Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

by Chet Richards

It seemed that fortune chose these two weeks to grant a monopoly to the Germans, and such a “string of luck” is a common indicator that a Boyd-type strategy is working. The chain of fortunate occurrence, however, is an indicator of the strategy, not the strategy itself.

Employing a strategy conceptually the same as the Germans’ in the Blitzkrieg, Honda used speed, or more accurately, decision cycle time, to create opportunities in the marketplace and then provide products that customers wanted to buy more than they wanted those of the competition.

If in your organization you have a small number of people making mistakes and performing poorly, it’s probably their fault. You should spend your time working with them, or transfer them to other jobs, or if neither of those options is feasible, remove them. If it’s much more than 10%, though, then it’s the system’s fault and you should put your effort into fixing the system and quit blaming or exhorting the people in it.

Einheit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion • Fingerspitzengefühl: Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations • Auftragstaktik: Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subordinate • Schwerpunkt: Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation

You cannot, he admonishes, give in to the urge to check and control everybody. In the heat of battle, there isn’t time. You have to trust your soldiers and subordinate leaders to do the right thing under the stress of combat.

Boyd concluded that to be most effective, training and shared experiences must expose the organization to more and more complex and dangerous situations so that people finally learn to trust each other in the confusion of conflict.

Zen and other oriental philosophies talk at great length about intuitive knowledge, but they also stress that it comes through years of experience and self-discipline.

The secret turned out to be that the F-86 had a bubble canopy, allowing its pilot much better observation of the fight, and full power hydraulic controls, which is like power steering for fighters.

It soon became clear that unlike EM, which only describes combat between fighters, fast transients can be found in most any form of competition.

Boyd inferred that if you can do things before the other side reacts, you can greatly increase your chances of winning, and it doesn’t make much difference how big or how strong the other guy is. Asymmetric fast transients, in other words, appeared to do a much better job of explaining real world results than simple counts of weapons or assessments of technology.

He must observe the environment, which includes himself, his opponent, the physical, mental, and moral situation, and potential allies and opponents. • He must orient himself to decide what it all means. Boyd calls orientation a “many-sided, implicit cross-referencing” process involving the information observed, one’s genetic heritage, social environment, and prior experiences, and the results of analyses one conducts and synthesis that one forms • He must reach some type of decision. • He must attempt to carry out that decision. That is, he must act.

It bears repeating that if you cannot or do not spot mismatches, and generally this means finding bad news, your orientation becomes detached from reality.

What Boyd discovered was that the side with the quicker OODA loops began to exert a strange and terrifying effect on its opponent. Quicker OODA execution caused the slower side to begin falling farther and farther behind events, to begin to lose touch with the situation.

“If you don’t know where you’re going,” runs a saying I first heard in the Air Force, “any road will take you there.” In a competitive environment, not knowing where you’re going may well lead you to some place you didn’t want to be.

Strategy isn’t beating the competition, it’s serving the customer’s real needs. Kenichi Ohmae, Managing Director, McKinsey & Co., Tokyo Office.

Strategy, then, includes selecting the view of the future we want, creating devices to harmonize all the plans and actions designed to achieve that future, and on relatively rare occasions, shifting to an alternate future.

The most basic concern of any strategy is to increase our ability to survive on our own terms in a threatening and confusing world.

Strategy is a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.

Under this paradigm, there is always a lag: the customer has needs and some time later, you discover them. To turn this into an active tool of strategy, you should ask yourself where these needs and wants come from. Too often they represent successful attempts by competitors to shape the marketplace—customers “want” something because a competitor has offered it to them.

The Japanese even have a name for it: miryoku teki hinshitsu, which roughly translates as “What the customer finds so beguiling or fascinating that he cannot live without it.”

How to Tell Your Strategy Is Working in Business • Your competitor’s new products are consistently late and lack your features or quality. • He starts blaming the customer, or insisting that his sales force “educate the customer.” • Personnel turnover is high. • He becomes even more “Theory X,” instituting rigid, explicit controls, frequently in the name of containing costs. • He launches witchhunts and other ever-intensifying internal searches for “the cause of the problem.”

First, there is the Basic Rule of All Competition (BRAC): You are not smarter than either the customer or the competition.

This is why “roadmaps of the future” that masquerade as strategy will get you into trouble. You’ve seen them: first we’re going to do this, then that, then the other thing. As if neither the customer nor competition much mattered. As we have discussed, these are complex plans, that is, intentions, and not strategy at all.

Our last strategic trap is a little different, since it doesn’t flow directly from intellectual arrogance. It is known as the “lessons learned” syndrome, or, as the military puts it, “fighting the last war.” This is the tendency to make major changes to your strategy based primarily (or only) on the last experience you had.

Mutual trust is the internal harmony that converts a mob into a team. For this reason, it underlies all the other components of a competitive organizational climate.

Although “mutual trust” gives us all a soft, warm feeling, how does it actually help win? Simply, it speeds execution of OODA loops. The reason? For starters, it permits implicit communication among team members, where very little needs to be written down.

Trust, as Bogle notes, has to start at the top of the organization. Then at every level, leaders must make it clear that mutual trust is the cardinal corporate virtue.

Robert Galford and Anne Siebold Drapeau identified five simple ways to destroy trust in any organization:122 1. Inconsistent messages—management proclaims one thing, actually does another 2. Inconsistent standards—people feel that they are being treated differently because of where they work, which legacy organization they came from, etc. 3. Misplaced benevolence—ignoring a poor performing or untrustworthy manager, or employee 4. “Elephants in the parlor”—ignoring the role that office politics actually plays in their organization 5. “Rumors in a vacuum”—senior managers embargo all information, or greatly restrict its flow—i.e., to only certain levels of management—during complex initiatives, merger discussions, restructuring, etc.

Junior military officers beginning their careers were able to make “recognition-primed” decisions (intuition and constructing simple mental models) slightly over 40% of the time. Senior battlefield commanders, on the other hand, were able to rely on recognition-primed faculties in upwards of 95% of their decisions. Formal decision making, of the type typically taught in business schools, is required only when experience is inadequate.

Deming rails against organizations that don’t understand the importance of requiring first-line supervisors to have expertise in the jobs they manage. How can a supervisor have a “feel” for how his operation is going if he’s never done it?

As the late science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, pointed out, specialization is for insects. Humans need the mystifying ability to cope with the unpredictable and ambiguous challenges posed by thinking adversaries in the real world.

Tom Peters suggests that you can spot who is going to do great things by what they do on airplanes. They don’t pull out the laptop and grind spreadsheets. Instead, they “read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the umpteenth time,” or pick up insights on human behavior from the great novelists.

Perhaps the greatest value of viewing responsibility as a contract is that it provides an alternative to over-control. Micromanaging is simply not allowed: Once he or she accepts the contract, the subordinate has total freedom within the constraints of the contract as to how to proceed.

Here’s what I think we face • Here’s what I think we should do, and why • Here’s what we should keep our eye on • Now, talk to me132 The only thing needed to make this into a mission order is to look your subordinate right in the eyes and say, • Here’s what I want you and your team to accomplish. Will you do it?

Futurist James Ogilvy simply denounced managing through goal setting as “bunk.” Instead, he recommends that: Organizations should tread near the edge of the future, making it up as they go along, with as much sensitivity, awareness, knowledge, compassion, feeling, and beauty as they can muster.

Boyd insisted that “ch’i” and “Schwerpunkt” are essentially the same, that is, finding and exploiting the magical element should be what gives your enterprise focus and direction.

In warfare, one purpose of using cheng / ch’i is to generate the jerky, abrupt, unexpected and disorienting changes that Boyd called “asymmetric fast transients.” We could generate such an effect, for example, when we spring the ch’i on an opponent whose attention has been captured by the cheng and so believes that he understands the situation. There is a similar-sounding term in business strategy called “market dislocation,” an innovation so profound that it changes the rules of the game in that market segment. The Internet is often cited as such a dislocation, and the theory is that we should be the ones striving to unleash such dislocations.

A better way to regard ch’i in business is the look of amazement and delight on the faces of customers when they discover magic in our products. Like the “What the f__k!” reaction of less agile fighter pilots, it’s “Incredible! Hey honey, look at this!” It’s the emotional force that pulls customers to do more business with us, and to tell their friends. Using “Ok, everything works.”/cheng in combination with “This is so cool!”/ch’i is as fundamental to success in business as employing Nebenpunkte/cheng to set up Schwerpunkt/ch’i is to maneuver warfare.

of Vision Precedes Clarity of Thought

Uncover, create, and exploit many vulnerabilities and weaknesses, hence many opportunities, to pull adversary apart and isolate remnants for mop-up or absorption • Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos… to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse • Destroy the moral bonds (of the enemy) that permit an organic whole to exist • Create moral bonds that permit us, as an organic whole, to shape and adapt to change

Since business is a competition, you don’t have to be perfect, only better than everyone else. But You Probably Won’t Win Just by Doing the Same Old Things Better Than Everybody Else