Deep in the heart of the pink city of Jaipur, there are a remarkable set of astronomical instruments known as the Jantar Mantar. Built in the early 18th century, these observational tools were designed to divine not only the movement of the stars and the passage of time, but more importantly the direction of one’s life.

Why do some companies survive and others simply crumple? And stranger still — for star-crossed brands such as Yahoo and Blackberry — why did major investments in innovation not save them from being blindsided by the future? In my view — it is all a problem of scale. Big leaders favour big solutions for big problems. But just like the search for the Higgs Boson particle, sometimes in order to understand how dramatic transformations happen, you have to start by looking for things that are very small.

When I finished law school, I almost took a job as a consultant at McKinsey. In any other decade, it would have been a dream job but this was the nineties, and in the end, the allure of joining a dotcom startup was just too seductive to ignore. But I will always remember my last interview with the company.

Most of us are familiar with Google’s moonshot projects that span everything from self-driving cars to AIs that can beat world champion GO players. Less well known are the ways that Google is re-inventing how it designs and optimizes its own internal operations.