Astro Teller: My Closing Speaker At A360

I'm very proud that my closing speaker at Abundance 360 this year will be my friend Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X (formerly Google X, Google’s R&D factory).

In today’s exponentially changing world, our Moonshots are key to our success and the impact we create.

How do you build a Moonshot team? How do you effectively lead that team?  How do you enable an environment where “crazy ideas” become real?

Astro leads a team of world-class engineers, scientists, and creatives developing solutions to dozens (perhaps hundreds) of the world’s toughest problems. Some of their public projects include Google’s self-driving car project, the smart contact lens, and Project Loon.

I’ve interviewed Astro several times, and frequently write about his leadership and innovation strategies. Here are a few of my favorite takeaways from past blogs, and the reason I’ve invited him to lead a “Moonshot Workshop” at A360 this January:

• What is Moonshot Thinking: A Moonshot is going 10X bigger, while the rest of the world is pursuing 10% bigger.  When you try to do 10% better, you’re putting yourself in a “smartness” competition with everyone else in the world -- a competition you’re unlikely to win. When you instead try to go 10x bigger, you’re forced to approach the problem in a radically different fashion. The result is 100x more worth it, but it’s never 100x harder.
• Ideas Are Easy, Culture is Hard: Creating the ecosystem for rapidly evaluating and testing ideas is much harder than finding the idea. Filter weaker ideas early by running a “pre-mortem” -- predict in advance why an idea is likely to fail -- and celebrate and reward ideas that the team kills early.
• Experiment, Experiment, Experiment: How can you encourage your team to experiment and pursue audacious goals? X has a “Get Weirder Award,” which rewards the best experiment the team runs based on a crazy idea. Instead of strictly incentivizing successful experiments, X focuses on progress, learning and asking the right questions.

If you join us live (or digitally), you’ll be able to participate in a lively discussion and “how-to” session with Astro... learning from him on what works, what fails, and how to pick your Moonshot in the first place.

Over the last few months, many members of the A360 community have shared with me how they are selling (divesting) and/or acquiring companies (investing) to manage exponential change.

I’m looking forward to seeing how our workshop with Astro helps us take bigger, better and more effective Moonshots in our companies and our lives.

Interested in Joining Me? (Two options)

1. A360 Executive Mastermind: This is the sort of conversation I explore at my Executive Mastermind group called Abundance 360. The program is highly selective, for 360 abundance and exponentially minded CEOs (running $10M to $10B companies). If you’d like to be considered, apply here.

Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.

2. A360 Digital Mastermind: I’ve also created a Digital/Online community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance 360 Digital (A360D).

A360D is my ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs – those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click Here to Learn More.

Head here for the full archive of my latest tech insights.