Author: Chet

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Is there a future for air travel?

Right now, it’s looking pretty bleak. Increases in fuel costs combined with the hollowing out of the middle class means that airlines will focus increasingly on the top 10-15%. You’ll see service to fewer places, as detailed in this Wall St. J. report, higher prices, and more space devoted to business and first class. Think of what air travel was like back in the 1950s, for example, but without a DC-3 stopping once a day in your home town. Oxford, MS, where I went to high school and college, used to have scheduled service via Southern Airways and the aforementioned DC-3 (later Martin 404s). Today, it’s the “Airport at Ole Miss,” where it primarily serves rich alums flying in for football games. Nearby Memphis is down to 91 scheduled flights a day from over 300 just a few years ago.

On the other hand, the CEO of Bombardier seems optimistic in this condensed interview, also in the Journal. A couple of points that I found interesting:

  • Their new C-series, scheduled to enter service next year, will serve the 100-149 seat market with an aircraft that promises to be “20% more fuel efficient than the best aircraft out there.” Could this make service to St. Augustine profitable again?
  • High speed rail, about half of Bombardier’s business, is booming except in one major market. For example, they’re introducing a new train, the “Zephiro 380, a train that goes [235 miles] an hour, designed in conjunction with our German and Chinese employees.” For trips of less than 1,000 miles, this train could well beat airlines for travel between city centers. Eventually, we may overcome the ideological blinders keeping high-speed rail from becoming a presence in such dense markets as along the east coast, as well as between Chicago and New York (say hi to Eva Marie Saint for me), Chicago and Washington, San Francisco and LA, and the Dallas – Houston – San Antonio triangle.

I don’t know what all this means, but it seems obvious that if we’re going to stay a great nation, much less a great power, we have to have efficient and ubiquitous means of moving around the country.

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Is Toyota Safe?

Of course not, although the record profits [CR Note: actually, the best in 5 years; its record was in the FY ending March 2008] it just posted might make you think so.  In an article in today’s New York Times, company President Akio Toyoda takes the “only the paranoid survive” approach:

“Have we really turned into a company that will be profitable and continue to grow no matter what happens to its business environment?” Mr. Toyoda asked.

“I am not sure yet, is my honest answer. An unprecedented crisis even beyond the scale of the Lehman Shock may happen again,” he said, using a common Japanese reference to the global economic crisis. “We’ll only know the answer when such events actually happen.”

Good attitude.  A couple of clouds on the horizon, though. For one thing, Toyota now faces brutal competition not only from Nissan and Honda but from Hyundai / Kia and, for the first time in years, from GM and Ford (Chrysler is still lagging). And the article in the Times talks about “a company-wide cost reduction drive.”  It’s worth remembering that such short-term thinking is really what got them in trouble in the first place.

Although Toyota’s problems were exacerbated by the recent recession, recalls, and the earthquake, they actually began in the early parts of the century when, in an attempt to accelerate its expansion drive and boost profits, it cut back on training and took shortcuts with its vaunted Toyota Production System. In other words, it started to look like any other car company, with the problems that any other car company faced:

Since 2004 the automaker has had to recall 9.3 million vehicles in the U.S. and Japan—its two biggest markets—up from 2.5 million in the previous three years. The problems got so bad that, in July [2006], Toyota CEO Katsuaki Watanabe felt obliged to bow deeply in apology.

You may remember that in January 2010, Consumer Reports cut Toyota from the companies that it automatically recommends.

As the owner of two Toyotas, I certainly wish them well. But I’d like to see some evidence that they’re refocusing on the values that led them to prominence and not  just chasing next quarter’s numbers.

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It’s Still a Wonderful World

My order from Apple has two parts. Yesterday, I posted FEDEX tracking information for the first.

Here’s the second, coming by UPS:

UPS Tracking

Notice that it left China on Friday and is now out for delivery to our house near Hilton Head. By the way, the FEDEX package from yesterday’s post just arrived.

If you’re a local retailer, how do you compete with this? And don’t go whining about sales taxes because Apple collects it. I can think of four approaches:

  1. Have it in stock for customers to feel and play with. This includes accessories.
  2. Instill the EFAS climate among your sales staff. This means Fingerspitzengefühl for both the product and for sales technique (do they know the product inside and out and are they aces at selling?)
  3. Provide a lagniappe. Even if you have to order it for them, give them something extra, something they can take home, in their hands, today.
  4. Sell the whole experience: Provide free coffee (most places won’t let you give out free wine), keep the shop clean, ensure that everybody’s enthusiastic and having fun, and if you do screw up on something, fess up and make it right (screw-ups are your best opportunities to build customer relationships). If you’re the owner, get out on the floor, introduce yourself and mix it up with the customers. If lines get long at checkout (you should wish) lend a hand.
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It’s a Wonderful World, part II

Imagine doing this when you were in college, assuming you were an undergrad in the ’60s:

Amazon Shipment

I’m tracking an Apple.com shipment in near realtime from the factory in Suzhou, China, to my house near Savannah, Georgia.

I think this is even more amazing than the first video Skype call I made, from Bergen, Norway, to my wife in Atlanta.

A couple of other thoughts:

  • It only takes a little over 4 days to make the trip, factory to end user. Talk about just-in-time.
  • Even though it was delivered to FEDEX Suzhou after the cutoff, FEDEX sent it out to Shanghai anyway (thanks, FEDEX!)
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Monterey Square

Pulaski MonumentOne of our favorite places in Savannah.

The centerpiece of the square is, somewhat incongruously, the monument to the Polish general and American Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski, who was mortally wounded in the Battle of Savannah, October 9, 1779. The square is named after the American victory in the Battle of Monterrey, Mexico, some 67 years later. (FYI, there was a “Battle” of Monterey, California, during the same war, but except for the mix-up in spelling, it had no relation to this square.)

It’s a breathtakingly beautiful square, one of  22 surviving squares in the city. Many of these date back to the city’s founding in the 1730s, although Monterey is one of the later additions. To make things only slightly confusing, Pulaski Square, also dedicated to the General, lies only a few blocks away.

In addition to the monument, the square is home to the Mercer-Williams House, built for the great-grandfather of composer Johnny Mercer and, facing it across the square, to Congregation Mickve Israel, pictured below right, the third oldest Jewish Congregation in America.

Congregation Mikve IsraelIf you haven’t visited Savannah, it’s well worth a trip. So like its older cousin, Charleston, but so different, with its picturesque squares and somewhat kitschy waterfront. Although it boasts a cathedral to rival any in the US, nobody ever called Savannah the “Holy City,” and it doesn’t exude the studied aristocracy one finds south of Broad.

The city is about a 15 minute drive off I-95 just inside the Georgia/South Carolina border, and easily accessible by nearby Savannah Hilton Head Airport, where Gulfstream bizjets are built. In addition to a Marriott, Hyatt, and Hilton, the squares host a myriad of boutique hotels and B&Bs, and you’ll find the usual assortment of business & tourist hotels nearby (we like the Residence Inn).

A generation ago, you wouldn’t have dared walk around Savannah much away from the waterfront. Then in 1978, the Savannah College of Art and Design was founded, and the transformation has been amazing. We live 20 miles north of downtown and come in about once a month to stroll the squares and parks, stop in at one of the many coffee shops (art colleges seem to attract them), and maybe take in a museum or antebellum home.

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More incestuous amplification

Originally, the term refers to the implicit guidance and control link from orientation to observation, which then loops back into orientation. That loop can become locked, so that we only see what we want to see, thereby reinforcing our original orientation.

More generally, it refers to Boyd’s comment at the bottom of Chart 3 of The Essence of Winning and Losing (the infamous OODA “loop” sketch):

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.

Problems can arise when we limit the range of phenomena so that we don’t detect mismatches in time to do anything about them. Here’s an interesting example, from “What Martial Arts Have to Do With Atheism: An interview with Sam Harris about self-defense and the seduction of faith,” by Graeme Wood at Atlantic.com.

First, an aikido master demonstrating the technique of the “touchless takedown/no-touch knockout” with a group of his students:

And then what happens when he confronts a master who is not one of his students:

[I can’t vouch for the authenticity of either of these. Read the article and decide for yourself.]

Along those same lines, here’s a recent piece in the New York Times that refers to David Freedman’s summary of John Ioannidis’s paper on why so much published, peer-reviewed scientific research is wrong, in that it cannot be reproduced or is contradicted by more precise studies later on. As Freedman’s original article notes:

Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right.

This is an extremely difficult habit for leaders to break because it requires you fire sycophants (who may be long-time friends or even family members), promote unorthodox or unpleasant employees who habitually tell you the truth, and establish robust ties to the eternal world, even when others inside the organization complain that you’re stepping on their toes.

You’re already doing all this? Oh, really?

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Stress and success

Stress and SuccessI met Jonathan Brown at the last Boyd Conference in Quantico, back in October, and we spent quite a lot of time discussing the role of stress in Boyd’s framework.

Boyd thought of stress as an offensive weapon. On chart 132 of Patterns of Conflict, for example, he lists one of the intentions of operating inside opponents’ OODA loops as:

Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos … to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse.

Which seems like a reasonably good definition of “stress” to me. He also used to say that it was OK to be confused, so long as your opponent is more confused. Probably the same thing is true of stress.

In this new book, now available on Amazon, Brown takes Boyd’s famous definition of the goal of human activity — to survive on our own terms — and melds it with the latest research on the causes of stress.

I think you’ll find it most interesting, not to mention practical, and it might even provide new insights into Boyd’s work.

By the way, the publisher is listed as “A.L.P. Limited (Publishing), The Old Bakery, Tunbridge Wells, Kent.” The Brits still have a way about these things, don’t they?

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Is 4GW dead?

I’m sorry, Mrs. Lind, there’s nothing more we can do.

Has the concept of fourth generation warfare outlived its usefulness? The term was coined by Bill Lind and his colleagues in a paper they published in the Marine Corps Gazette in October 1989, “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation.”  If you haven’t read this paper, you might want to take the time now.

Here is their primary prediction:

Fourth is a goal of collapsing the enemy internally rather than physically destroying him. Targets will include such things as the population’s support for the war and the enemy’s culture. Correct identification of enemy strategic centers of gravity will be highly important.

In broad terms, fourth generation warfare seems likely to be widely dispersed and largely undefined; the distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. It will be nonlinear, possibly to the point of having no definable battlefields or fronts. The distinction between “civilian” and “military” may disappear. Actions will occur concurrently throughout all participants’ depth, including their society as a cultural, not just a physical, entity. Major military facilities, such as airfields, fixed communications sites, and large headquarters will become rarities because of their vulnerability; the same may be true of civilian equivalents, such as seats of government, power plants, and industrial sites (including knowledge as well as manufacturing industries). Success will depend heavily on effectiveness in joint operations as lines between responsibility and mission become very blurred. Again, all these elements are present in third generation warfare; fourth generation will merely accentuate them.

Continue reading →

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Paying for Einheit

Somewhere in the middle of new employee orientation, more years ago than I shall admit, I suddenly jerked awake when the briefer very slowly enunciated that “It is a fireable offense for employees to discuss their salaries.”

Tom Peters once insisted that in a capitalistic society, where we reward according to performance, why not post the scores? The answer, quite obviously, is that we often don’t reward according to performance, despite what we say. What companies get from such a policy is mistrust, with rumor replacing fact.  As the WSJ reported in an article today (paywall), even ostensibly well-run companies like Apple would sometimes rather play games than build a more powerful organization.

The article makes an important point: Don’t kid yourself — people will find out the truth. And some of the better performers will feel betrayed.

Like many readers of this blog, I come from a military background, where you can look at people’s uniforms and know to within a few dollars a year how much they make. And not coincidentally, the best military organizations make a fetish out of building Einheit.

In Boyd’s framework, Einheit is what defines the organization: We strive to improve it within our organization, and one of your primary goals is to destroy Einheit in your opponents. If you build an environment where internal politics flourishes, you’re doing your opponents’ jobs for them.

As the Journal article observes: “So one way for employers to head off internal politics: Be even more transparent.”  It would seem logical. Showing that you have nothing to hide is a step towards building trust.