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As odd as this may seem—a doctrine of war and a car manufacturing system turning out to be brothers under the skin—they both use time as their principle strategic device, their organizational climates share several elements, and they both trace back to the school of strategy whose earliest known documentation is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
Our view of the world, our “orientation,” as Boyd called it, depends heavily on things happening close in time to when we expect them to happen. Mismatches in time—such as when things don’t appear to be happening in a continuous and predictable (even if very rapid) manner—can be disorienting. Under stress, disoriented people become demoralized, frustrated, and panicked.
Honda, however, chose to attack through speed and agility. Over the 18 month period of the “H-Y War,” Honda introduced 113 new models to replace the 60 it had in the beginning. In contrast, Yamaha was only able to bring out 37.
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. The critical element was that Honda was both learning
what these “wants” were and was helping to shape them at the same time.
This might lead one to suspect that in any competitive endeavor, if you can be modeled (“sand-tabled,” as Boyd referred to it) you aren’t using strategy at all, and you can be defeated.
Key Attributes of the Blitzkrieg • 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
An “asymmetric fast transient,” though, is not a traditional maneuver done more quickly, even much more quickly. In business, it should not conjure up an image of doing what you’re doing now, just doing it faster. The “transient” is the change between maneuvers. In Boyd’s concept, the ideal asymmetric fast transient is an abrupt, unexpected, jerky, disorienting change that causes at least a hesitation and preferably plants the seeds of panic in the other side.
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
“Go out and get all the information you can by whatever means possible” is even closer. You can never be sure beforehand which stray idea will provide the key to unlock some fatal dilemma.
How well your orientation matches the real world is largely a function of how well you observe, since in Boyd’s conception, “observe” is the only input from the outside. Like the canopy on the Korean-era MiGs, anything that restricts the inflow of information or ideas can lead to mismatches (disorientations) between what
you think is happening and what actually is and may also delay you from spotting (and so acting upon) these mismatches.
Since what you’re looking for is mismatches, a general rule is that bad news is the only kind that will do you any good. To thrive in any form of maneuver conflict, you must seek out and find data that don’t fit with your current worldview and you must do this while there is still time. Otherwise the world will change—or more likely your adversaries or competitors will change it for you—and you will find yourself disoriented and in the position of playing catch-up. You will have lost the initiative, which is dangerous in any conflict.
As Sun Tzu put it in the last chapter of The Art of War: No reward is more generous than that for a spy … There is nothing for which one cannot employ spies.72
Decisions can transition us into the action stage. For an individual, though, if observe and orient were done well you just know what to do the vast majority of the time. Such “implicit decision making” is another way to look at the notion of “intuitive competence.”73
It is the quickness of the entire cycle, and in particular, the time it takes to, in Boyd’s language, “transition from one orientation state to another,” and not just or even particularly the speed of the O-to-O-to-D-to-A axis, that determines agility and competitive power.74
A side in a conflict or competition is more agile than its opponent if it can execute its OODA loops more quickly.
It also turns out to be equivalent to the definition floated in chapter II, the ability to rapidly change one’s orientation, since it is orientation locking up under the stress of competition and conflict that causes OODA loops to slow and makes one predictable, rather than abrupt and unpredictable. Speed, that is physical velocity, may provide an important tactical option, but it is not The Way.77 In fact, speed increases momentum, which can make one more predictable.
Ambiguity is a terrible thing, much more effective as a strategy than deception, with which it is often confused. Deception is correctly described as a tactic: If you are deceived, you will be surprised when you discover the truth, and it is possible that you will be led to do some things, perhaps even fatal things, that you would not have done if you had realized the truth earlier. It can be an extremely effective tactic, even though your ability to function as a thinking human being is not at risk. This is exactly what you can attack and destroy using ambiguity.
“Friction,” wrote the 19th century Prussian general and philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, “is the only conception that more or less corresponds to that which distinguishes real war from war on paper.”79 Along with his insistence that “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” it is his most famous quote.
The Army was the first to put the concept of agility into formal written doctrine. In their Field Manual 3-0, Operations, the Army tells its soldiers that:
By our actions, we seek to impose menacing dilemmas in which events happen unexpectedly and faster than the enemy can keep up with them (author’s note: asymmetric fast transients) … The ultimate goal is panic and paralysis, an enemy who has lost the will to resist.”
From everyday life: The art of the possible in a world where constraints force us to choose between unpleasant or imperfect alternatives. Retired Pentagon official and long-time Boyd associate Franklin C. Spinney, author of Defense Facts of Life.
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.
Boyd’s definition: 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.101
grand strategy—pumping up our morale and attracting the uncommitted to our side. Since in business, “attraction” is the only tool we have to influence customers, there is no essential difference between “business strategy” and “business grand strategy.” Yet another distinction between business and war.
The best Japanese carmakers routinely use their superior OODA loop speeds both to find and to shape what customers really want, whether the customers know it or not. 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.”105
