Nobel Prize winner in Physics)

On April 12, 1945, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who led the United States to victory in World War II, died suddenly.
The president's personal physician officially recorded it as "a bolt from the blue."
But for his doctors, Roosevelt's death was no bolt from the blue.
He had been suffering from angina, a serious chronic heart disease, for a long time.
At that time, angina was considered an inevitable disease that one would get as one got older.
Neither the cause nor the cure was known.
There was no cure other than rest, alcohol, and opium.


Since the United States began officially recording mortality rates from heart disease, the rate has gradually increased since the early 20th century, peaking in the late 1960s.
But since then, heart disease mortality rates have dropped dramatically, by about 75 percent.
This means that over 10 million lives have been saved over the past 50 years.


How did humanity overcome a disease once thought incurable? It all came down to a drug isolated from a blue-green mold discovered in a grain silo by Akira Endo, a Japanese researcher and mushroom enthusiast who was also a microbiologist.


However, the drug discovered by Akira Endo was shunned in Japan due to its “dangerous side effects.”
Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical company Merck, which had gotten the idea from Endo, capitalized on the drug's potential and launched the first statin drug, Mevacor, in 1987.
Merck has become the most successful pharmaceutical company ever, having earned $90 billion (about 110 trillion won) from its statin drugs.

How can one person dismiss the same idea as "crazy" and miss the opportunity, while another can turn the crises of war, disease, and recession into a driving force for success?

Safi Bakal's hit book, "Loonshots," which has been highly praised by world-renowned scholars and celebrities such as Bill Gates, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Kahneman, presents a new management theory that fosters and develops creative ideas by striking an appropriate balance between the creative ideas of creators (scientists and developers) and the efficient management of managers, based on the physics theory of "phase transition."
While existing theories emphasize efficiency and management, the author captures the potential of ideas often dismissed as "useless" and proposes a method for systematically nurturing them to achieve explosive growth.

However, that doesn't mean that "Runshot" is a rigid management book.
The author, a promising physicist who founded and successfully led a biotech company for 13 years and served as a science advisor to President Obama, travels across various historical sites from ancient China to industrialized Europe, World War II, Pan Am, Polaroid, Apple, and Hollywood, introducing the power of 'loonshots' through the eyes of both scientists and businesspeople.
The book remained an Amazon bestseller for 52 consecutive weeks and has been translated into 18 languages.
It is also receiving explosive interest, to the point that it was selected as the book of the year by 12 media outlets, including [Forbes].

The Balance Between Creativity and Efficiency

How do we discover and nurture "runshots," often criticized as crazy ideas? In "Part 1: The Designers of Chance," author Safi Bakal explains runshots using a physical law called "phase transition."


Let's make a bathtub full of water just before freezing.
If you move even a little bit in either direction, the whole thing will freeze or melt.
But at that very point of contact, ice and liquid water coexist.
The phenomenon of two states coexisting at the boundary of a phase transition is called 'phase separation'.
The states of ice and water are separate yet still connected.
The relationship between the two states takes the form of a circular relationship in which give and take are in balance with each other.
Molecules in the ice cubes melt into adjacent puddles of water.
Liquid molecules swimming next to the ice cube are caught on the ice surface and freeze.
This cyclical relationship, in which neither state is dominant, is called 'dynamic equilibrium'.
(_From the text)

The principle of phase transition actually had a significant impact on the United States' rise to global hegemony after World War II.
Let's follow the story of Vannevar Bush as introduced in the book.


In the mid-1930s, just before the outbreak of World War II, the U.S. military cut its research budget to one-twentieth of the cost of building a battleship.
The Ministry of Defense claimed that the key force was “infantry with rifles and bayonets.”
Meanwhile, Nazi Germany was transforming the concept of war, deploying new technologies like U-boats and Stuka bombers. Vannevar Bush, MIT's vice president and former military officer during World War I, warned of the growing technological gap with Germany, but the military generals had no regard for the opinions of the "darn professors" (their term for civilian scientists).


When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Bush persuaded President Roosevelt to establish the Office of Scientific Research and Development.
The group worked to apply hundreds of scientific ideas, previously dismissed as "useless ideas," to the military.
That doesn't mean Bush only sided with the "damn professors."
Bush applied the principle of phase transition to the organization, designing a 'separate but communicating' organization that would maximize the creativity of artists (scientists) (phase separation) while allowing soldiers (military managers) to operate it efficiently.
As a result, the organization created everything from radar systems that played a crucial role in repelling U-boats, to missiles that increased bombing efficiency sevenfold, to the atomic bomb that Einstein warned Germany would develop first.

After World War II, the United States reorganized Bush's organization into the permanent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency collaborated with numerous universities and research institutes in the United States to conduct research that would later become the motif of the Internet, semiconductors, GPS, 3D graphics, and digital cameras, and contributed greatly to the United States' rise to superpower status.

Even the "innovative inventions" made by "creative eccentrics" must adhere to two principles if they are to change the fate of science, technology, and business.
It is a dynamic equilibrium that ensures a separation between the group developing innovative inventions and the group protecting existing fields, and good cooperation and feedback between the two groups.
Phase separation creates a structure that protects seemingly outlandish ideas from being crushed before they even sprout by separating the artists working on risky, early-stage ideas from the soldiers working on already successful, continuously growing fields.
Dynamic equilibrium means that we must not lean towards either artists or soldiers, but rather achieve harmony and balance between the two, like Bush, who persuaded military officials who were vehemently opposed to new technology to participate in its development and application.
Because to complete innovation, both artists and soldiers are needed.
This is the central theme of this book.


Five Runshot Principles for Turning Serendipity into Great Success

The author presents five practical principles for implementing the design principles that foster runeshots:


First, overcome three deaths.
Few ideas that have changed science, business, or history have been successful from the start.
Most of us go through a long, dark tunnel of skepticism and uncertainty, being trampled on or ignored.
As in the case of Akira Endo mentioned earlier, leaders and organizations should encourage the potential of even seemingly shaky ideas, rather than burying them, like growing a flower in a greenhouse.
The [Star Wars] series, the diabetes treatment drug Gleevec, and the initial idea for Apple's smartphone were able to blossom because they overcame three deaths despite various criticisms.

Second, don't be fooled by fake failures.
When Facebook launched in 2004, many social networking services had already experienced brief successes and then failed miserably, despite their promising ideas of communicating in virtual spaces.
So when Mark Zuckerberg tried to raise money for a "similar service," most investors turned away. They thought social media was a business driven by trends, like changing jeans.
But Peter Thiel delves into the 'why' users switch social networks.
After some investigation, he discovered that the problem wasn't the social network's weak business model that was causing users to leave, but rather the service's frequent outages.
Most investors were fooled by the 'fake failure'.
Peter Thiel saw Facebook's technological prowess and wrote a check for $500,000.
Eight years later, Thiel sold most of his shares to Facebook for roughly $1 billion.

Third, be curious and listen to failures.
Garry Kasparov, who reigned as world chess champion for 15 years, attributes his success to not analyzing why a move was bad when he lost a game, but rather analyzing how to change the "decision-making process behind that move."
In other words, I analyze how I decided on that move at that point when I met my opponent, and think about how I should change my decision-making process or game preparation routine going forward.
The author calls this secondary strategy or systems thinking.


The weakest teams are the ones that don't analyze their failures at all.
They just keep going.
This means that there is no strategy itself.
Team members who think in systems delve into the other side of failure.
How did we arrive at that decision? Should we structure the participants differently, or change the way we engage? Should we change our approach to opportunity analysis before making similar decisions in the future? How are our current motivations influencing our decision-making? Should we change those motivations? Systems thinking meticulously examines not only the "quality of outcomes" but also the "quality of decisions," preventing organizations from being overly excited or frustrated by a single success or failure.

Fourth, create a system rather than a culture.
By the early 2000s, Nokia was the world's most valuable company, selling half of the world's mobile phones.
Nokia's CEO explained that organizational culture is a key to success.
“It’s okay to have fun, to think outside the box, and to make mistakes.”

In 2004, a few excited Nokia engineers created a completely new kind of phone.
It was an internet-enabled phone with a large color touchscreen and a high-resolution camera.
Engineers came up with another crazy idea to go with this phone.
The idea is to create an ‘online app store’.
But management buried both ideas.
Three years later, the engineers witness their crazy idea being implemented by Steve Jobs.
Five years later, Nokia was a company that had fallen out of favor with the industry, and in 2013, Nokia sold its mobile business.

It is often said that ideas blossom in a creative culture.
However, the author compares Nokia and Apple and says that Loonshot is fostered within a structure where creativity and efficiency are balanced.
As a physicist, the author details the formula for creating an organization that explodes a runeshot (Chapters 7 and 8).


Fifth, be a gardener, not a prophet.
Edwin Land, who founded Polaroid, was famous as a brilliant scientist and a manager with artistic sensibility.
He commercialized 3D movies and instant cameras by utilizing the phenomenon of 'polarization', and made Polaroid a company that was once more popular than Apple today.
But Rand, by choosing to be the judge and jury of ideas rather than encourage them, ended up turning his company into a rigid place that only looked out for prophets.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple with Vannevar Bush, focuses on the role of a gardener who is responsible for communication between the artists (scientists, creators) and the soldiers (management organization), and encourages the transfer and exchange of ideas.
As a result, Polaroid experienced a miserable failure after its brilliant success, but Vannevar Bush's organization and Apple fundamentally changed the world.


He who cultivates runeshots rules the future.

Finally, Part 3, "Runshots That Changed the Course of World History," traces the rise and fall of countries, companies, and leaders who internalized the principles introduced in Parts 1 and 2, and those who did not.


As we trace the fall of the Qing Dynasty, once a leading economic, scientific, and military power, and the rise of the remote island nation of Britain, through the footsteps of historical figures such as Joseph Needham and Johannes Kepler, we find ourselves nodding along to the author's assertion that "those who cultivate loonshots will control the future."


As Daniel Kahneman's recommendation states, "It has everything: new ideas, bold insights, interesting history, and compelling analysis." This book introduces the power of loonshots that lead crises to victory, crossing over physics, history, management, and business.
In particular, the author says that his book could be a turning point for Korean readers who need to find a new breakthrough in an era when the existing order is being shaken.

Remember the 'Korean Miracle' of the last century.
The once struggling, agriculturally centered economy has evolved into a powerful, industrially centered economy.
What was once one of the world's poorest countries is now ranked among the world's richest.
Today, Korea's education, healthcare, transportation, and industrial systems are models for the world.
But what happens next?

I have included my own answers to these questions in this book.
We introduce the scientific principles of collective behavior that can help not only businesses but also nations solve this puzzle.


Korea has long emphasized the role of science, technology, and mathematics, and its researchers and students in these fields are among the world's best.
That's why I hope my ideas will resonate more deeply with Korean readers.
Because there may be no country better suited to implementing the ideas in this book than Korea.
(From "To Korean Readers")