Author: Chet

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Back to agility

Finally, after the Tour de France, Wimbledon, and the Olympics.

Interesting series in the Wall St. Journal that illustrate Boyd’s General Theory of Agility (subscription required).

How Japan Lost Its Electronics Crown

Japan’s Dimwitted Smartphones

Perhaps what’s most interesting is that we’re talking about a country and culture that had a strong influence on Boyd’s concept. The CEO of Canon, for example, once said that the trait he prized most was a “mind that does not stick.”

More details later, but for now, consider that if it can happen to these guys, it can happen to anyone.

 

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Make your competitors into great copiers

Copyrights and patents grant exclusive rights to those who create new products, works of art, or other things deemed to be especially beneficial to society. So what could be wrong with that? People who bring new creation to society should benefit.

But here’s the problem. As the new book The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation hints at, the data do not show that industries with strong copyright and patent protection are any more innovative than those without such barriers, which suggests that the concept of patents and copyrights may not be the engine of creativity and innovation that its advocates (esp. such groups as the MPAA and RIAA) promise.

The book, excerpted in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal, gives examples showing that industries such as fashion and pro sports, which do not enjoy the protections granted the publishing and recording industries, are beehives of innovation. If you stop to think about it, they have to be. When any innovation can be quickly and legally copied, only those who get really good at coming up with and successfully employing new ideas will thrive. As Boyd said, the key to surviving on your own terms is to be the best at building and employing snowmobiles.

You can easily see this under our current system, where Apple is in great danger of morphing from an innovative powerhouse to a company whose business is suing people. As I mentioned in Certain to Win, this is the Maginot Line principle applied to commercial competition. Like the famous Line, the better it works (and it worked great), the deader you are. Companies would be better served to follow Tom Peters’ advice to spin off their innovations into separate companies that would license them to all competitors. For one thing, this would be a wonderful device to stunt your competition’s ability to innovate. If your invention is really clever, you might consider making it open source.

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A Helluva Game!

Like most Americans, I don’t know enough about soccer to make an informed judgment about the just-concluded women’s semifinal match between USA and Canada, but just from watching the intensity of play and the sportsmanship (at one point, a Canadian player who was walking by helped Abby Wambach to her feet), that was a match for the ages.

Congratulations to both teams, and I’m sorry they weren’t playing for the gold.

In a tactical sense, these multi-dimensional interactions suggest a spontaneous, synthetic/ creative, and flowing action/counteraction operation, rather than a step-by-step, analytical/ logical, and discrete move/countermove game. Patterns 176

I’ll be cheering for Canada in the bronze medal round (I like the French, too, but they didn’t play the US), although I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could naturalize Christine Sinclair in time for Japan on Thursday????

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Closed means closed, whether insanely great or not.

From a recent article in The Register (UK):

We might continue to buy our Apple gear, but every time we buy a Samsung or Amazon or Google device, we’re going to be reminded why we don’t keep our content in iCloud, but instead keep it with Amazon or Google or Microsoft SkyDrive. These other services “just work.” Apple’s cloud? Not so much.

The author, Matt Asay, writes that his household owns: five Macs, two iPads, and four iPhones all running the latest OSes).

I’ve written before that Apple’s closed system is eventually going to get it into trouble, despite its insanely great hardware and OSes. A couple of days ago, my wife’s .me e-mail stopped working. We had moved her over to iCloud several weeks ago and it had been working fine. It stopped working on all platforms — iPhone, iPad, our two Macs, and through icloud.com, and whether accessed through our home network or over ATT mobile. She can log on to her account on icloud.com, but when she tries to check Mail, she gets a “Not available” message. When she tries to check from Mail on her computer or iOS devices, she gets an”incorrect username or password” message.

Because her system is over 4 years old, Apple support won’t talk to her. All we can tell from the discussion boards is that other people have the same problem. Other than the “send report to Apple” box from icloud.com, I can’t find any way to report the problem.

As I type this (on my MacBook), she’s busy converting all her accounts over to her new gmail address (I had already set her up on Dropbox). When Apple’s latest earnings were announced, she cheered.

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Positioning for the melee

Venkatesh Rao has another thought provoking post up at his Tempo blog. Go take a look and then come back here … Play close attention to his distinction between “planning” and “positioning” near the bottom of the piece.

Rao’s concept of positioning & melee moves seems similar to the military’s concepts of operational and tactical levels of war. Even more interesting for business — where these concepts of levels apply only by analogy — they appear to be closely related to shih, Sun Tzu’s framework for employing force or energy.  For those of you not familiar with shih, it’s the title of the fifth chapter of The Art of War and encompasses a variety of concepts including zheng / qi (cheng / ch’i). For an excellent intro, see David Lai’s paper “Learning from the Stones,” available from the Federation of American Scientists.

Continue reading →

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RIP Sally Ride

I sat next to Dr. Ride on a flight from Atlanta to Washington DC in the mid-1980s (it was Eastern Airlines, to give you an idea).

Idiot me, I didn’t recognize her–one does hate to stare, although the NASA briefcase should have given it away–until as we were getting off the plane, she was greeted by a NASA team at the door.

One of the greats, at the early age of 61.

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MNCCG

As in “many noncooperative centers of gravity.” It’s what you want to turn your opponents into because it can, as Boyd suggested, pump up friction and entropy and “impede vigorous activity.”

Boyd’s primary critique of Clausewitz, for example, was that:

Clausewitz did not see that many non-cooperative, or conflicting, centers of gravity paralyze adversary by denying him the opportunity to operate in a directed fashion, hence they impede vigorous activity and magnify friction. (Patterns of Conflict, 42).

Think about a 3-D assortment of metal balls connected by springs. You try to get the contraption to move and you’ll find that most of your energy goes into the oscillations among the weights. Now translate that effect to organizations.

Nice example of this effect in yesterday’s Wall St. Journal in an article about Nokia, whose decline is spectacular, even by the standards of modern hi-tech. Here’s the critical conclusion:

“You were spending more time fighting politics than doing design,” said Alastair Curtis, Nokia’s chief designer from 2006 to 2009. The organizational structure was so convoluted, he added, that “it was hard for the team to drive through a coherent, consistent, beautiful experience.”

From: “Nokia’s Bad Call on Smartphones,” Wall St. J., July 19, 2012, p. A1 (subscription required)

If your organization has fallen prey to MNCCG, it doesn’t make any difference what your strategy is—because you won’t be able to execute it—or how potent your research and manufacturing operations are because they won’t be producing many products that customers want to buy. As the article shows, Nokia spent vastly more on R&D than any other company in its industry, nearly four times what Apple did, and had developed a modern smart phone, with touchscreen keyboard and a tablet with wireless connectivity some seven years before the iPhone. But today, they are struggling, to say the least, just to stay in the telecommunications business.

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An agile interlude

Here’s a chart where Boyd lays out the power of agility (click to enlarge):

It’s chart 44 from Strategic Game, which makes some extraordinary claims about what you can do to adversaries by operating at a “faster tempo or rhythm” than they can.

To see that this really is agility, you may need to go back to one of the precursor charts in this “illuminating example,” where Boyd mentions again that :

The ability to shift or transition from one maneuver to another more rapidly than an adversary enables one to win in air-to-air combat. (SG 42)

This is the classic definition of “agility.”  What Boyd is suggesting is that even if your maneuvers don’t lead to a kill, just by being able to exercise a higher degree of agility (in this sense) over a period of time will end the contest in your favor.  Your opponent might, for example, lose control of the aircraft or, with the ability to carry on collapsed, just punch out.

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