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

by Chet Richards

The Chinese, in their commentary on Sun Tzu, summarized the practice of strategy as a way to respond to changing conditions and create timely options. The strategy is in the responding and creating (what OODA loops do), and not in the options (e.g., plans & tactics) themselves. One can almost hear the exasperation in the commentators’ voices as they asked how one could possibly say in advance what their specific actions would be. By the late 19th Century, military leaders, driven by the lethality new technology was bringing to the battlefield, realized the need to return to this more flexible and opportunistic view of strategy. Helmuth von Moltke, whose armies had won the wars that unified Germany, concluded that, “Strategy is a system of ad hoc expedients.”