10x vs 10% Thinking
Deliberately reserve space for moonshot bets instead of settling for safe incremental improvements.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 87%
Teams default to 'small ball', a stack of safe 10% improvements, because big swings feel risky and unlikely to survive approval. But breakthrough innovation only comes from being willing to try, fail, and shoot for 10x. The framework is partly mindset (think bigger than feels natural) and partly cultural: leaders must engineer environments where audacious ideas can surface and be attempted, allocated in a fractal way across company, team, and individual levels.
Origin
Norton describes himself as a synthesizer rather than originator, crediting thinking that emerged at Google, including its 70/20/10 resource model, and illustrating with historical examples in his essay on his site.
Core principles
- 01Breakthroughs require willingness to fail; failure is often the more likely outcome of a genuine 10x bet.
- 02The ideas usually already exist inside the organization; what's missing is an environment where people can step up and try them.
- 03Resource allocation should be fractal: applied at company, team, and individual levels rather than one blanket ratio.
- 04Most companies with real paying customers cannot bet everything on moonshots, so carve out protected space instead.
How to run it
- 1
Notice when you are ramping expectations down
Catch the reflex of shrinking an idea because 'the CEO will never approve the big one.' That self-censorship is how breakthroughs die before they're proposed.
Pro tip Default to thinking a bit bigger than feels natural, since the systemic bias is toward too-small.
- 2
Allocate bets fractally
Match the portfolio to your context. A research lab or seed VC may put nearly everything into moonshots; a product company with real customers should not. Google's company-level split was 70% core, 20% adjacent, 10% crazy bets.
Pro tip At the team level, invent your own air bubble, e.g. one engineer every sprint or a couple of times a year, for bets that could pay off enormously.
Watch out Do not copy a lab or VC portfolio ratio into a company that has real customers depending on the current product.
- 3
Engineer the environment for the bet
As a leader, create conditions where people can bring and attempt audacious ideas without punishment, rather than rewarding only safe, guaranteed-to-work proposals.
Watch out Having the idea is not enough; without a supportive environment even a company that invents the breakthrough will fail to pursue it.
In the wild
Kodak literally invented the digital camera, so the failure was not a lack of ideas or foresight. There was simply no environment where the people who saw the potential could step up to the plate and pursue it.
→ The breakthrough existed inside the company but died for lack of a culture that let people try it, illustrating that environment, not ideas, is the bottleneck.
At the company level Google split resources 70% to the core business (search and ads at the time), 20% to adjacent businesses, and 10% to crazy bets that might amount to nothing.
→ A structured way to guarantee protected space for moonshots without betting the whole company on them.
Common mistakes
Playing small ball to guarantee approval
Pre-shrinking ideas to what the CEO will surely accept trades away the rare massive breakthroughs for a pile of safe 10% gains that never compound into anything transformative.
Applying a single bet ratio everywhere
Betting the entire company on 50 moonshots is right for an R&D lab or seed fund but reckless when you have real customers relying on the product; the allocation must be thought of fractally by level.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders and managers who set direction and want to build a culture that produces breakthrough innovation rather than only incremental gains.
Not ideal for
Resource-constrained teams whose core product still needs to be stabilized, where reliability matters more than moonshots right now.
From the transcript
“if you have a choice between trying something that could have a massive breakthrough, a massive change, and and playing small ball where you're going…”
“Google once upon a time had a 70/20/10 thing where it was like 70% is our core business.”
“Kodak invented the digital camera, right?”
From the episode
How to unlock your product leadership skills
Ken Norton, Ex-Google