Author: Chet

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Is hierarchy necessary?

One well-known company doesn’t think so.  According to Cnet, Zappos will, by the end of 2014, eliminate “all job titles and managers in a corporate structure, leaving nearly every employee on equal footing.” Quoting the news site Quartz, 

Zappos is going all-in on the system and will create approximately 400 “circles” made up of a group of employees that will be tasked with projects. The group must work together — sans hierarchy — to do their jobs.

This is fascinating. A couple of observations;

  • The system isn’t totally without hierarchy — somebody is doing the tasking. Note the “nearly every employee.”
  • It will be interesting to see if new hierarchies form within the circles, and what mechanism they evolve to form and un-form circles.
  • The Danish hearing device company Oticon has been experimenting with similar ideas since the late 1980s.
  • Boyd didn’t say anything about how to organize a military unit or a business. He once told me that he had a preference for “bottom up” because such an orientation fostered initiative and creativity. On the other hand, if you look at his description of mission (Patterns 76), it’s clear that he was thinking in terms of hierarchies.

We should pay close attention to Zappos’s experiment and, of course,wish them the best.

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Is business strategy wrong?

Or at least that part that talks about improving the bottom line through better customer service?

That’s the conclusion reported by Business Week on a survey of 146 publicly traded corporations. Basically, they found no correlation between customer satisfaction and YTD stock returns. For you geeks out there, the regression line was y = -0.6x+79.17, with R^2=0.018. What this means is that there is actually a slight negative correlation between stock market returns and customer satisfaction (that is, higher customer satisfaction scores are associated — very slightly — with lower stock market returns), but with an R^2  so near zero, a better conclusion is that there is no meaningful relationship. Continue reading →

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Climate change

No, not the kind you’re thinking of.  In the late 1980s, Boyd come up with a list that he originally called “principles of the Blitzkrieg.” It wasn’t long, though, before he renamed it “an organizational climate for operational success.” The climate consists of:

  • Mutual trust, unity, cohesion (Ger. Einheit)
  • Intuitive competence (Fingerspitzengefühl)
  • Mission “command & control’ (Auftragstaktik; Boyd preferred “leadership & appreciation”)
  • Focus & direction (Schwerpunkt)
  • Mental agility (Behendigkeit)

You can use this climate, or whatever culture you fancy, as a Schwerpunkt: Whenever you’re making choices, try to move in the direction that improves the climate. If anything, obsessing on climate may be more important — in the sense of requiring more of a leader’s resources — in business than in war.

With that in mind, check out the latest LinkedIn post by Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of Rakuten: The Real Role of Leadership is Climate Control.

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Good morning, ATL

Hartsfield JacksonIf you’re staying near Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, check out the Renaissance. This is the view from my room. It can be a little noisy, but it’s worth it to watch the world’s busiest airport operating in its full glory, especially after dark. Click for a larger view, and see if you can spot the Delta flight that’s just taken off from the other side of the field.

That’s the new international terminal on the left.

The tower, by the way, is the third tallest in the world and the tallest in North America.

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Vandergriff: Selfless vs. Selfish Service

Here’s a guest editorial by my friend and colleague, Don Vandergriff. Consider it my Christmas present to you all.

Chet

I read MG Bob Scales’s piece on Anton Myrer’s wonderful novel Once an Eagle in Tom Ricks blog “The Best Defense.” I wholeheartily disagree with his assessment. Despite his recommendation to do away with it, it is necessary and should be a mandatory book for all cadets to read regardless of commissioning source! In sum, Scales (and Ricks) interprets the whole book as a command-vs-staff conflict. It is not, as I point out in the review below. The first thing someone has to do to understand this, though, is to read Myrer’s 1200 pages (I have done it twice in 13 years). Then, they must understand the evils of self-serving careerism pitted against the honorable selfless service that the services all claim they promote Their incentives, however, all work the other way.

While it is a nice fantasy to believe that MG Bob Scales (ret.) has had such an impact on COLs and LTCs at the War College, the Army culture from the time right after WWII, but institutionalized in Vietnam, had already set a course of self-serving careerism (Once an Eagle was published in 1969). It is a route toward rampant careerism based on out-of-date assumptions on ambition and talent management drawn from new Human Resource theories developed in the Progressive age, codified in the wave of emerging theories written in the 20s and 30s, and later taught in the leading business schools to the new captains serving in HR (now AG) after WWII. Anton Myrer’s insights toward this trend are remarkable given the time he was writing this and based on his own service in WWII; but he also saw the reflecting trends in American society going this way (and unfortunately continuing today).

Again, why I laugh at all the people that say there is such a cultural gap between US society and the military — there is not one. We are reflective of the emerging values of today’s society’s focus on the new values system of money, things, and time. Anton Myrer points out in vivid detail in many of the non-military scenes that he puts Sam Damon through in the interwar years and his conflict of getting out, at the constant demand of his wife Tommy Damon, in order to ride the wave of greed in the 20s! Damon (Myrer) sees the shallowness in this trend, which by the way is appearing again today, but even worse as the kings of the big banks and Wall Street (while using their political cronies to pave the way) simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic (to buy an additional 7th home at the expense of everyone else). They know it, the data is there, and they are still doing it, while using our own elective officials to do it (and I am a libertarian, hating both parties). Despite countless opportunities to ride this way, Damon refuses, because the honor of leading soldiers and serving them and the nation he believes in always draws him back.

Additionally, the book’s focus is at the heart of selfless-serving versus selfish-serving. It has little to do with command vs staff, except only as a vehicle to demonstrate the former conflict. Courtney Massingale seeks the most prominent staff and command positions, always on someone’s coat tails, to avoid the responsibility of having to make the risky decisions when leading and commanding soldiers (regardless of branch type) at any level unless and until it only serves him (Corps Command in the Pacific in late 44 when the war is already decided and the ability to gain all the glory while avoiding the hazards of the frontlines).

In reverse, Sam Damon always does seek these tough assignments, but as you read the bylines, the system is not rewarding of this (so the lesson taken away can have the opposite effect that he, Scales, claims it has). Damon is constantly viewed by the Army establishment as a maverick and is only put in regimental and division command in the worse place possible, New Guinea northern coast in late 42/43 (Read the book America’s First Battles on the disastrous campaign there) out of desperation and because no one else of prominence wanted it. The chosen ones are all trying to go to Europe to serve in the real war with Nazi Germany. Also, Courtney serves in many aide-de-camp and executive officer for GO positions as well. Another prominent step to the top today.

No, data and research have shown that the value sets of most officers toward service or selfish service are set in stone by the time they reach the War College. This book will have little or no impact on anyone other than confirm their own deep seated feelings on who they really are or have become. When asked about this book in 2012 by the CG of Cadet Command for continual reading by cadets, I said “YES!” it needs to be, there is still a chance to mold these aspiring leaders before being corrupted by our own personnel system.

As with so much of Don’s work, these comments apply not just to the military but to any large bureaucratic organization.

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Why start-ups sometimes win

I’ve always been told that most start-ups fail — seem to recall numbers in the 95% range after five years. What’s amazing is that some do succeed and eventually replace the behemoths of their time, companies who had all the advantages that money, talent, economies of scale, established pipelines, and so on offer.

So why do the big guys (sometimes) lose? Here’s a priceless example from Chris Matyszczyk over at Cnet.com:

This is surely the greatest opportunity for the new MicroNokia. Both companies have plowed their own, sometimes lonely, road toward making products that enjoy a completely different aesthetic from Apple’s.
With time and a little more luck and taste, it’s in the aesthetic area that MicroNokia might make the swiftest progress.

One of the biggest obstacles is the imaginations of the companies involved. One brilliant phone designer told me recently that the biggest problem he faced was to persuade senior executives to accept revolutionary forms, ones that don’t look like existing products.

From “So Apple does own beautiful and sexy,” http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-57613576-71/so-apple-does-own-beautiful-and-sexy/ Continue reading →

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Imperial Class: A progress report

Several months ago, I posted a news release from May 2018 (69 KB PDF) in which the newly consolidated airline DeltaUnited-American announced the end of coach service:

“Coach just got to be more trouble than it’s worth,” explained Capt. O’Leary. “Coach passengers always buy the cheapest fares, but they still expect to be treated like royalty. I tell you, though, did you ever see the coach section of a 777 after a 12-hour flight? And those toilets! Our business class clients complain about even being on the same plane with those people, and who can blame them?”

Slowly but inexorably it is coming to pass. Here are a couple of updates: Continue reading →

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PDCA vs. OODA — Why not take both?

One of Boyd’s great achievements was to demonstrate that by using the principles we call “maneuver warfare,” one could harmonize all levels of war, from the tactical through the grand strategic (see Patterns, 141-144). Attrition warfare, by contrast, can certainly win wars, but it has a nasty habit of losing the peace.

But business is not war, and it isn’t immediately clear what terms like “tactical” and “strategic” might mean for businesses or whether thinking in such terms helps businesses survive and grow.

In this guest post, my friend and colleague Dean Lenane takes on this question and, in the best tradition of John Boyd, tests his answer in the marketplace.

PDCA and OODA – Complementary Systems from Complimentary Men

By Dean Lenane

I had the privilege of working with Dr. W. Edwards Deming during the early 1980’s when he was reintroduced to the American business environment. Deming had of course become something of a celebrity due to his identification with the success of Japanese automotive juggernaut, which was making life difficult for the American automobile manufacturers by producing well equipped, high quality vehicles at very reasonable prices.

Teams of “experts” were sent to Japan to determine how the Japanese had managed this miracle and one of the things that they brought back was a newly re-minted Dr. Deming. Deming was consulted and cosseted and sent for by many companies, one of which was Ford. Here, I was introduced to the man as he was employed by Ford to go and sort out the quality systems of some of the major suppliers to Ford. One of these targeted companies was United Technologies Automotive, where I was employed as a quality and reliability engineer. Continue reading →

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Seeing more ghosts

As the late, very great, Richard Feynman put it:

But even today I meet lots of people who sooner or later get me into a conversation about UFO’s, or astrology, or some form of mysticism, expanded consciousness, new types of awareness, ESP, and so forth. And I’ve concluded that it’s not a scientific world.

No, and it seems, sometimes, to be moving the other way. We’ll be bleeding patients and burning witches any day now.

For example, just yesterday, “Does ESP Exist? 11 Premonitions That Came True,” appeared in The Epoch Times (in my Flipboard Science category, of all things).

We read,

Though some psychologists and natural scientists remain skeptical, many agree telepathic abilities and related phenomena exist.

Chris Carter, an Oxford University-educated author of “Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics,” cited two surveys in an article he published in Epoch Times last year that show a majority of scientists believe in such abilities.

One survey was conducted among more than 500 scientists; 56 percent said extra-sensory perception (ESP) is “an established fact” or a “likely possibility.” The other survey was conducted among more than 1,000 scientists; 67 percent said it is an established fact or likely possibility.

I rechecked the date on the article. It wasn’t April 1st.

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The Ghosts of Orientation

More on the wonders of orientation. You’d think it would be simple: take in information, form hypotheses, test in the real world, revise. The scientific method, as taught in high schools and laid out in Conceptual Spiral as a model for forming and correcting orientation.

Unfortunately, when human beings get involved, things aren’t so simple. The idea of orientation steering observation to see only what it wants to see, of avoiding, ignoring, or explaining away observations that conflict with existing orientation is well known. Google “confirmation bias,” for example, to see some fascinating research on this subject. In an extreme form, it becomes “incestuous amplification,” a term coined by Chuck Spinney years ago to refer to rowing oneself over a waterfall while explaining away the mists looming ahead, the roar of the falls, and the frantic screams of onlookers.

Typically we think of incestuous amplification as misinterpreting the data we find, shoehorning it to fit a preconceived and tightly held conviction. But even when there is no signal present, orientation can sometimes find one, anyway. Think castles in the clouds, constellations, creationism, inferring what the boss didn’t actually want, and so on. It’s also a occupational hazard of counterintelligence.

There’s a name for this phenomenon: apophenia, and a recent article in The Observer, “Why we can ‘see’ the house that looks like Hitler,” by Vaughn Bell, relates the case of a person who lived out his life believing that he could hear voices of ghosts in radio static. You might think that only people with mental problems fall prey to this effect, but research shows that we all have this tendency, to some degree. Did you ever try to play Beatles’s 45s backwards?

Statisticians, of course, create beautiful and complex mathematics to try to answer the question, “Is there really anything there, or could it just be happening by chance?” If you flip a coin 10 times and get 10 heads, is it a plugged nickel? Even if you can’t apply statistical formulae to your problem, it’s helpful to stop and ask yourself, “Is there really anything here? Could this all be a mistake?” Might save a lot of marriages.

To put this into the OODA loop sketch, we’re talking about the implicit guidance and control link between orientation and observation. But it’s a little more than that. Not only is orientation steering observation, but it is locked into a pattern of interpreting the results to support existing beliefs, and sometimes it will find what it needs, whether it’s there or not.  As John wrote in the penultimate chart of his final briefing:

Note how orientation shapes observation, shapes decision, shapes action, and in turn is shaped by the feedback and other phenomena coming into our sensing or observing window. Also note how the entire “loop” (not just orientation) is an ongoing many-sided implicit cross-referencing process of projection, empathy, correlation, and rejection.

[All of Boyd’s briefings are available from our Articles page.]