Joe Pelt

Biotech leaders, here's what it takes to truly innovate. 👇 Wise words from the Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, Noubar Afeyan: "Scientific innovation is heavily limited by reasonableness. How can you expect extraordinary results from reasonable people doing reasonable things? Everybody's looking for extraordinary outcomes, but they constantly want to figure out whether every single step is the right, reasonable one. People go ask key opinion leaders, they do what's called due diligence and there's this massive crowdsource reasonableness filter. And yet they expect extraordinary results... I learned a long time ago, that if you aspire to extraordinary results, you've got to be comfortable with being unreasonable—and persistently so. So you might say, "Well, then, if you're unreasonable, does that mean you get extraordinary results?" Of course, not; it's not reversible... And that's where the evolutionary approach comes in: You first project yourself to things and places that people consider unreasonable in terms of what you're proposing to do or are willing to do... But then what makes you survive is recognizing that when you get there, you can do variation and selection and look for what survives. Every single company that we've created at Flagship has this exact same philosophy." Noubar Afeyan, Flagship Pioneering