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A book on organizational tactics to prevent the stifling of innovation in favor of office politics, Loonshots is an easy read with many vividly regaled tales of successful and unsuccessful examples of innovative ideas within a team of people. The central thesis of the book is that the optimal number of people in an organization can be modeled as a phase transition, much like in percolation theory (which was the topic of one of my grad school papers).

Because this book is intended for a non-technical audience, the main text goes very light on the model details, although the extensive footnotes go into more detail. I was left wanting for some model validation using empirical data, rather than plugging in handpicked hyperparameters designed to guide the results, seemingly towards a preferred outcome on the behalf of the author.