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

by Chet Richards

Boyd noted, at the start of World War II, the French and British were using the same outmoded strategies that had caused horrendous bloodbaths during World War I. The Germans, on the other hand, had developed the Blitzkrieg, and they sliced through the allied lines in a couple of weeks. After considerable research, Boyd concluded that a small set of principles formed the foundation for the German victory and that they were primarily cultural, that is, they dealt with the behavior of people in groups. These “principles of the Blitzkrieg” do not give instructions on how to deploy tanks on the battlefield. Rather they aim to attack the ability of the other side to make effective decisions under conditions of danger, fear, and uncertainty and to increase our ability to function well under these same conditions. There was, in other words, little exclusively military about Boyd’s philosophy of conflict.

This book began in 1988 from a briefing on maneuver warfare and business. Boyd read, commented on, and corrected every draft until his death in 1997. The chapters on climate and strategy are very similar to the last manuscript Boyd saw, although I have updated the examples and changed a few “buts” to “however.” I have also had the opportunity to re-read his exegesis of strategy, Patterns of Conflict, a few more times, discuss it with his other surviving colleagues, and present it to military and commercial audiences.

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecclesiastes, IX,

I propose to resurrect business strategy by returning to a form of conflict that is simpler in the abstract, war.6 Businesses will not be able to use the specific tactics, principles, or strategies of war since these are designed to destroy adversaries—morally and mentally if possible, physically if necessary—and not to attract customers. War strategies, however, rest on a deeper foundation of people working together under stress and uncertainty, and good ones shape the terms of the conflict to their liking before combat begins. Such an environment describes modern business, and strategies based on this foundation will work as well for business as for war.

During the night of May 9th and 10th, 1940, Germany attacked Belgium and Holland. (Maps 1 and 2) Map 1—Western Front, May 1940 Map 2—The Attack Begins The French and their British allies had anticipated the attack, which was similar to how the Germans had started World War I a generation earlier, and they rushed forward to meet them. The idea was that when the trenches formed, as the allies believed they must, as they had in every war since the US Civil War, they would form outside the borders of France. (Map 3) Map 3—The Allies Respond It was a trap. It was as if the Germans had not only read the Allies’ minds, but were planting thoughts in them as well. Everything the Germans did was designed to reinforce the Allied conclusion that the main thrust was coming through the flat terrain of the Low Countries—military eyes recognized it as good tank country and tank warfare was known to be a German forte. German deception succeeded to the extent that ten days later, as the real German main thrust was approaching the French coast miles to the west, Churchill was still reassuring the English people that events were under control:

As Churchill was soon to realize—barely in time to order the withdrawal of the surviving British forces from Dunkirk—the German penetration was far more than a “scoop or raid.” Three corps composed of eight German armored divisions, “Panzers,”7 had snaked through narrow roads in the dense Ardennes Forest in southern Belgium and Luxembourg. By the morning of May 14, they were across the Meuse River at Sedan and began streaming into France. One week later, they reached the sea.

At the start of the attack on France, the Germans had no advantage in numbers and lagged in technology. Yet they won and won easily, and they did it through the application of strategy. Their strategy was so powerful that in one two-week period, it set aside 300 years of military history.

What about the two sides’ weapons? We sometimes assume that the German tanks were so superior that they swept the French from the field. Many people are surprised to learn that one for one, the French tanks were state of the art for the time.10 Germany, on the other hand, had suffered under a ban on tanks imposed by the allies from 1918 until Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Catching up proved slow, and she did not produce her first fully modern tank until 1939. German armies still had only 349 of this design by May 1940.11 In addition, France had a great advantage in artillery, which had been the main killer on the battlefield in the last war.

That the Germans would attack surprised no one. Both Britain and France had declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939, two days after the German attack on Poland, and so had eight months to get ready. Likewise, it cannot be said that the German tactics were a surprise. They were a refinement of tactics the Germans had used in their last major offensive in the earlier war and had been studied by both French and British strategists between the wars. As for terrain, the French could read a map and knew about conditions in the Ardennes Forest and the network of narrow roads that traversed it. The French had even surmised that the Germans might try an attack in that area. To guard against this possibility, the French Second and Ninth Armies took up positions in Sedan and along the Meuse River. Although these formations were staffed with second-rate troops and lacked modern tanks and transport, calculations had shown that the Germans would need nine or ten days to move enough men and artillery through the limited road network in the Ardennes to force a crossing. This would allow French commanders plenty of time to bring up more heavily armed and better trained reinforcements.

There is one caution. Don’t become fascinated by the map. You may be tempted to say to yourself, “It was simple. The allies rushed to the north, and the Germans then cut across the south. I could have won that battle.” Could you, now? If the French and British had had the God’s-eye view shown in the maps, we would not be studying the battle today. They could have bottled-up the German thrust through the Ardennes since they had the forces available and the plans prepared. An allied loss under what the military call “perfect intelligence” would have been a colossal blunder, not the result of superior German strategy.

On the evening of the German attack on Sedan, May 13th, the French 55th Infantry Division began a withdrawal from the west bank of the Meuse River in the face of massive German attacks. As sometimes happens, the retreat got out of control and became a rout. There were incidents, for example, where men far behind the lines abandoned their artillery pieces and began to run to the rear. Writer Len Deighton called it the “greatest tank victory in all the records of warfare,” because in truth, the nearest German tanks were still trying to get across the river.12 Once one side considers abandoning the field, particularly if it loses the initiative, small setbacks can lead to big disasters, and collapse can occur quickly. This happened with the French. About 36 hours after the Germans crossed the Meuse, for example, the French First Armored Division was moving up to attack the German penetration. It was a powerful force and should have been able to throw a roadblock in front of the fast-moving Germans. As the French force stopped to refuel, however, Major General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, joined by the 5th Panzers, ambushed them and destroyed all but 17 out of the original 175 French tanks.13 Now Rommel did something that characterizes Blitzkrieg warfare. Rather than dig in and “consolidate his position,” or otherwise savor the fruits of victory, he proceeded to use his advantage in time to neutralize his opponents’ forces and weapons. Battle-weary as they must have bee...

Or from the British general whom the Germans credit as one of the sources of the Blitzkrieg, J. F. C. Fuller: It was to employ mobility as a psychological weapon: not to kill but to move; not to move to kill but to move to terrify, to bewilder, to perplex, to cause consternation, doubt and confusion in the rear of the enemy …

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. Once in this condition, they can easily be defeated, regardless of the weapons that remain in their possession.

In 1981, Stalk wrote, Yamaha opened an enormous factory and announced that it would become the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer. At that time Honda held the honor and had no intention of relinquishing it. Most companies in the US as well as in Japan would have challenged force with force and built a factory even larger than Yamaha’s. After a while, overcapacity would have reared its ugly head, profits would have turned down, and there would have been the massive layoffs we see in the US auto industry today.

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. Honda wasn’t cranking out new models for the fun of it. They were learning from how the public accepted, or not, each new model and they made changes accordingly. The result was that both Honda and public tastes evolved during the course of the campaign. By the end of the war, a Yamaha looked drab and unimaginative parked next to a Honda. Yamaha accepted an embarrassing surrender, publicly stating “We want to end the H-Y War. It was our fault.”

Don’t worry if the mechanics of how the Germans or Honda won are not clear. These details are the subject of the rest of the book. At this point, the only fact of importance is that in two different fields of human competition, war and business, people found ways to use time to offset and eventually render irrelevant their opponent’s advantages in such physical parameters as size and technology.

One of the reasons Boyd’s concepts have become so widely accepted, even by people who have never heard of him, is that viewed through his lens, the successes of Toyota, Dell, Southwest, the Germans in 1940, the Israelis in 1956 and 1967, and the Vietnamese in 1975 become readily understandable, even obvious.

You will even see terms like “first mover advantage.” The simplest such business strategy is to grow: A competitor makes an acquisition, so we make a larger one. Until the meltdown of the early 21st century, a growth strategy also meant loading up on debt to finance acquisitions. The idea is that once a company achieves sufficient market share, it can dictate the terms of the competition. It can, for example, use economies of scale to drive down prices and eliminate its smaller, less efficient competitors, whereupon it can raise prices and otherwise manipulate the marketplace to produce superior profitability and pay back the costs of the acquisitions. It sounds attractive and it is easy to model the cost savings one can achieve and even the profits one will reap in the end. Players using this strategy included such famous names as SwissAir, Enron, WorldCom, and AOL.

This is Silicon Valley's entire business model. If interest rates don't go down, the San Francisco Bay Area may well end up like Detroit.

The noted Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (c. 5th century B.C.), who is still widely studied today, dismissed the fascination with size thusly: “Numbers alone confer no advantage.”31 Japan’s favorite strategist, the 17th Century samurai warrior-philosopher, Miyamoto Musashi, wrote with blunt contempt that “it does not matter who is stronger or who is faster.”

In May 1863, at about the time Lee was befuddling Hooker at Chancellorsville, Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest was chasing a regiment of Union cavalry across a wide swath of northern Alabama, finally cornering them a few miles west of the Georgia border near the town of Cedar Bluff. Forrest demanded surrender, and the Union commander, a colonel named Abel D. Streight, refused. At that point, one of Forrest’s men rode up and asked for orders for his regiment, which was coming in from the north, followed shortly by another requesting orders for a regiment approaching from the south. Streight, who could also hear sounds of large amounts of equipment moving in the distance, figured the game was over and honorably surrendered his 1700 men to what turned out (to his horror) to be Forrest’s 350, less than one-quarter of one fully manned regiment. He was still demanding his guns back when Forrest put his arm around him and uttered those immortal words of strategy, “Ah Colonel, all is fair in love and war, you know.”

If you dig a little, you can find that throughout history, there has been an undercurrent of strategists who looked at war in this light, and not as some type of collection of pieces on a game board.

Where Boyd made his great contribution was not in drawing up this list, for its elements can all be found in the earliest works on strategy, but by showing that they still apply in this era of $200 million fighter aircraft and by giving some concrete advice on how to generate and employ them.

Things we want to have on our side - Sense of Mission, Morale, Leadership, Harmony, Teamwork. Which allow us to - Appear Ambiguous, Be Deceptive, Generate Surprise & Panic, Seize & Keep the Initiative, Create & Exploit Opportunities. Which Cause These In The Enemy - Bickering, Scapegoating, Confusion, Panic, Rout, Mass Defection & Surrender.

Nobel Laureate Frederick Hayek eloquently makes this case in his book, The Fatal Conceit. Hayek inveighed against the notion of ever being able to plan a productive economy. He argues that formal planning methodologies—which are models of how an economy works—do not capture what really drives a competitive economy, in particular the information processed through decisions made daily by millions of buyers and sellers. Conversely, countries that try to run their economies through a central state planning mechanism cannot process information nearly as well as the multitude of players in a decentralized system.

Financially massive organizations warp the environment they inhabit much like the way gravitationally massive bodies warp space-time in physics: Normal rules do not apply to them. Giant companies influence Congress, the executive branch, and local governing bodies to pass legislation they want—granting them subsidies, protection, environmental relief, favorable tax status, and so on—and otherwise treat them in ways that are perfectly legal, but outside what the equations of economics predict.

Aperture Science is a pretty great fictional example.

Frankly, it is difficult to see how this exotic hardware would have prevented—or can prevent in the future—attacks like those of September 11, 2001, which cost al-Qa’ida perhaps $200,000 and required no weapons development program.41 What al-Qa’ida did use were the factors that have produced victory in combat, such as those in the list in Table I, chapter II.

Boyd was famous for browbeating his audiences with the mantra, “People, ideas, and hardware—in that order!”

We also found that on many occasions, the smaller or less technologically advanced side won, confounding the predictions of the models. The reason for this reversal, in business and in war, appears to be that these smaller organizations were able to avoid or negate the larger’s advantages in size and strength. Somehow they had managed not to become systems in the eyes of their larger opponents. 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.

The research cited in the last chapter indicated that by picking the larger or more technologically advanced side, you can predict victory in just less than 75% of the battles studied. This sounds impressive, until you recall that by flipping a coin, you can predict victory 50% of the time.

Armies that engage in Blitzkrieg and maneuver warfare in general differ in fundamental ways from armies designed to conduct attrition warfare. Blitzkrieg strategies do not aim to execute the same maneuvers as other forms of warfare, such as charging across no man’s land, only more quickly.43 In a typical operation, blitzing units don’t expose themselves to direct enemy fire any more than absolutely necessary. They seem to loom up from out of nowhere to overwhelm a section of the enemy’s line, then penetrate to create surprise and confusion in the rear. It is this abrupt, unexpected, and disorienting pattern of action that forms the basis of his strategy.44 The people who created this style of warfare in the late 19th and first part of the 20th centuries realized early on that it required a type of discipline different from the mindless obedience to orders that characterized the Prussian armies of Frederick the Great in the mid-1700s. Modern weapons are extremely lethal and opportunities to surprise and shock an intelligent enemy are fleeting. Soldiers at all levels must be free to—must be required to—use their creativity, intelligence, and initiatives to work around the enemy’s weapons and generate and exploit opportunities.

By using German strategy, and their own words to describe it, are we not condoning or even glorifying Nazi actions? This is not my intention. One could argue that given the limitations of their system—the Nazis’ absolute refusal to learn anything from their Jewish population, who included many of Germany’s most highly educated citizens, for example—they had put themselves at an enormous disadvantage relative to the rest of the world. I believe this is correct, and that they nearly won anyway gives further evidence to how good their strategy was. Those who would oppose fascist and totalitarian movements in the future would do well to consider this.

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

Pick up any good book on military leadership—I particularly like Small Unit Leadership: A Commonsense Approach47 by retired US Army Colonel Mike Malone because of the practical advice this decorated combat infantry leader gives young officers and NCOs. 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. But, and this is the key point, this trust cannot be wished for or assumed. It must be earned through training and working together, as the German Army did between the two world wars when it was reduced to a small core of career professionals (an “unintended consequence” of the surrender terms imposed by the Allies at Versailles.)

Bill Lind, a colleague of Boyd’s and the author of one of the classics of maneuver warfare, a book that belongs on every strategist’s bookshelf, Maneuver Warfare Handbook,49 wrote that: Both leadership and monitoring are valueless without trust. The “contracts” … of intent and mission express that trust … that his subordinates will understand and carry out his desires and trust by his subordinates that they will be supported when exercising their initiative.

If there is a universally accepted truth in military science, the fundamental role played by cohesion, unity, and trust may be it. Twenty-four hundred years before Fuller, Sun Tzu had concluded that, “He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious.”50 The Arab historian ibn Khaldun, who is generally credited with writing the first modern analysis of history, echoed this theme in 1377 A.D., “What is in fact proven to make for superiority is the situation with regard to group feeling.” The rule is simple: The side with the stronger group feeling has a great advantage.51 Thus German General Heinz Gaedcke, when asked about what makes a good commander, replied that first, they did not lead from the rear, and second, “they commanded on the basis of mutual trust.”52 Postwar military analysts agreed: “Teamwork was the key to German superiority.”

During its period of greatest triumph, from 1948 to 1973, the Israeli Army went to great lengths to build mutual trust. You could not, for example, come into the army as an officer. Everybody started as an 18-year old draftee or volunteer. From among this crowd, the best were selected to become NCOs and finally officers. Now here is the critical idea: While they were moving up, from squad leader to platoon leader and company commander, they generally stayed in their original units. All of the officers and sergeants shared a common background, knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and could communicate rapidly and accurately using very few words. So perhaps it is ironic that today, some Israelis credit trust for whatever success was achieved by the first intifada, the largely unarmed Palestinian uprising that caused Israel far more problems than the Arab armies ever did. Intifada leaders, it turns out, built mutual trust through years of organizing within Israeli prison camps. This trust on a person-to-person level had proven stronger than the factional rivalries that divided these leaders before they were jailed.

“Through the long years of fighting in hard conditions of dangers and privations, our officers and men have loved each other like blood brothers, sharing hardships and joys together, united for life and in death.” North Vietnamese Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap (1961—before significant numbers of US forces had entered the conflict)

General F. W. von Mellenthin, who as a junior officer participated in the attack on France, noted that the German units crossing the Meuse on May 14, 1940, had “practiced and rehearsed their roles for months.” Their French opponents were not so well prepared: Fortunately, the French found it difficult to improvise (a counterattack) at short notice; their tanks moved slowly and clumsily and by the time they got into action, our antitank guns were arriving … although the French attacked courageously, they showed little skill, and soon nearly 50 of their tanks were burning on the battlefield.

Although hierarchies are not the only type of human organization, I am going to use terms like “subordinate” faute de mieux. If this bothers you, substitute “the person who has the vision for what needs to be done” for “superior” and “a person whom he or she is going to ask to help accomplish it” for “subordinate.” It should be noted, though, that there are few examples of effective combat units that were participatory democracies.

A mission order can be thought of as a virtual contract between superior and subordinate. If I am your superior, and I order you to disrupt and delay enemy forces east of XYZ River, you have two choices. You can accept, in which case enemy forces east of XYZ River are disrupted and delayed. There is no excuse for anything else, even if you and all your people get killed trying. Note that how you accomplish the mission is up to you, within any constraints that I put into the order. Your other choice, if you believe that you do not have the resources to carry out the order, or that it is just plain dumb, is to challenge it. The German system encouraged this, but once agreement was reached, the superior could assume that the mission would be accomplished. Now this sounds brutal, a caricature of Prussian discipline. Such a contract, though, is effective only as part of an overall cultural milieu that includes such other elements as mutual trust and an intuitive sense of strategy. If we have built sufficient trust based on mutual experience, I know what you are capable of, and I trust you to do it if you agree to it. You trust me not to order you to do something that you cannot do or that will endanger you for no important strategic reason. How do we all know these things? Because we have trained and fought together over an extended time and earned this level of trust. We can make these decisions rapidly and accurately because of our intuitive competence.

In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.

So you won’t think that I am glorifying everything the German Army did, it is interesting to note that the Germans themselves violated the focus-and-direction principle one year after their Blitzkrieg had so spectacularly defeated France. In his critique of the attack on Russia, Field Marshal Gerd von Runstedt, commander of Army Group A, which spearheaded the Blitzkrieg (Map 4), noted that instead of a clearly designated Schwerpunkt against Leningrad in the north, Moscow in the center, or Stalingrad in the south, they simply tried all three60. Part of the reason for this strategic lapse undoubtedly came from the dismal performance of Soviet troops against Finland in the Russo-Finnish War (1939-1940, and another example of a small force dealing defeat after defeat upon a larger one until numbers finally wore them down), and part reflected Hitler’s belief in the innate superiority of some “Aryan race.” In any case, an arrogant disrespect for the opponent has proven fatal in most every arena of competition.

The German organizational climate encouraged people to act, and to take the initiative, even during the terror and chaos of war. Within this climate, the principles of mutual trust and intuitive competence make much of implicit communication, as opposed to detailed, written instructions. The Germans felt they had no alternative. As the Chief of the Prussian General Staff in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, observed in the mid-1800s, the greater risk is the loss of time that comes from always trying to be explicit.61 Or as General Gaedcke commented about his unit in WW II, if he had tried to write everything down, “we would have been too late with every attack we ever attempted.”

Thomas Cleary, in his The Japanese Art of War (which may have been Boyd’s all time favorite book, next to Sun Tzu itself) emphasizes the importance Zen places on mind-to-mind communication. As Cleary notes, this has nothing to do with telepathy or other mystical nonsense but clearly means the transmission of Zen through objective experience, that is, through actions in the real world, which is how Boyd and the maneuver warfare theorists build mutual trust and unit cohesion.

Len Deighton even claims that there was only one true Blitzkrieg, the May 1940 attack on France.64 Defense analyst and Boyd acolyte Pierre M. Sprey,65 who translated and assisted in several of Boyd’s interviews with the German generals, estimated that the climate was only fully implemented by maybe one-half of one percent of the army—the small circle around Heinz Guderian that Sprey calls “brilliant rebels.” In this sense, the Israeli Army of 1956 and 1967 was superior, man for man, to the German Army of 1940.

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. What this described vis-à-vis the MiG and the F-86 is that the American fighter could set up novel and unexpected conditions and exploit them before the Russian could react with his sometimes superior EM capability.

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.

Our strategic directives were dynamism, initiative, mobility, and rapidity of decision in the face of new situations.69 Gen Vo Nguyen Giap.

After examining many wars, battles, and engagements, Boyd synthesized his now well-known “OODA Loop.” A participant in a conflict, any conflict, may be thought of as engaging in four distinctive although not distinct activities: • 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.

“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. You can never be sure beforehand which stray idea will provide the key to unlock some fatal dilemma. German strategists recognized that this was as important to the soldier in the foxhole as for a general in his headquarters. As General Hermann Balck, whom Boyd regarded as one of World War II’s best field commanders and whose rifle regiment was one of the first across the Meuse during the Blitzkrieg, put it, “The training of the infantryman can never be too many-sided.”70 Musashi, who gave up bathing and other activities generally associated with personal hygiene, still insisted that his disciples be open to all areas of knowledge—that they cultivate the arts in particular—and he produced calligraphy and watercolors that are admired today.

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.