10xDNA – Mindset for a thriving Future

Frank Thelen, Markus Schorn

• Publisher: Frank Thelen
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783982176437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Digitalization was just the beginning, the biggest revolution for mankind starts now Flying cars, autonomous driving, 3D-printed houses and lab-grown meat - what sounds like a science fiction movie, is already a reality. We are on the verge of a new age. Building upon digitalization, technologies like artificial intelligence, 5G, robotics, quantum computing and synthetic biology will bring profound changes to the world we know today. The impact on our everyday lives and our economy will be immense. The Internet-Era alone created companies worth over 7 trillion dollars - but only the US and China reaped the benefits. The upcoming era of exponential progress offers many new opportunities. Europe needs a mindset shift, a unique 10xDNA to take advantage of these prospects. 10xDNA will inform and inspire those who wish to understand how our world will change in the next decade. Instead of fearing the unknown, we should embrace the opportunities to build a strong, fair and diverse Europe. Are you ready to unleash your 10xFuture?

How the Moon Landing started the 10x Revolution

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon – and the moving, immortal words he uttered at that incredible moment have echoed around the world and down through the years: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” But what most people don’t know is that taking this “small step” involved years of extensive R&D – and ultimately gave birth to a new paradigm: 10x.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the US and USSR were engaged in a bitterly contested space race, in which the Soviets had been the leading player for quite a while. With the launch of their Sputnik satellite in 1957, the Russians became the first to put a man-made object into orbit. And in that same year, they put the first living creature, a dog named Laika, into orbit in a space capsule. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the earth.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, fearing that the US were going to lose the space race, announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade.

At the time, this moonshot, as it came to be called, seemed like wishful thinking, an impossible dream, more than anything else. And still today, some people believe that the moon landing never actually happened. It’s hard to imagine how NASA’s employees must have felt when President Kennedy assigned them this Herculean task. Just imagine for a moment, how you might react if the head of your organization asked you to take on what at first glance seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Would you immediately give him a laundry list of reasons why there was no way you or anyone else could ever hope to succeed? Or would you accept the challenge and do everything in your power to find a solution?

Well, as is well known, NASA adopted the latter approach – although the chances of succeeding seemed extremely dim at first. The rockets NASA had at its disposal weren’t nearly powerful enough to carry a command module containing three astronauts, plus a lunar module and sufficient fuel and supplies to make the trip to the Moon and back. At the time, German-born rocket specialist Dr. Wernher von Braun observed that for a moonshot to be successful, the rockets needed would have to be ten times (10x) more powerful than those currently available. In other words, Dr. von Braun felt that the moonshot was a “mission impossible.” But President Kennedy was determined to succeed – and expressed his unshakable faith in the moonshot in his now famous 1962 Moon speech, in which he stated, in ringing tones, “We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

And so, NASA set about using all the resources at its disposal to make Kennedy’s dream of a moonshot a reality. When the project was in full swing, more than 400,000 R&D specialists and other engineers, as well as mathematicians, were giving their all in the interest of coming up with revolutionary new solutions. The US plowed around 2.5% of its GDP into R&D for these new technologies – $25 billion annually, the equivalent of quadruple that amount in today’s dollars. This massive investment of financial and human resources not only paved the way for the moon landing, but also gave rise to completely new industries. The offshoots and ramifications of the solutions that the many brilliant minds who made the moonshot possible came up with are still affecting us today; for example, MIT Draper Laboratory director Margaret Hamilton developed the on-board flight software for the Apollo program. She coined the term software engineering and developed new approaches for system architecture and end-to-end testing. Today, software development entails not only creation of the relevant applications, but also of the attendant code – which undergoes a massive number of pre-release test scenarios and checks, to ensure that the software runs smoothly and is glitch-free.

Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments developed integrated circuits (microchips) for the Apollo project. Without these components, it would not have been possible to control and monitor the various Apollo rocket systems and navigate the Apollo space capsules. Kilby and two other scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded a company called Integrated Electronics, or Intel for short, in what later became known as Silicon Valley. Today virtually every electronic device, from vacuum cleaners to headphones, depends for its operability on one or more microchips.

The Apollo project created a biotope, it was the cradle for engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists who sincerely believed that almost any goal was achievable. And it is precisely this mindset that can pave the way for groundbreaking discoveries.

R&D stands for Research and Development. There are R&D departments in most companies which are dedicated to focus their time and energy on future strategies and new product developments.

End-to-End Testing ensures a smooth flow of an application from start to finish. The purpose of end-to-end testing is to simulate the real user scenario and to verify the function of the system under test and its individual components.

The US vs. CHINA

10xDNA and Silicon Valley

The Apollo project was the first genuine 10x project. Many of the brilliant men and women who participated in the project went on to start their own companies and commercialized the technologies they’d developed. But more importantly, these technological pioneers collectively gave birth to a new mindset: think bigger - Moonshots are possible!

These individuals eventually made their homes in cities that fell within the catchment area of Stanford University, such as Mountain View, Palo Alto and Cupertino – and brought their 10xDNA along with them. The family tree of many major companies such as Google, Cisco and Nvidia is directly linked to the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and thus to the Apollo project.

Robert Noyce became a father figure and mentor for the young Steve Jobs, whom he gave valuable support during Apple’s startup phase.

Other Fairchild alumni founded venture capital firms such as Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, which to this day are leading startup financiers. Kleiner Perkins was among the earliest investors in Google, Amazon and Spotify, while Sequoia invested in startups such as PayPal, YouTube and WhatsApp. The seed capital they provided played a major part in the success of companies whose products and services are used today by millions of people around the world.

An ethos developed that fostered – and richly rewarded – thinking as far as possible outside the box, along with a mindset that was relentlessly in search of the next great leap forward, and that never settled for minor optimizations. Today, 10x is a permanent fixture in the culture of many Silicon Valley companies. Whereas most CEOs are content with 2-3% optimization per year, Silicon Valley leading lights such as Google founder Larry Page are not. For Page, 10x has become a watchword, a mantra, an ironclad tenet for the conduct of his organization’s affairs – and even a 10% improvement is tantamount to mere coasting and resting on one’s laurels. As Page sees it, the only way to outdo the competition by a factor of 10 – and achieve real progress – is to think exponentially and break new ground. A prime example of 10x in action can be found in the 2004 market launch of Gmail. Google’s “exponential” innovation was to offer Gmail users 1 gigabyte of free email storage space – 250 times more than its competitor, Yahoo. However, the catch was that, due to data storage costs amounting to around $4 per gigabyte back then, and with 100 million envisaged users, Google stood to lose a sizeable chunk of change. No sane financial controller of a conventional corporation would have ever green-lit such a folly, fearing to lose his job. But imbued as it was with the 10x ethos, the Gmail team put on their 10x “think ahead/think optimistically” caps – which enabled them to foresee that technological progress in data storage capacity would greatly reduce the attendant costs. As it turned out, they were right.

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Elon Musk

Gmail’s user base expanded exponentially, while simultaneously data storage costs declined precipitously, to a few cents per gigabyte. As a result, Gmail became an enormous cash cow, with today over 1.5 billion users.

Another key proponent of the 10x paradigm is Elon Musk, whose preferred method for coming up with radical new solutions is called first-principles thinking. First, Musk breaks down major challenges into their constituent elements. Then, he and his teams set about rethinking these various elements from the ground up, using new technical methods. Instead of focusing on how something has been done so far, Musk asks himself the following question: What is technically feasible, given the current state of advancement in the fields of physics and chemistry, and the laws governing these disciplines?

For example, in 2002 Musk founded SpaceX, whose avowed purpose, according to the company’s website, is to “revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.” To achieve this goal, SpaceX is developing reusable rockets, which will radically reduce the price of space travel.

First Principles Thinking describes a method of thinking in which a problem is broken down to its fundamentals. Based on these fundamentals alone, the best approach is sought. You must deliberately ignore methods and procedures that have been used up to now and focus on new approaches or technologies that should be technically, physically or chemically possible.

It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.

Astro Teller, Google X

Musk’s initial plan – to buy and recondition decommissioned Russian space program rockets – went awry; but instead of giving up, he broke space-travel rockets down into their principal constituent elements – namely aerodynamics, thermodynamics and engines. Armed with this schema, Musk’s team came up with a way to build rockets using inexpensive off-the-shelf components.

This approach enabled SpaceX to reduce the per-payload-kilogram cost of firing up a rocket from $18,500 to less than $3,000.

10x and Google X

Alphabet (formerly Google) took the 10x paradigm to unprecedented heights. Alphabet adopted a revolutionary new approach that set the company apart from its competitors, which were busily establishing R&D teams in the hope of driving innovation for their core businesses. X (aka the Moonshot Factory) is a division of Google whose mission is to generate moonshot-based businesses for Alphabet by developing radical new technologies aimed at solving some of the world’s hardest problems – and launch startups that have the potential to become even larger than Google itself.

At X, moonshot projects are tackled using a set procedure. First, a problem is identified that affects hundreds of millions of people. Then, a team of creatives, scientists and inventors brainstorms possible solutions to the problem, however far-fetched they may seem. If current research or recent technological breakthroughs even remotely suggest that the solutions the team comes up with could potentially be implemented within the next ten years, a moonshot team forms and gets down to work.

Only a fraction of the around 100 solutions vetted by X each year make it to this stage. As odd as this approach may seem at first glance, it is in fact the only reliable path to the development of 10x innovations; for this method enables 10xers to gain the perspective on existing solutions and processes necessary to think outside the box. This strategy has proven its worth on a number of occasions.

Waymo for example, began in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. The German-born Stanford Professor of Computer Science Sebastian Thrun led the mission to develop the sensors, software and algorithms needed to make self-driving cars a reality. In 2018, Waymo One, the world’s first self-driving ride-hailing service, went into operation in Phoenix, Arizona, and similar services are in the works for other locations. A technology that is still being perceived as science fiction in some countries has long since become a reality in the US.

Apart from developing the software needed in order for driverless cars to be safely operable, the other challenge faced by the Waymo team was to find a way to keep the cost of the requisite hardware low enough to be affordable for ordinary passenger cars. Waymo met this challenge with great aplomb, in that it reduced the hardware costs by 90%, from an initial price tag of $150,000 per vehicle. Many of these solutions were inspired by technologies that had been developed, but then shelved by European companies, for the...