Now playing on our Articles page.

This one is based on a version that I presented last year to the Weapons & Field Training cadre at the Marine Recruit Depot, Parris Island.

Don’t let the title fool you.

Between 1976 and 1996, Boyd produced nearly 350 slides comprising six briefings. Most of these went through many, many revisions. And then there’s the roughly 3,900 word paper, “Destruction and Creation.” All of these, incidentally, are available on the Articles page.

What I’ve tried to do here is sort some of this into a few categories that reflect distinctions that Boyd actually used. The idea is to make Boyd’s body of work accessible to people who didn’t have the opportunity to hear Boyd himself deliver it.  The fact is that Boyd never intended for his briefings to stand alone and for years he wouldn’t give out copies to people who hadn’t heard them.

The danger is that people will glom onto the categories I’ve selected, and this will limit their own thinking and use of Boyd’s Discourse. Try to avoid this, and, as I almost entitled this presentation, be your own guru.

Good luck!

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Hint:  ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰ ✰

Those of you who have taken on “Destruction and Creation” (available, along with all of Boyd’s works, from the Articles tab) have probably puzzled over how, and why, Boyd dragged in three concepts not ordinarily associated with strategy:

• Gödel’s Theorem
• The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
• The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Most people just shrug them off as analogies: We see something in domain B, strategy for example, that seems like something in domain A, say, particle physics.  I worked with Boyd on “Destruction and Creation,” and I’m reasonably sure that this is not how he’s using these concepts.

I’ve added a short paper to the Articles page that gives my explanation.  While you’re there, you might also check out Chuck Spinney’s take on “Destruction and Creation,” Evolutionary Epistemology, particularly charts 33-35, where he discusses Boyd’s use of the three concepts.

I get asked from time to time what to read after finishing Boyd’s Discourse (All of Boyd’s briefings are available from the Articles tab at the top of this page).  If you look at the Sources section of Patterns of Conflict, or the “Disciplines or activities to be examined” page from Strategic Game:

the answer would appear to be “most anything.”

Let me toss out a few suggestions from the last few years; please add your favorites in the comments. Continue reading →

Some of you have taken me to task for my comments about Siri.  Note that I wasn’t criticizing Siri’s current performance. Instead, I was pointing out how hard it can be to regain the magic once you’ve disappointed your customer. Product developers often get focused on the chi, the “Pursuit of Wow!” as Tom Peters once called it, but if the thing doesn’t work, i.e., no cheng, you don’t need to worry yourself about the chi. If the bathroom’s not clean, who cares what brand of chocolate is on the pillow?

So Sunday morning I take iPhone in hand and say, “Hey Siri, what time does Kay Hills open?”  She comes right back with “Cahill’s Market on May River Road opens at 9 am,” provides a map, and offers to give directions. Cahills is a favorite breakfast / lunch, and sometimes dinner spot here in the Hilton Head area.  If you go, be sure and ask for coffee in the rooster or pig cups, designed by my wife, Ginger.

Did I mention that these things are starting to get scary? Not the cups, they’re pretty cool.

No, I’m not going to discuss the president’s plans for Afghanistan, but the Amazon Echo and more specifically its AI system, Alexa.

I’ve used Apple’s Siri for years but usually found it more trouble than it’s worth. The problem is that if you’re talking with a fellow native speaker, there’s a virtual infinity of questions you could ask. If you’re talking to an AI system, there’s only a small subset that it will understand (“Pardon?”)  What’s that subset? I got tired of guessing. It’s good at finding local restaurants when we’re traveling.

Once Siri lowered the bar, it made it easier for Amazon to meet expectations (cheng) and then to exceed them (chi.) The net effect, as I explained in Certain to Win, is that you become hooked. With Alexa, for example, Amazon has gone to great lengths to ease you into the process. Inside the shipping box there’s a short list of things you can try.  These are pretty much what you expect, and I’m sure all the other AI systems can do these, too (although, as I noted, Siri’s initial performance was so disappointing that I never thought to try). Then the web site has a few more, and the support pages even more, and pretty soon you’re trying them out, and Wow! All of the requests I made worked, even while the system was playing music and I was on the other side of the room. Simple example: It will play anything on Amazon Prime (and on Unlimited if you subscribe to that). It will even tell you the artist. Just by asking. Which is chi at least to me.

Continue reading →

This time in the wild battlefields of strawberry development:

Bjorn, the company’s president, says, “Consumers have to be more satisfied, or what we call more delighted, all the time.” Produce companies tend to be driven by supply: what they grow, they try to sell. Driscoll’s, conversely, sees itself as a consumer-products company. According to Bjorn, “We create the demand …”

The company is Driscoll’s “a fourth-generation family business, says that it controls roughly a third of the six-billion-dollar U.S. berry market, including sixty per cent of organic strawberries, forty-six per cent of blackberries, fourteen per cent of blueberries, and just about every raspberry you don’t pick yourself.”

Produce is war, and it is won by having something beautiful-looking to sell at Costco when the competition has only cat-faced uglies.

In other words, they meet customer expectations for flavor and appearance (that would be cheng) but then figure out how to add something special and unexpected — something that delights (the chi).  This could be a new variety as a result of their high powered R&D effort, or perhaps a tinkering of a currently seasonal variety to make it available year round, in 49 countries. The result, as the man said, and as it usually is: “We create the demand.”  The Steve Jobs of Strawberries?

Boyd, paraphrasing Sun Tzu, put it this way on Patterns chart 13: “Employ cheng and ch’i maneuvers to quickly and unexpectedly hurl strength against weaknesses.” Driscoll’s use of this concept, inadvertent as it might, perhaps, be isn’t an analogy. It’s the exact same concept applied to a different sphere of competition.

Read the complete article, “How Driscoll’s Reinvented the Strawberry” by Dana Goodyear in August 21, 2017 edition of The New Yorker.