Certain to Win Quotes

“The nature of war is to shape the enemy.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“If you’re not former military, join the Marine Corps.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. 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.59 This is a revealing statement by a man reported to have won some sixty bouts, virtually all of which ended in the death of his opponent (not surprising, when you consider that the samurai long sword, the tachi, was a four foot blade of steel, sharp as a modern razor, and strong enough to chop cleanly through a water pipe.) Once you accept Musashi’s dictum as a strategic principle, then you might ask how to carry it out, how to actually defeat the opponent’s spirit. Musashi was no mystic, and he grounded all his methods in real actions his students could take. We will encounter him and his techniques many times in this book. 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Specialist or Strategist? Isn’t it true that the more you practice, the better you get? Yes, but, and this bears repeating, the intuitive mastery we are striving for is not brilliant skill at predictable tasks. As the late science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, pointed out, specialization is for insects. Humans need the mystifying ability to cope with the unpredictable and ambiguous challenges posed by thinking adversaries in the real world. Since kendo masters practice hard, don’t we need to put in long hours to develop super competence? The answer is absolutely yes. However, sixteen hours at the office doing the same things day after day simply make you a workaholic (and very likely a micromanager); they do not per se confer an intuitive skill useful in competitive 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“There is a well-known name for this detachment from reality that strikes the less agile side: the fog of war. Boyd’s observations on the effects of agility boil down to the conclusion that by becoming more agile than your competitors, you can cause the fog of war to grow in their minds, thereby decreasing the quality of their decisions and eventually attacking their abilities to make effective decisions altogether. A similar effect, a breakdown in the quality of energy, is well known to students of physics as “entropy.” The energy is still there, but it isn’t available for doing work. The insidious thing about entropy is that within a closed system, it always increases. In other words, closed systems run down. In a competitive situation, the less agile competitor will begin to act like a closed system and the fog of war, or the fog of business, for that matter, begins to grow within. And fog plus menace, as Boyd often noted, is a good formula for generating frustration and eventually, panic.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Another reason why discovering customer “wants” may not generate much in the way of useful strategy is that what customers often want is magic—something like IBM’s “server pixie dust” in their 2003 commercials, or unlimited free energy,”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Helmuth von Moltke, whose armies had won the wars that unified Germany, concluded that, “Strategy is a system of ad hoc expedients.”102 Armed with this view of strategy, a few military leaders began to explore alternatives that eventually led to the Blitzkrieg—ways of operating that encouraged initiative on the part of subordinates to flow around lethal threats and search for advantage elsewhere.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“A plan says, “Here’s what I intend to accomplish, here’s what I’ve got to work with, so here’s what I’m going to do.” Strategy can also ask, “Who said this is what I’ve got to work with? I can develop or buy new capabilities or partner with those who have them.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“It is also possible to have multiple plans operating at the same time, within an overall strategy. You can then reinforce the ones that succeed and cut off the ones that don’t.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“What this says is that Future1 is the idea of the future that best defines what we want for ourselves and our strategy gives enough guidance for us to construct plans to achieve it. At the level of strategy, we don’t worry too much about the specific plans inside the big arrow. We are confident in our abilities to create plans, within the overall strategy, because we have worked and trained together in the past in circumstances not too dissimilar from where we are now.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“A 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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?”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Victory is achieved in the way of conflict by ascertaining the rhythm of each opponent, by attacking with a rhythm not anticipated by the opponent, and by the use of knowledge of the rhythm of the abstract. Miyamoto Musashi, samurai strategist, 17th century Japan; Nihon Services Group trans.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Goals and Visions These higher purposes are sometimes called “overarching goals”97 or “unifying vision”98. Some businesses have this sense of purpose, above making enough profit to survive, or adding a few more million to the CEO’s compensation package.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“So winning requires more than the promise of survival. It must offer an idea of such power and appeal that people will, at times, neglect their other responsibilities and work nights and weekends and extend trips to make it happen.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“If you don’t know where you’re going,” runs a saying I first heard in the Air Force, “any road will take you there.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“The Americans would be less dangerous if they had a regular army. British General Frederick Haldimand, Boston, 1776.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“The most advanced combat doctrine belongs to the US Marine Corps, which is part of the Department of the Navy. Their manual, MCDP1, Warfighting,86 lays out a concept of maneuver warfare entirely consistent with the ideas of agility that we have been exploring: 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Agility is the ability to move and adjust quickly and easily. It springs from trained and disciplined forces. Agility requires that subordinates act to achieve the commander’s intent and fight through any obstacle to accomplish the mission. (Emphasis in the original) Operational agility stems from the capability to deploy and employ forces across the range of Army operations. Army forces and commanders shift among offensive, defensive, stability, and support operations as circumstances and missions require. This capability is not merely physical; it requires conceptual sophistication and intellectual flexibility. Tactical agility is the ability of a friendly force to react faster than the enemy. It is essential to seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative. Agility is mental and physical. Agile commanders quickly comprehend unfamiliar situations, creatively apply doctrine, and make timely decisions.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“There is no conflict, however, between ambiguity and deception, since the first provides an environment for generating the second.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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. The fact that the smaller side does win, and not infrequently, is what excites our interest.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Boyd was famous for browbeating his audiences with the mantra, “People, ideas, and hardware—in that order!” What we have seen so far reinforces Boyd’s conclusion. In all the battles and business examples noted in chapter II, as well as in the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, groups of dedicated people found and exploited weaknesses in their larger and better-financed adversaries.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“If in your organization you have a small number of people making mistakes and performing poorly, it’s probably their fault. You should spend your time working with them, or transfer them to other jobs, or if neither of those options is feasible, remove them. If it’s much more than 10%, though, then it’s the system’s fault and you should put your effort into fixing the system and quit blaming or exhorting the people in it.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“When applied to war, Boyd’s strategy provides ways to keep one’s own orientation intact, while taking active measures to destroy that of the opponent. Time—in particular how long it takes our side to reorient compared to how long it takes the opponent—is Boyd’s primary device for accomplishing this, which is why the name “time-based competition” also came to be applied to this approach to strategy.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“In both the Blitzkrieg and to a lesser extent in Desert Storm, one side was able to use time as a device to offset the other’s size, technology, position, and even planning. In particular, the winners were able to make things happen that their opponents may have anticipated, but not when their opponents might have expected.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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 … 18 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Look at what British military historian Basil Liddell Hart had to say: 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business