Month: April 2017

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Masters of the Snowmobile: Musashi, Boyd, Musk

In 1645, as he was looking back at his long and successful career as a samurai, where a single loss often meant death, Miyamoto Musashi concluded that although rigorous sword practice was essential, it wasn’t enough. At the end of the first chapter of A Book of Five Rings, he also admonishes aspiring warriors to “Cultivate a wide variety of interests in the arts” and “Be knowledgable in a wide variety of occupations.”

Similarly, Boyd, who was was a keen student of Musashi, described his method as looking across a wide variety of fields — “domains” he called them — searching for underlying principles, “invariants.” He would then experiment with syntheses involving these principles until he evolved a solution to the problem he was working on. Because they involved bits and pieces from a variety of domains, he called these syntheses “snowmobiles” (skis, handlebar from a bicycle, etc.) Continue reading →

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Beakley reviews Gully Dirt

[Ed Beakley is a retired Naval Aviator with 170 combat missions in the A-7 Corsair during the war in Vietnam; all total, he has over 3000 hours in 20 different military aircraft. In his last military tour he was Test Director and Lead Project Test Pilot for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile Program.

Ed is a 1968 NROTC graduate from Vanderbilt University with a degree in Electrical Engineering, a graduate of the Naval Post Graduate School with a Masters in Aeronautical Engineering, and a graduate of the Flight Research Inc. Test Pilot and Flight Test Engineer Course. He is a member of the International Test and Evaluation Association, Naval Institute, the Association of Naval Aviation, and the Society of Experimental Test Pilots.

He founded and manages Project White Horse, exploring leadership in the post 9/11 world.]

Recommendation for my Nashville, Litton HS, Vandy, and generally below the Mason Dixon long time friends:

Don’t know if you’re familiar with author Robert Coram out of Atlanta. Fiction writer but his last four books prior to Gully Dirt were biographies of military folks — all of which I highly recommend, not because of military or war connection, but because of the story telling of some really great, brave, and unique Americans. See: http://robertcoram.com/portfolio/# Continue reading →

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United Air Lines – an OODA loop perspective

In other words, what’s their orientation?

I’m not too good at reading minds, much less corporate minds, but one thing stands out: For all practical purposes, domestic airlines in the US today are monopolies. They have left just enough market share at their primary hubs to avoid the threat of federal action, and this limited capacity means that open skies treaties won’t significantly increase competition.

When your orientation says “monopoly,” you act like a monopoly. In particular, without the threat of the marketplace, you have a lot of flexibility in the levels of service you provide — your quality — and in what you can charge. Play this game well and you can maximize the amount of money to be paid out to the the people who control the organization and to those who can fire them. Continue reading →