Building Moonshots

WAY 47Hire for Unique Skills: Hiring box checkers will rarely lead to revolutions.

About the Way

When moonshot‐seeking teams hear the phrase “to think outside of the box,” their first thought is “which box?” Inventing the future requires a team to bring different experiences, knowledge, and practical skills. At its simplest, moonshot teams need two types of people: blue‐sky visionaries to envision and evangelize an almost impossible future and schedule‐oriented realists whose extensive experience delivering and scaling the unimaginable keeps them focused on the brass tacks. These are not skills taught explicitly at universities or corporate training programs. Even working on just one phase of a moonshot journey requires skills that often transcend a traditional discipline, not to mention the radical collaboration capabilities that enable a team to move from utter ambiguity through measurable uncertainty to ultimately broad customer adoption. (See Way 45: Invite Radical Collaboration.)

The mismatch between “what we know how to do today” and “the skills we need to build tomorrow” are a constant complaint from industry. For example, a report from Maimai, often dubbed as China's LinkedIn, showed a major lag as the market need for web and mobile app jobs quickly shifted to hiring for hard tech roles in areas of biomedicine, energy generation, and smart hardware, based on job postings across China for the first half of 2022. Jobs in the “Pure Internet” sector—which include the major ...