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

by Chet Richards

Their strategy was so powerful that in one two-week period, it set aside 300 years of military history.

The issue turned on the time factor at stage after stage. French counter-movements were repeatedly thrown out of gear because their timing was too slow to catch up with the changing situation … The French, trained in the slow-motion methods of World War I, were mentally unfit to cope with the new tempo, and it caused a spreading paralysis among them.17

In other words, the purpose of Blitzkrieg strategy was not so much to cope with chaos, but to cause and then exploit it, and it is this cascading of panic and chaos that accounts for the German’s “string of luck.”

Patterns of Conflict,

He that would run his company on visible figures alone will soon have neither company nor visible figures to work with. W. Edwards Deming20

Among the many post-mortem analyses of that conflict, Boyd’s followed the logic that since we cannot predict exactly what a future war might look like, we need to find general patterns, the “common elements” as he termed them, that will apply to any battle, conflict, or war. So, rather than engage in a technical “Why did the North Vietnamese win?” inquiry, of which many began at that time, Boyd simply asked: “What does it take to win?” By taking such a general approach, he arrived at ideas that apply to human conflicts in practically whichever arena they occur.

What does it take to win? This question occupies the rest of the book, which will base its answer on a concept known as agility, another word that has lost its original meaning through careless application. Boyd, however, used the term in a specific sense, to mean the ability to rapidly change one’s orientation—roughly, worldview—in response to what is happening in the external world.

The essence of agility and of applying Boyd’s ideas to any form of competition is to keep one’s orientation well matched to the real world during times of ambiguity, confusion, and rapid change, when the natural tendency is to become disoriented.

There are many other strategies—you may recall portfolio theory (involving a cast of “stars,” “dogs,” and “cash cows”), which enjoyed a huge vogue during the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently “core competencies” and “positioning.” All of these concepts reflected the idea that strategy involves moves and counter-moves and if played according to the rules of the strategy du jour, the result would be improved profitability.

Corporation, Norm Augustine, figured that such logic would eventually lead to weapons so expensive—although of enormous predicted effectiveness—that the entire defense budget would buy only one. He decided to calculate when this would be. The answer is not in some far dim future, but within the expected lifetimes of many readers: 2054.25

“C’est magnifique, ma c’est ne pas la guerre.”

“Someone had blundered.”

“Numbers alone confer no advantage.”

“We have been led astray by computerized war games and map exercises because the primary determinant of victory in these exercises is a preponderance of firepower…”37

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

Strategy itself begins where hard, provable techniques leave off. There must be something more, and what this something more might be is the subject of the rest of this book.

“People, ideas, and hardware—in that order!”

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.

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

Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach47

Maneuver Warfare Handbook,

The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.

“asymmetric fast transients.”

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. It’s a “What-the f___k!” change in circumstances, and in the interval when the opponent is trying to comprehend what the f___k is, Boyd would strike.

The great Olympic and professional boxer Muhammad Ali had said virtually the same thing when he described his strategy as “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.”

“OODA Loop.”

“Observe” means much more than “see.” “Absorb” might be more descriptive if it did not have a passive undertone. “Go out and get all the information you can by whatever means possible” is even closer.

“Orient” is the key to the process. Conditioned by one’s genetic heritage, surrounding culture, and previous learning, the mind combines fragments of ideas, information, conjectures, impressions, etc., to form the “many-sided,

This means that in the OODA concept as Boyd envisioned it, competition is not a simple cycle. This is a critical idea that is often misunderstood: You are simultaneously observing any mismatches between your conception of the world and the way the world really is, trying to reorient to a confusing and threatening situation, and attempting to come up with ideas to deal with it. 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. This generalizes the term agility from air-to-air combat and from warfare in general.

What is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents, but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries. Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature in the scheme of things.95

Strategy is a deliberate search for a plan of action that will develop a business’s competitive advantage and compound it.

Strategy isn’t beating the competition, it’s serving the customer’s real needs.

The art of the possible in a world where constraints force us to choose between unpleasant or imperfect alternatives.

Because the future is unpredictable, a strategy can only be built from intentions: Given where you are now and where you think you want to go, now, what can you do, now, to help you get there? A strategy is not a fact, or a forecast, or a schedule, or a roadmap to the future. Is a strategy, then, a type of plan?

plan is an intention about how to get from where we are now to where we want to be in the future. It is an intention because although we may plan to accomplish certain things, whether we actually do, and whether they have the effects we want, depends on factors beyond our control: customers, competitors, governments, and acts of God, to name a few. The term strategy will be used for higher-order devices for creating and managing plans.

Plans are what we intend to do to get from Now to where we want to be in the Future. To build a specific a plan, we have to make assumptions about what the future will bring. In other words, we have to construct a scenario. We can represent one such plan, with its embedded scenario, as a simple arrow100:

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

What a Business Strategy Should Do • Keep our focus on the customer, with an eye to the competition and the rest of the strategic environment • Provide our team with a continuing stream of options • Enable rapid switching between options • Encourage initiative at all levels—in particular, an execute-and-communicate (“shoot and scoot”) mindset rather than one of ask-and-wait • Harmonize our efforts to achieve the future we have in mind.

Here is an idea for such a strategy. It is certainly not the only one, but it is based on the patterns of thought described so far in this book, and it has worked well for military leaders over the ages: 1. Within your team (company, division, or whatever defines “we” for you), form a clear (though not rigid) view of what “survival on your own terms” means. 2. Cultivate an organizational climate, such as the one described in this book, that will enable your business to operate at increasingly quicker OODA loop speed. 3. Foster an organizational ethos that grows and strengthens the climate, that promotes those who use it and removes those who do not.

Signs Your Strategy Is Working In War • Vehicles or couriers blundering into your lines • You reach an enemy position to find rations still being cooked • Shelling of your last position after you left • Surrender after token resistance • Piles of uniforms by the side of the road • More prisoners than your military police can handle

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. Mathematically, IQours ≤ IQtheirs

There is nothing wrong with conducting post-mortem investigations into your success and failures and you should do this as a matter of course. Problems arise when you change strategies after every one. Management theorists call this tendency to chase the last data point the “Nelson Funnel.”113

The machine metaphor of a military unit was never apt, especially in a fight—where it counts. When you replace the carburetor of a car, it works from the get-go, if it’s the right part. It doesn’t have to practice stopping and starting with the brake linings, or learn the job of the brake linings so that the brakes and the carburetor say they can read each other’s minds. This is the way members of a tight military unit speak of each other.114

Other Ways to Destroy Mutual Trust Trust is now recognized as a topic worthy of academic effort. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, researchers 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.

As the late science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, pointed out, specialization is for insects.

situations. 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.

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