September 12, 2019 Dinner Meeting featuring Safi Bahcall

The Economic Club of Memphis is pleased to present Safi Bahcall on Thursday, September 12, 2019. A reception begins at 6 pm with dinner seating at 6:45 pm.  

In his instant Wall Street Journal bestselling book Loonshots, Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about innovation and group dynamics, challenging everything we thought we knew about radical breakthroughs. In talks based on his book—which Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman calls “Not to be missed by anyone who wants to understand how ideas change the world”—Bahcall shows how we can stoke innovation, create better leaders, and support “loonshots”: the imperfect but ingenious ideas that have the potential to change the world. 

Safi is a second-generation physicist - the son of two astrophysicists - and a biotech entrepreneur.  He received his BA summa cum laude from Harvard and his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford, where he worked with Lenny Susskind in particle physics and the Nobel laureate Bob Laughlin in condensed matter physics.  He was a Miller Fellow in physics at UC Berkeley.  After working for three years as a consultant for McKinsey, Safi co-founded a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer.  He led its IPO and served as its CEO for 13 years.

Safi regularly speaks with senior leadership teams in technology, healthcare, media, entertainment, finance, consumer goods, and the US military about implementing the ideas in Loonshots: how to balance the core and the new, and lessons in transformation and reinvention. In addition, Safi has presented at industry conferences, investor events, and medical meetings around the world, as well as leading academic institutions including business schools and physics, mathematics, or medical departments at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, UC Berkeley, Caltech, Cornell, Bell Labs, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, Rockefeller, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.