Safi Bahcall
Author, Physicist, Biotech Entrepreneur & Former CEO
Safi Bahcall
Author, Physicist, Biotech Entrepreneur & Former CEO
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Biography
Safi Bahcall is a physicist, a former public company CEO, and the bestselling author of Loonshots, Bloomberg’s #1 most recommended book of the year.
He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his PhD in physics from Stanford, where he worked with Lenny Susskind in particle physics (the science of the small) and the Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin in condensed matter physics (the science of the many). He was a Miller Fellow in physics at UC Berkeley (the school of the many).
After working for three years as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years.
In 2008, he was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year. In 2011, he worked with President Obama’s council of science advisors (PCAST) on the future of national research.
Loonshots, Safi’s first book, has been translated into 18 languages; recommended by Bill Gates, three Nobel laureates, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tim Ferriss; and selected as a best business book of the year by Amazon, Bloomberg, Financial Times, Forbes, Inc., Newsweek, Strategy + Business, Tech Crunch, and the Washington Post.
Safi has delivered keynote presentations at industry conferences, investor events, leadership retreats, medical meetings, and leading academic institutions around the world. He advises CEOs and leadership teams on strategy and innovation and is working on his next book. He lives with his wife and two children in Cambridge, MA.
Speaker Videos
Talks At Goldman Sachs
How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Transform Industries | SXSW 2019
What is the Moses Trap?
On Thinking Big, Curing Cancer, and Transforming Industries | The Tim Ferris Show
Speech Topics
Five Rules for Innovating in Turbulent Times
Many companies struggle to adapt to rapidly changing markets: the core dominates the new, projects linger too long, and innovation theater proliferates. The apex innovators who avoid these traps and dominate their industry focus on structure not just culture. They build a system to run experiments at pace and scale without sacrificing excellence in their core franchise. Using surprising and entertaining examples from Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, Harley-Davidson, Lego, and the US military, Safi describes five rules you can use to build this system and become the initiator rather than the victim of innovative surprise.
The Three Zones of Leadership
Learn how Amazon beat Google, why one retailer thrived while others collapsed, and how the music industry escaped death. See how these examples illustrate the need for leaders to navigate the three zones of leadership. Learn how key leadership skills differ across the three zones, what you can never delegate as a leader, and why failing to understand these principles has caused the collapse of once great companies. Safi offers practical rules for both new and experienced leaders, with detailed examples drawn from his research and work with some of the most innovative organizations in the world.
Chasing Anomalies in Science, Business, and Medicine
The secret to breakthroughs.
Workshop: Building an Innovation Operating System
Mature organizations often struggle to innovate as the core suffocates or rejects the new, and zombie projects, premature scaling, and innovation theater proliferate. The key to avoiding these traps is building a sustainable, integrated system for running business experiments at pace and scale and learning to navigate the three zones of leadership: core, experiments, and transformation.
In this half-day or full-day workshop, Safi describes the nonobvious causes of innovation failure inside organizations and ten principles behind successful innovation operating systems. The principles, which are based on the novel ideas in Loonshots and Safi’s work with some of the most innovative organizations in the world, are illustrated with surprising insights and detailed examples drawn from Apple, Amazon, Best Buy, Google, Harley-Davidson, Lego, the US military, and more. Interactive exercises help leadership teams internalize the ideas and apply them to real-time problems.
Workshops are customized based on interviews to understand company-specific pain points and goals.
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