The Kennedy moon shot goal. Cf. the BHAG
From the last chapter, we saw the example, or the metaphor of the moonshot. John F. Kennedy said we're going to land somebody on the moon in 10 years. We did it six months early, in the summer of 1969. Where every school kid --and I was a school kid then-- was glued to the TV. We all watched that first step, that first one had it with some absolutely amazing. And so that this has become a metaphor. There's a new book out, business book, called “The Moonshot Effect” Lisa Goldman, et al., The Moonshot Effect: Disrupting Business as Usual, Wynnefield, 2016, . There are organizations like Google and others that talk about their moonshot project, or their moonshot department that's focused on these things.
So the question is related to the innovation question; but the question is, is Phoenix a moonshot project?
My first thought was, yes; it probably is. It certainly is a bet-the-business project. But here's the definitions that the authors of this book mentioned. One is a senior consultant and another is a CEO. They both said that a moonshot is "a worthy objective that’s hard to achieve because it requires significant scientific or technological breakthroughs.” This is the first factor, IBID, p. 5 Going to the moon certainly requires significant technological breakthroughs. And the pivotal event they mentioned in the book was the fact that we happen to have a rocket engine in the US that was powerful enough to break the Earth's orbit, and the Soviets did not. Kennedy picked up on that as an opportunity. Let's go for that moonshot. "It demands that organizations and teams change how they operate." This is the second factor, IBID, p. 5 We're seeing that in Phoenix; they're having to change the way they operate, and "it operates within a compressed time frame" This is the third factor, IBID, p. 5. |