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The OODA Loop and Lean: What John Boyd Wrote in the Margins

By Chet Richards and Brian “Ponch” Rivera

“Learn from Japanese, retired colonel says,” by John Guerriero, Erie /Morning News, 1992. Boyd explains just-in-time. The article credits Taiichi Ohno with the system, and Boyd credits Shigeo Shingo with quick die changes. John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division, MCHD 109904 (Box 2, Folder 3).

In 1992, John Boyd went home to Erie, Pennsylvania, to give the commencement address at Strong Vincent High School, where he had graduated in 1945. Before the ceremony, he told a Morning News reporter what American manufacturers needed to learn from the Japanese.

“We’re taking cues from the Japanese. Now we’re going to have to learn from them, and we are. You can’t be arrogant in this business. There’s always somebody else who’s got an idea, and you’d better understand it.””We got too comfortable with our methods. It’s like a weatherman. Every once in a while, you’ve got to look out the door and find out what’s going on.”

To people who know Boyd only as a fighter pilot, a tactician of air-to-air combat or a philosopher of conflict, it may seem strange to hear him talk about manufacturing. His interest in business and manufacturing, however, went back many years. His first college degree was in economics, and in the early 1960s the Air Force sent him to Georgia Tech for a second degree, in industrial engineering.

By 1992, Boyd had studied the Toyota Production System in depth. Material in his papers, now held by the Marine Corps History Division at Quantico, Virginia, shows that this interest grew out of his earlier work on the theory of conflict and competition. In Patterns of Conflict, Boyd’s advice was to “operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops.” He wanted to understand how the Toyota Production System let Toyota do that to American competitors that were much larger and better financed.

Chet laid out a business example in his June 1989 briefing for Lockheed, “War, Chaos, and Business,” using what George Stalk called the H-Y War. In 1981, Yamaha announced that it would become the world’s largest motorcycle maker, a position Honda held. Honda counterattacked. Over the next eighteen months it introduced 113 new models against Yamaha’s 37, and Yamaha gave up: “We want to end the H-Y War. It was our fault.” In Boyd’s terms, Honda was operating inside Yamaha’s OODA loop.

The same briefing listed how to tell the approach is working against a business competitor: “His new products are consistently late,” “Turnover is high throughout his organization,” “He constantly blames his customers,” and “He launches witchhunts and other ever-intensifying internal searches for The Cause of His Problem.” These are the business cousins of what Boyd described in war, where the aim is to “generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos.” As we read it, Boyd saw the same symptoms in American industry, and that is the warning behind his Erie remark about the weatherman.

Then, as books on the Toyota Production System (TPS) appeared in English during the 1980s, he got a close look at how the Japanese actually did it.

He explained one of the primary elements of the TPS, just-in-time, in one line: “What it really is, is you get what you want, when you want it and in the amount you want it.” The Japanese, he said, studied American mass production after the war and “took it to the next level up.” A Toyota took 17 man-hours to build, Boyd said, against 30 hours for a similar General Motors car. The article says the system “was invented by the late Taiichi Ohno, an engineer and later vice president in charge of production at one of the Toyota automobile plants.” Ohno’s consultant, Shigeo Shingo, developed quick ways of changing dies, so model changes took minutes instead of hours.

As Ohno himself explains, he did not “invent” the Toyota Production System. It evolved over many years, starting with the invention of the auto-activated loom, which would stop “should any one of the many warp threads break or the weft threads run out.” As Chet recalls, the TPS material Toyota gave prospective suppliers in the early 1990s credited three people as its primary creators: Sakichi Toyoda, Kiichiro Toyoda and Taiichi Ohno. Ohno gives them generous credit in his own book.

That distinction matters, because what interested Boyd most about the TPS was how it evolved. It struck a personal note. In the early 1960s, Boyd and the mathematician Thomas Christie had built energy-maneuverability theory, a way to compare the performance of two air-to-air fighters across their entire ranges of speed, altitude, acceleration and turn rate. Fighter pilots still learn it. It changed the design of modern fighters, away from higher, farther and faster and toward maneuverability and agility.

Why, Boyd wondered, was he able to build it when many people with far more knowledge of aerodynamics, propulsion and even basic physics could not? According to Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, as he told it to Chet, Boyd thought about that question for years. His answer became his first paper after retiring, “Destruction and Creation” (1976). As Chet reads Boyd’s later work, Boyd applied that answer to everything he did for the rest of his career.

The OODA loop and PDCA do different jobs

Boyd, in his usual voracious manner, did not stop with the TPS. He read Shewhart and Deming closely, and there he met the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle. At that point the OODA loop had not yet been sketched. It was described as a cycle of observation, orientation, decision and action. Chet’s 1989 Lockheed briefing drew it that way, as four words in a cycle, credited to Boyd’s “Patterns.” Lockheed was doing a lot with Deming and PDCA at the time, so later in the same briefing Chet set the Shewhart/Deming cycle under the heading “THIS SHOULD LOOK FAMILIAR.” In that early form, the two did look alike. Chet’s manuscript from the late 1980s called the Shewhart/Deming cycle “a final example of the O-O-D-A loop in business” and gave it its job: “The purpose of this cycle is to get your act together internally so that you can compete externally.”

The sketch Boyd produced on 28 June 1995, in “The Essence of Winning and Losing,” looks very different from PDCA. Orientation sits at the center, shaped by genetic heritage, cultural traditions, previous experiences and new information. Feed-forward and feedback paths run through it, and implicit guidance and control runs from orientation straight to observation and action.

We see PDCA and the OODA loop doing different jobs. PDCA is a method a team uses to test and improve a process. The OODA loop represents how a living system, whether a person, a team or a company, interacts with a changing environment full of other adaptive agents. Run well, PDCA improves OODA loops.

Boyd saw the limit of any cycle that runs only inside a process. On a legal pad dated 5 May 1992, under the heading “Unstated Message derived from Shewhart & Deming,” he wrote:

“We can neither maintain nor reduce statistical variation of a physical process/system unless we reach out beyond that process/system. … or put another way … We can neither maintain nor reduce statistical variation of a physical process/system from within that process/system.”

As we read it, improvement needs information from outside the process, and the OODA loop is how that information gets in.

What Boyd was reading

On another page of the same legal pad, dated 15 July 1992, Boyd wrote out a reading list. It includes Rafael Aguayo’s book on Deming, Deming’s Out of the Crisis, Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen, Ichiro Majima’s The Shift to JIT, three books by Ohno, two by Shingo, Stalk and Hout’s Competing Against Time, and The Machine That Changed the World by Womack, Jones and Roos. The source list for his briefing cycle, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, carries the same three Ohno books and the same two Shingo books.

Boyd’s “Reading Outside” list. Ohno and Shingo sit in the same list as Gödel, Heisenberg and Bohr, Shewhart and Deming, and the MIT team of Womack, Jones and Roos. An arrow runs down to “Many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of …” John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division, MCHD 111469, p. 54 (Box 17, Folder 10).

Another page shows where Toyota sat in his thinking. Under the heading “Reading Outside,” Boyd listed the people he drew from: Löwenheim and Skolem, Heisenberg and Bohr, the Hawthorne Study, Gödel, Gentzen and Tarski, Shewhart and Deming, Jay Forrester and E.T. Hall. Then come “Taiichi Ohno & Shigeo Shingo (1978-1992),” the MIT team, and Stalk and Hout, on the same list as the mathematicians and the physicists. An arrow runs from the list down to a box: “Many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of …”

That reading came before the 1995 sketch, and we believe the Toyota system influenced it, through Toyota’s continuous interaction with its environment and its emphasis on orientation. In the margin of Imai’s Kaizen, next to a figure that sets “Innovation” against “Kaizen,” Boyd wrote: “They’re not necessarily true. Both Taiichi Ohno’s & my own work blow these juxtapositions apart.”

Beside one of his OODA loop sketches, on a page from a telephone conversation in the 1990s, Boyd wrote that the loop “can be used to represent how we deal with this world around us, regardless of our profession.”

Ponch has done Lean work for many years, Toyota included, and this is the thread he kept pulling in Boyd’s papers and in Boyd’s personal library at the Marine Corps History Division. Here is what he found in the margins.

Boyd thought the MIT team missed Ohno

The Machine That Changed the World (1990) made the word “lean” famous. John Krafcik coined it two years earlier, in a 1988 article in the Sloan Management Review. Krafcik also served as the MIT team’s assembly plant survey leader. Boyd’s copy of the book is full of his notes. On the blank page that closes chapter 3, facing the Part Two title, “The Elements of Lean Production,” he wrote:

Boyd’s note on the blank page before Part Two of his copy of The Machine That Changed the World. Handwriting only. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0101.

“It is clear from reading chapter III (3) that the authors did not come to grips with Taiichi Ohno and the Toyota Production System. Furthermore there is no mention of Shigeo Shingo and his contributions. (Why is this so) Because, in reality, they do not understand how to make snowmobiles which in turn permits one to ‘leapfrog’ the competition. And leapfrog is the name-of-the-game if you want to survive and grab in an evolving, competitive reality.”

Snowmobiles are Boyd’s image for creation, from “Destruction and Creation.” You take skis, an outboard motor, bicycle handlebars and tank treads, pull them apart from the things they belong to, and recombine them into something new. His complaint, as we read it, is that the MIT team described the parts Toyota had built and skipped the creative process Ohno used to build them. Inside that same chapter, on page 62, Boyd says kanban “is only part of the JIT system,” and the authors “have not captured Ohno’s reverse ‘thinking.'”

In other words, unlike Boyd, the MIT team did not dig into the thinking behind how the creators of the TPS evolved the system. Ohno covers this in detail in his book, and we think it struck a chord with Boyd as he reflected on how he had evolved energy-maneuverability and then the rest of his work. To be fair to Womack, Jones and Roos, that does not appear to have been their aim.

He was just as hard on the managers the book describes. Early in Part Two, the authors recount their first interview with the senior managers at General Motors’ Framingham plant, who had just returned from a tour of NUMMI, the Toyota-GM joint venture. Boyd wrote above the passage: “Folded back inside themselves, possessed mental images that could neither appreciate nor cope with what’s really going on.”

GM had a front-row seat. NUMMI opened in 1984, and yet, as Frank Langfitt reported for This American Life, “It was 15 years before GM took the lessons of NUMMI seriously.”

Boyd saw Toyota inside Detroit’s OODA loop

Boyd’s note around the margins of page 65 of The Machine That Changed the World, shown in four strips. Handwriting only; the printed page is left out. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0100.

Where the book explains how the West misread Japanese success, Boyd wrote across the top of page 65:

“Japanese totally inside Detroit OODA loop; why? We read Japanese thru our orientation while Japanese exploit our orientation & theirs by knowing both. Therefore with their wider focus or wider orientation they understand us we don’t understand them. Shades of Sun Tzu: Know your enemy, know yourself.”

What Boyd credits is a wider orientation, and as we read it, speed follows from orientation. Boyd said as much at a 1988 Defense Department conference on agility, where he defined agility as “the ability to shift from one unfolding OODA loop pattern to another by being able to transition from one orientation to another.” Chet quoted that definition in his 1989 briefing, and his manuscript makes the same point: “your ability to cycle rapidly through O-O-D-A loops (old definition of agility) depends on your ability to change your orientations (new definition).”

Boyd read pull as control from the outside in

Boyd’s note around the margins of page 18 of Masaaki Imai’s Kaizen, shown in three strips. Handwriting only; the printed page is left out. His last words, “is bottom-up,” run across the printed text and are cut from the image. Photo by Brian “Ponch” Rivera of Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division. Register ID BL-0203.

In his copy of Kaizen, next to a passage on the manager’s role, Boyd wrote:

“If looked at this way a’la Taiichi Ohno then the customer or subsequent process controls the … previous process. [In] other words control is really exercised by the environment (customer). Hence control is outside-in—bottom-up not top-down—inside-out. Put simply command may be top-down but control is bottom-up.”

He came back to the idea at Imai’s section titled “The Next Process Is the Customer”: “Tie this idea with Taiichi Ohno’s Kanban and we see control is exerted upstream (one more time).” In TPS terms, that is a pull system, in which the next process draws work from the one before it and the customer sets the pace.

Boyd held other authors to the same standard. In his copy of Aguayo’s book on Deming, beside a passage on the meaning of control, he wrote: “These comments while nice do not really address the … nature of control. If he had read Ohno, Shingo, and others he would appreciate the idea of control much better.”

Why does this matter now?

In Ponch’s experience, most Lean programs took the vocabulary from that 1990 book and left Ohno’s thinking behind. They install kanban boards, count waste and drive results from the top. In the same Deming book, Boyd wrote the warning plainly: “Once again, you must get outside the system!”

Military doctrine did the same thing to Boyd’s own sketch. It turned the sketch into a linear, four-step version and lost the orientation that drives it. Lean and the OODA loop suffered the same loss for the same reason: people copied the visible parts and left out the thinking that made the parts work.

Back to Erie. “You can’t be arrogant in this business,” Boyd told the reporter in 1992. “There’s always somebody else who’s got an idea, and you’d better understand it.” That still holds for anyone running a Lean transformation.

Listen and read further

Sources

John R. Boyd Papers, Marine Corps History Division (MCHD), Quantico, Virginia: “Learn from Japanese, retired colonel says,” John Guerriero, Erie Morning News, 1992, MCHD 109904 (Box 2, Folder 3); Boyd’s handwritten notes, MCHD 111469, pp. 17, 38 and 54 (Box 17, Folder 10); Boyd’s OODA loop sketch page, MCHD 111475, p. 1 (Box 17, Folder 15); A Discourse on Winning and Losing outline and notes, MCHD 110119, pp. 16 and 18 (Box 7, Folder 10); Chet Richards, “War, Chaos, and Business,” Revision 5, June 1989, PDF pp. 7, 15, 29, 30 and 41, MCHD 110311 (Box 12, Folder 2); Chet Richards, untitled manuscript (late 1980s), pp. 144 and 150, MCHD 110312 (Box 12, Folder 3).

Boyd’s personal library, Marine Corps History Division, photographed by Brian “Ponch” Rivera: Womack, Jones and Roos, The Machine That Changed the World (pp. 62, 65, 77, and the blank page before Part Two); Imai, Kaizen (pp. 18, 32, 51); Aguayo, Dr. Deming (pp. 75, 138). Book images are cropped to Boyd’s handwriting. The printed book text is left out, and two running heads and a page number that sat between his lines are painted out.

John R. Boyd, A Discourse on Winning and Losing, ed. Grant T. Hammond (Maxwell AFB, AL: Air University Press, 2018): “Patterns of Conflict” (1986), pp. 152-153; introduction, p. 2, for the date of “The Essence of Winning and Losing” (28 June 1995). John R. Boyd, “Destruction and Creation” (1976). John R. Boyd and Thomas P. Christie, Energy-Maneuverability (March 1966). Boyd, remarks at the DoD Agility Conference, Los Angeles, 26 January 1988, as quoted in Richards, “War, Chaos, and Business.”

George Stalk Jr., “Time: The Next Source of Competitive Advantage,” Harvard Business Review (July-August 1988). George Stalk Jr. and Thomas M. Hout, Competing Against Time (New York: Free Press, 1990), pp. 58-59. Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Cambridge, MA: Productivity Press, 1988), p. 77 and pp. 75-92. John F. Krafcik, “Triumph of the Lean Production System,” Sloan Management Review 30 (Fall 1988). Robert Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). Frank Langfitt, “NUMMI (2015),” This American Life, episode 561, Act Two, 17 July 2015.

Personal communications: Franklin “Chuck” Spinney to Chet Richards, on Boyd’s question about energy-maneuverability. Chet Richards’s recollection of Toyota’s TPS material for prospective suppliers, early 1990s.

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Leadership is (could be) magic

I just posted a new version of my presentation The Lost Arts of Leadership. This is an editing of my first YouTube video, which adds a new intro and removes some of the extraneous noises and distractions from the original posting.

I gave the original of this presentation as a keynote to the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in August 2022. This version is a moderate revision of that address.

By the way, this is my third YouTube video. It’s taking me a little while to develop fluency in iMovie — a long way from fingerspitzengefuehl — but they say that as you get older, you should keep learning new things. I’ll let you know.

The Penn and Teller video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lo5BRAKvJoA

PDF of slides: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/leadership-is-magic-youtube-final.pdf

Notes to accompany the lecture: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/notes-to-accompany-tlaol-youtube.pdf

Original presentation at the Kanban Global Summit in San Diego in 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGcSg-gEFhA&t=2s

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Changes to Patterns of Conflict

I’ve posted a short (17 min) YouTube video on a couple of major changes John Boyd made to Patterns of Conflict after its “final” publication date of December 1986.

(my second ever YouTube video)

Here are links and references included in the description box of the video:

Reference to the Fortune article: “How CEO Larry Culp pulled off the turnaround of the century,” by Shawn Tully, Fortune, posted July 23, 2026.

Snowmobiles and Grand Ideals: https://www.usmcu.edu/Outreach/Marine-Corps-University-Press/Books-by-topic/MCUP-Titles-A-Z/Snowmobiles-and-Grand-Ideals

Grant Hammond’s book, the Mind of War

AGLX: https://www.aglx.com Click on “Podcasts” for the “No Way Out” collection of podcasts on subjects related to Boyd’s work. Lots of interviews, including me.

Mind control in leadership and strategy. Download “The Lost Arts of Leadership” and its accompanying notes from the Articles tab at Slightly East of New: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/439-2/

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New articles on Goodhart and WFH

Graphic courtesy of Apple Image Playground

Quick note about a couple of recent articles.

First, from Steve Denning at Forbes, “Jack Welch Called It ‘The Dumbest Idea.’ HBR Article Wants To Bring It Back,” June 19, 2026 (may be firewalled).

Citing Goodhart’s Law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (the Strathern formulation, incidentally), Denning observes that:

Turning a customer satisfaction score into a floor to protect shareholder returns guarantees the metric will be gamed.

Denning doesn’t mention this, but in the process, you make yourself increasingly vulnerable to competitors who can deliver more of what customers want to buy, often increasing shareholder returns in the process.

And then, Wharton researchers Adam Grant, Marissa Shandell, and Courtney Elliott published “The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week,” in The New York Times, June 22, 2026.

They note that roughly one-third of American companies now mandate 100% attendance in the office, every day. Why is this? Teamwork? Cohesion? Productivity? Their research points to a different explanation:

We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

This was a big theme in my presentation at the Kanban Global Summit in August 2022, that focusing on where people work, as contrasted with what they and their teams accomplish, is not leadership. You can find that presentation and its accompanying notes,on our Articles page, and watch the video on YouTube.

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Yet another update to “Logical end of the K-shaped economy.”

New York Magazine has just published a long article on airline economics, centered on its most profitable element, Delta Air Lines: “We Love Delta. We Hate Delta — It’s been a hellish time to travel, but one airline is winning by catering to the elite. Good luck to everyone in coach.” by Ben Ryder Howe.

Here’s a quote from near the end:

“The industry is moving toward elite clientele,” says Stephen Milstrey, a veteran airline network planning and scheduling executive who has routed planes for Virgin America and Frontier. “Eventually the big airlines will minimize the main cabin and let Frontier and Allegiant handle those people.”

Or, as is happening in Japan, according to the article, they can just stay home. With the demise of Spirit, my guess is that this opens up competitive space for someone who can figure out how to exploit it. Not necessarily another airline.

If you have Apple News, you can find the article at: https://apple.news/ARKzMW_FGRIigjAkpBzD7bg

You can read “Logical end to the K-shaped economy” here: https://slightlyeastofnew.com/2026/01/21/logical-end-of-the-k-shaped-economy/

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Updates

1. To “Logical End of the K-Shaped Economy“

From “The Economy Cabin on Airplanes Keeps on Shrinking,” by Dean Seal in The Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2026:

Premium economy seats can be priced at least twice as high as regular economy seats and only take up slightly more room on the plane, according to a report from Global Tourism Forum. For bigger airlines, selling more premium seats helps subsidize spots in their economy cabins at prices competitive with low-cost carriers.

“Delta got more revenue in the fourth quarter from premium ticket sales, which were up 9%, than from the main cabin, where sales fell 7%. Premium revenue outgrew basic economy sales at United in 2025. Both carriers soared past their peers in profitability last year.

So the smaller the economy cabin becomes, the more money airlines make.

2. To “Cracker Barrel Succumbs to Boyd“

From “The Company Where Driving the Wrong Car to Work Can Get You a Ticket,” by Ryan Felton in The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2026 (that company being Stellantis):

The crackdown has reignited the debate over a longstanding practice in Detroit, where automakers have encouraged employees to spend their paychecks on company-made vehicles—with preferential parking as a perk.

On the other hand:

A Ford spokesman said the company doesn’t designate parking spots for company and competitor vehicles at its corporate facilities.

You might think that an organization in as much trouble as Stellantis would do everything it could to ensure that its members share a clear understanding of how their cars stack up against their competitors’. The people running Stellantis might take to heart the admonition offered by Admiral James Stockdale:

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. (Jim Collins, Good to Great, p.85)

“Confronting” means more than just looking over tables of data. It implies the mental courage to form a deep understanding — overcoming emotional attachments — and shared through the organization, of how we stack up against our competitors. If I were running Stellantis, I would give bonuses to employees (hourly or salaried or exec) who buy cars from manufacturers in the top 10 of the J.D. Power survey.

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Cracker Barrel succumbs to Boyd

The skyscraper formerly known as the Sears Tower. Chicago, Illinois.

Robert Coram described “Destruction and Creation” as “having a specific gravity approaching that of uranium.” While apt (you can download a copy from our Articles page and draw your own conclusion), Boyd distilled its essence down to a couple of cogent sentences:

According to Gödel we cannot—in general—determine the consistency, hence the character or nature, of an abstract system within itself. According to Heisenberg and the Second Law of Thermodynamics any attempt to do so in the real world will expose uncertainty and generate disorder.

Examples are not hard to find. In a recent column for Inc.com, “Cracker Barrel wanted to cut costs. Instead, it damaged its own brand–again,” author Minda Zetlin noted that the company has gone through a series of mis-steps that define the cliche “mind boggling.” First, they decided to modernize the logo by eliminating anything associated with their homey, country theme — the old man and even the cracker barrel itself — then they got rid of the antiques on the wooden walls (and repainted them an androgynous white).

There was an immediate customer backlash, driving the share price down almost 50%. As Ms. Kalin notes, they did learn from the experience. Sort of. Going into frantic reverse, the company squelched both initiatives. But then, they turned around and did something almost as, shall we say, ineffective. In a panic to cut costs, they issued a directive requiring employees, if at all possible, to only eat at Cracker Barrels while traveling. Once leaked, comments on the directive were brutal. Many were along the line of “even their own employees have to be forced to eat there.”

Ms. Kalin, however, reaches a deeper, more strategic, even Boydian, conclusion: ” … it can prevent employees from checking out other restaurants, looking to see what the competition is doing or discovering new and innovative approaches.” She surmises that the root cause of their problems was that Cracker Barrel execs “were so used to looking at the world from inside their company that they forgot how things looked from the outside.” In other words, success at playing the game inside the company is what got you rewarded and promoted, and over time, this internal focus warped their orientation. As Boyd predicted:

Put another way, we can expect unexplained and disturbing ambiguities, uncertainties, anomalies, or apparent inconsistencies to emerge more and more often. 

I noted this effect, and suggested several antidotes in Certain to Win, chapter VI. Ms. Kalin insists, rightly, that senior execs should interact with customers and “customer-facing employees as part of their regular workweek.” But also, these same senior leaders, not just employees who happen to be on the road, should experience the competition regularly and first hand. Finally, organizations need mechanisms to take all this tactical, front-line knowledge and ensure that it influences their (common implicit*) orientation. Thus are effective actions taken.

In this regard, a shout out to Ford CEO Jim Farley, who imported a Xiaomi SU7, drove it for a while, and described it as “fantastic!” praising its its superior technology, quality, and, specifically, its seamless smartphone integration. There may be hope for Ford.

Here’s a video review of the car, so you can see what he’s talking about.

*As explained on Organic Design 23 (available from our Articles page).

As an aside, last Sunday evening, before seeing this article but aware of CB’s problems, I was returning with a companion from the Rowdy Gaines Invitational Swim Meet in Orlando. Starting with temperatures that broke a 90-year record cold, it had been a long day. So when we stopped for the night in Palm Coast, we wanted some place for dinner that was warm, quick, and close. As luck would have it, there was a Cracker Barrel around the corner. Although it had been a couple of years since my last visit to their chain, it was familiar as soon as we walked in: the roaring fireplace, folksy artifacts, and natural wood walls. Familiar menu, quick service, and a hoot of a waitress. Somehow, it felt like going home. Now why in the world would you want to take that brand and turn it into “just another restaurant”?