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

by Chet Richards

After the war, American strategists did get the opportunity to talk at length with many of the practitioners of the Blitzkrieg. Amidst all the war stories, a pattern became clear: The roots of success in 1940 lay in the German system for dealing with people; it was cultural, rather than technical. Here, I am using “cultural” in the sense of “business culture,” not as a national trait. From his conversations with the German generals and his study of their experiences and doctrine, Boyd extracted the four concepts shown below as the primary reasons for the Germans’ success: You don’t have to be a tank commander in central Europe to exploit these cultural properties. Boyd called them “an organizational climate for operational success,” and the organization can be a business, a political campaign, or, of course, an army.