Bold (13 page)

On many levels, Google's moonshot factory is no different from a traditional skunk works. Isolation, for example, is also key to their process. “In any organization,” says Teller, “the bulk of your people will be climbing the hill they're standing on. That's what you want them to do. That's their job. A skunk works does a totally different job. It's
a group of people looking for a better hill to climb. This is threatening to the rest of the organization. It just makes good sense to separate these two groups.”

It also makes sense to encourage skunk workers to take risks. “If you're telling people to find a new mountain to climb,” says Teller, “it's pretty stupid to tell them to play it safe. Moonshots are risky. If you're interested in tackling these challenges, you're going to have to embrace some serious risk.”

About this last bit—well, he's not kidding. Where GoogleX deviates from traditional skunk is with the size of the goals they're setting. Moonshots, by their definition, live in that gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction. Instead of mere 10 percent gains, they aim for 10x (meaning ten times) improvements—that's a 1000 percent increase in performance.

While a 10x improvement is gargantuan, Teller has very specific reasons for aiming exactly that high. “You assume that going 10x bigger is going to be ten times harder,” he continues, “but often it's literally easier to go bigger. Why should that be? It doesn't feel intuitively right. But if you choose to make something 10 percent better, you are almost by definition signing up for the status quo—and trying to make it a little bit better. That means you start from the status quo, with all its existing assumptions, locked into the tools, technologies, and processes that you're going to try to slightly improve. It means you're putting yourself and your people into a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. Statistically, no matter the resources available, you're not going to win. But if you sign up for moonshot thinking, if you sign up to make something 10x better, there is no chance of doing that with existing assumptions. You're going to have to throw out the rule book. You're going to have to perspective-shift and supplant all that smartness and resources with bravery and creativity.”

This perspective shift is key. It encourages risk taking and enhances creativity while simultaneously guarding against the inevitable decline. Teller explains: “Even if you think you're going to go ten times bigger, reality will eat into your 10x. It always does. There will be things that
will be more expensive, some that are slower; others that you didn't think were competitive will become competitive. If you shoot for 10x, you might only be at 2x by the time you're done. But 2x is still amazing. On the other hand, if you only shoot for 2x [i.e., 200 percent], you're only going to get 5 percent and it's going to cost you the perspective shift that comes from aiming bigger.”

Most critically here, this 10x strategy doesn't hold true just for large corporations. “A start-up is simply a skunk works without the big company around it,” says Teller. “The upside is there's no Borg to get sucked back into; the downside is you have no money. But that's not a reason not to go after moonshots. I think the opposite is true. If you publicly state your big goal, if you vocally commit yourself to making more progress than is actually possible using normal methods, there's no way back. In one fell swoop you've severed all ties between yourself and all the expert assumptions.” Thus entrepreneurs, by striving for truly huge goals, are tapping into the same creativity accelerant that Google uses to achieve such goals.

That said, by itself, a willingness to take bigger risks is no guarantee of success. The rapid iteration approach of “fail early, fail often” still applies. As a result, some serious risk mitigation is equally critical.

At GoogleX, this mitigation comes from an especially vicious feedback process. “We try a lot of things,” says Teller, “but we don't allow most of them to continue. At several different stages, we end most projects. Only a very small number are allowed to escalate to the next level. In the end, it looks like we got everything right, like we're geniuses—but that's not what's going on at all.”

What's going on is data or death. GoogleX demands that all their projects be measurable and testable. They won't start a project if they don't have ways to judge its progress. And they do judge its progress—repeatedly. Sometimes projects end, sometimes they're absorbed into Google proper, sometimes they're stalled—meaning they can continue but are not allowed to grow. “As far as individual projects are concerned,” says Teller, “this allows for a fairly freewheeling approach. But taken together, in aggregate, it's actually
a fairly rigorous process.”

It's also Darwinian evolution applied to rapid iteration. Big ideas for progress are competing against other big ideas for progress. While it's not a zero-sum game—as there's more than one winner—it's ruthless nonetheless. To put this in different terms, just as Google's version of skunk amps up the risk taking with the size of the goals they set (their 10x requirement), forcing those goals to compete in an experimental ecosystem amps up the risk mitigation.

And while average entrepreneurs might not be able to afford to start, stop, or stall dozens of projects at once—the Google ecosystem—they can set up multiple experimental tracks, employing rapid iteration and tighter feedback loops to fail forward far more consistently. Even better, as Teller argues, this kind of rigor brings a funding advantage. “People think that bold projects don't get funding because of their audacity. That's not the case. They don't get funded because of a lack of measurability. Nobody wants to make a large up-front investment and wait ten years for any sign of life. But more often than not, if you can show progress along the way, smart investors will come on some pretty crazy rides.”

While Kelly Johnson had fourteen rules, Google has eight innovation principles that govern their strategy, famously summarized in a 2011 article by Google senior vice president of advertising Susan Wojcicki.
¹⁷
Throughout this book, we'll see them highlighted in different ways and exhibited by different people. Without doubt, these rules are core to your success as an exponential entrepreneur. My suggestion is that you write them on your wall, use them as a filter for your next start-up idea, but above all, don't ignore them. Let's take a quick look:

1. 
Focus on the User.
We'll see this again in chapter 6, when Larry Page and Richard Branson speak about the importance of building customer-centric businesses.

2. 
Share Everything.
In a hyperconnected world with massive amounts of cognitive surplus, it's critical to be open, allow the crowd to help you innovate, and build on each other's ideas.

3. 
Look for Ideas Everywhere.
The entire third part of this book is dedicated to the principle that crowdsourcing can provide you with incredible ideas, insights, products, and services.

4. 
Think Big but Start Small.
This is the basis for Singularity University's 10
⁹
thinking. You can start a company on day one that affects a small group, but aim to positively impact a billion people within a decade.

5. 
Never Fail to Fail.
The importance of rapid iteration: Fail frequently, fail fast, and fail forward.

6. 
Spark with Imagination, Fuel with Data.
Agility—that is, nimbleness—is a key discriminator against the large and linear. And agility requires lots of access to new and often wild ideas and lots of good data to separate the worthwhile from the wooly. For certain, the most successful start-ups today are data driven. They measure everything and use machine learning and algorithms to help them analyze that data to make decisions.

7. 
Be a Platform.
Look at the most successful companies getting billion-dollar valuations . . . AirBnb, Uber, Instagram . . . they are all platform plays. Is yours?

8. 
Have a Mission That Matters.
Perhaps most important, is the company you're starting built upon a massively transformative purpose? When the going gets hard, will you push on or give up? Passion is fundamental to forward progress.

In trying to parse the secrets to skunk, we've covered a motley crew of mind hacks. On the motivational side, we've explored bold goals, value-aligned bold goals, and the trifecta super-charge of autonomy, mastery, and purpose. On the performance side, we enhanced creativity
with the perspective-shift of 10x, boosted risk taking with rapid iteration, and shortening learning cycles with fast feedback. Then, to derisk the whole process, we introduced the rigor of experimental ecosystems. But there's a larger point here—this crew is not so motley.

All of these mind hacks serve an additional function. Not only do they increase motivation and performance, they do double duty as triggers for the state of consciousness known as
flow
.
¹⁸

Technically, flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. And you've probably had some experience with this state. If you've ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or become so involved in a work project that all else was forgotten, then you've tasted the experience. Flow describes these moments of total absorption, when we become so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away. Action and awareness merge. Time flies. Self vanishes. All aspects of performance—mental and physical—go through the roof.

We call this experience
flow
because that is the sensation conferred. In the state, every action, each decision, leads effortlessly, fluidly, seamlessly to the next. It's high-speed problem solving; it's being swept away by the river of ultimate performance.

This last bit is no exaggeration. Over a hundred and fifty years of research show that flow sits at the heart of almost every athletic championship, underpins major scientific breakthroughs, and accounts for significant progress in the arts. “In recent business studies,” says John Hagel III,
¹⁹
cochairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge, “top executives report being five times more productive in flow.” This is a staggering statistic. Five times more productive is a 500 percent increase. As Virgin CEO Richard Branson says, “In two hours [in flow], I can accomplish tremendous things . . . It's like there's no challenge I can't meet.”
²⁰

Hagel explains further: “In all our studies of extreme performance improvement, the people and organizations who covered the most distance in the shortest time were always the ones who were tapping into
passion and finding flow.”

How to find flow is a tricky question, yet it's one my coauthor, Steven Kotler, has spent the past fifteen years trying to answer. Steven is the cofounder and director of research for the Flow Genome Project, an organization dedicated to decoding the science of ultimate human performance.

One of the lessons to emerge from this work is that flow states have triggers—that is, preconditions that lead to more flow. There are seventeen flow triggers in total—three environmental, three psychological, ten social, and one creative. We'll go into greater detail about these triggers in the next section, but the first thing to know is that flow follows focus. It is a state of total absorption. Thus all seventeen triggers are ways of heightening and tightening focus, of driving attention into the now and thus driving flow.

This also brings us back to the secrets of skunk. All the various mind hacks described in this chapter—the so-called secrets—are also incredible focusing mechanisms. Increased risk taking is obvious: Flow follows focus, and consequences always catch our attention. As big goals have big consequences, they too serve this function. And value-aligned big goals work even better. When alignment exists, passion results. As we always pay more attention to those things we're passionate about, value-aligned big goals further increase focus. Autonomy, mastery, and purpose—which all serve to boost intrinsic motivation and further passion—do more of the same. Fast feedback, meanwhile, allows real-time course correction; thus we don't lose focus wondering about how to better our performance. By creating an environment packed with flow triggers, skunk works create a high-flow environment.

As a way of exploring how today's entrepreneur can create such an environment, I want to introduce the book's first how-to section. The idea here is to offer a series of actionable steps, immediately applicable to your life and work and guaranteed to move the needle. In this case, we're going to break down flow's seventeen triggers
²¹
in far more detail, focusing specifically on how they apply to exponential
entrepreneurs.

Environmental triggers are qualities in the environment that drive people deeper into flow.

High consequences
are the first in this category. As mentioned above, flow follows focus, and consequences catch our attention. When there's danger lurking in the environment, we don't need to concentrate extra hard to drive focus; the elevated risk levels do the job for us.

And this doesn't just mean taking physical risks. The science shows that other risks—emotional, intellectual, creative, social—work just as well. “To reach flow,” explains psychiatrist Ned Hallowell,
²²
“one must be willing to take risks. The lover must be willing to risk rejection to enter this state. The athlete must be willing to risk physical harm, even loss of life, to enter this state. The artist must be willing to be scorned and despised by critics and the public and still push on. And the average person—you and me—must be willing to fail, look foolish, and fall flat on our faces should we wish to enter this state.”