Peter Diamandis may be best known as chief executive of the XPrize Foundation, which hosts global innovation competitions that hand out multimillion-dollar rewards. But he has also helped found more than 15 tech companies, including one focused on human genomics and another that designs spacecraft that will mine asteroids for precious minerals. And he's the co-founder of Singularity University, a Silicon Valley institution that trains executives and future leaders to use technology to enact big change.
Diamandis shared his advice for managing innovative teams, details of his newest book — Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (co-authored with Steven Kotler) — and why we're headed toward an era of what he calls "technological socialism."
Q: Why did you write this book?
A: Bold was meant to be a guidebook, a how-to and an inspiration for entrepreneurs. It was also to help them realize that the world's biggest problems, which I fundamentally believe are solvable, are also the world's biggest business opportunities.
I was seeing a lot of entrepreneurs who were effectively working on the next photo-sharing app. I wanted to inspire them to go much bigger.
What do the most disruptive, innovative leaders have in common?
They're driven by passion and purpose. They're not doing something just to make money. They have a fundamental discontent with something that exists or a fundamental vision of where we should be and a drive to get there.
The second is a willingness to take risks and experiment — to constantly try to deviate from the baseline of linear thinking, to start with a clean sheet of paper and try something new.
The third is a willingness to shoot for goals that are 10 times bigger versus 10 percent bigger, with the realization that although the benefit will be 100-fold more, it's typically not 100 times harder.
You discuss the value of "skunk works," the concept of isolating groups of people within larger organizations and giving them the freedom to fail. What's the right management structure for projects like this?
No. 1 is that the team is built around a passionate, visionary individual who loves what he or she is doing. That team is small. It's reasonably flat.
But in addition, when you're forced to go 10 times bigger or 10 times faster or 10 times cheaper, what also matters is that instead of thinking out of the box, you're thinking in a very small box. If you give a team all the money, all the people and all the time it needs, people get lazy.
If you significantly constrain them and say you've got to do it with a very small team, in a short period of time, on a smaller budget, they have to throw out the traditional way of doing things because they can't get there. It forces true innovation …
Whether that's being at the rocket launch site or at the winning moment for an XPrize, they need to be reminded that they are working someplace that's epic and exciting and visionary.