Certain to Win
[Sun Tzu´s prognosis for generals who follow his advice] develops
the strategy of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd for
the world of business.
The success of Robert Coram’s monumental biography,
Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War rekindled
interest in this obscure pilot and documented his influence
on military matters ranging from his early work on fighter tactics
to the USMC's maneuver warfare doctrine to the planning for
Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately Boyd’s written legacy,
consisting of a single paper and a four-set cycle of briefings,
addresses strategy only in war.
Boyd and Business
Boyd did study business. He read everything he could find on
the Toyota Production System and came to consider it as an implementation
of ideas similar to his own. He took business into account when
he formulated the final version of his “OODA loop” and in his
last major briefing, Conceptual Spiral, on science and technology.
He read and commented on early versions of this manuscript,
but he never wrote on how business could operate more profitably
by using his ideas.
Other writers and business strategists have taken up the challenge,
introducing Boyd’s concepts and suggesting applications to business.
Keith Hammonds, in the magazine Fast Company, George
Stalk and Tom Hout in Competing Against Time, and Tom
Peters most recently in Re-imagine! have described the
OODA loop and its effects on competitors.
They made significant contributions. Successful businesses,
though, don’t concentrate on affecting competitors but on enticing
customers. You could apply Boyd all you wanted to competitors,
but unless this somehow caused customers to buy your products
and services, you’ve wasted time and money. If this were all
there were to Boyd, he would rate at most a sidebar in business
strategy.
Business is not War
Part of the problem has been Boyd’s focus on war, where “affecting
competitors” is the whole idea. Armed conflict was Boyd’s life
for nearly 50 years, first as a fighter pilot, then as a tactician
and an instructor of fighter pilots, and after his retirement,
as a military philosopher. Coram describes (and I know from
personal experience) how his quest consumed Boyd virtually every
waking hour.
It was not a monastic existence, though, since John was above
everything else a competitor and loved to argue over beer and
cigars far into the night. During most of the 1970s and 80s
he worked at the Pentagon, where he could share ideas and debate
with other strategists and practitioners of the art of war.
The result was the remarkable synthesis we know as Patterns
of Conflict. Discussions about generals and campaigns, however,
did not give Boyd much insight into competition in other areas,
like business
Now you might expect, at first glance, that business is so much
like war that lifting concepts from one and applying them to
the other would be straightforward. But think about that for
a minute. Even in its simplest description, business doesn't
really look much like war. For one thing, there are always three
sides to business competition: you, customers, and competitors.
Often it is vastly more complex, with a multitude of competitors
who are customers of each other as well. In business, unlike
war, it may even be desirable to be “conquered” by a competitor
in a lucrative merger or acquisition. Finally, and most important,
it is rarely possible to “defeat” the other player in the triangle,
that is, to compel an unwilling customer to buy. Attempts to
pressure customers into paying too much or into buying more
than they need often open a window for competitors (as the US
airline industry is belatedly discovering.) Generally all we
can do is attract – offer products and services to potential
customers, whose decisions determine who wins and who loses.
What this means is that the strategies and tactics of war, Boyd’s
included, are destructive in nature and so never apply to business.
Expressions like “Attack enemy weaknesses” have no meaning,
except as metaphors and analogies. Across different domains,
such literary devices are as likely to be misleading as helpful.
Boyd’s Strategy Still Applies
Business is not war, but it is a form of conflict, a situation
where one group can win only if another group loses. If you
dig beneath Boyd’s war-centered tactics you find a general strategy
for ensuring that in most any type of conflict your group will
be the one that wins.
Although Boyd made a number of new and fundamental contributions,
his is an ancient school, extending back in written form 2,500
years. It is built around two primary themes:
- A focus on time (not speed)
and specifically, using dislocations in time to shape the
competitive situation. These effects, by the way, are quite
different in business than they are in war.
- A culture with attributes
that enable—even impel—organizations to exploit time for
competitive advantage. Within Boyd´s culture, members will
seek out or invent specific practices that will work for
it.
Why
You Should Read this Book
This book will give you a firm foundation in Boyd’s strategy,
starting with its military roots, but it is not a how-to manual.
There could never be such a manual for strategy since all sides
could use it and so would derive no strategic benefit. Anything
you can write a how-to manual for is tactics or even technique.
Strategy begins where these leave off.
You should read this book if you’ve found other books on business
strategy lacking something. You should read it if you appreciate
that Sun Tzu seems to be revealing fundamental truths, but it’s
not clear what they have to do with business. You should read
it if you intend to run your own show – without the decision
making by committee, shunning of responsibility, and breakdown
of ethics and trust that you see around you every day. You should
read it because you’ll find ideas you’ve never seen before,
and besides, it’s not that long.
For seminars and presentations
on Certain to Win, including Col John Boyd´s Patterns
of Conflict, please contact:
Jeannine Addams,
J. Addams & Partners, Inc.
Telephone: (+1) 404-231-1132
E-mail: jfaddams@jaddams.com
Sometimes even self
starters need a boot in the butt, and you have me re-fired
up. The class you presented was awesome!
~Fred Leland, Director
Law Enforcement & Security Consulting, Inc. (www.lesc.net)
To order Certain to Win online, direct from the publisher,
click
here (or call 1-888-795-4274 or from outside the US, +1-215-923-4686)
Now available from
Barnes & Noble and
Amazon .
If you are interested in the
planning process for large organizations, like the US Department
of Defense, Chet Richards has also written
If We Can Keep It
(2008). Experience shows that in large, bureaucratic organizations,
evolutionary transformations rarely succeed. There are other
options.
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