Boyd’s Theories

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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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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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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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New qi sighting

From Slate.com yesterday:

I’m a frequent Amazon shopper, and over the last few months I’ve noticed a significant improvement in its shipping times. As a subscriber to Amazon’s Prime subscription service, I’m used to getting two-day shipping on most items for free. But on about a third of my purchases, my package arrives after just one day for no extra charge. Sometimes the service is so speedy it seems almost magical. “I Want It Today: How Amazon’s ambitious new push for same-day delivery will destroy local retail,” by Farhad Manjoo. http://slate.me/O8yt5C

Magical — a typical description of a successful zheng/qi operation. Written descriptions date back to Sun Tzu (chapter 5), but the basic idea hasn’t changed: Understand what the other players in your game expect (ideally by helping to shape those expectations), and then when you think the time is ripe, spring the unexpected.

The result in conflict can be paralyzing shock and disorientation (see, for example, Patterns 117). In business, if done well, it can be delighted and fanatically loyal customers, as I describe in Certain to Win, and Apple does so well.

Amazon’s strategy appears to be to use zheng/qi to offset the costs of establishing regional distribution centers and collecting local sales taxes:

[Retailers claim that] If prices were equal, you’d always go with the “instant gratification” of shopping in the real [CR: brick-and-mortar] world. The trouble with that argument is that shopping offline isn’t really “instant”—it takes time to get in the car, go to the store, find what you want, stand in line, and drive back home.

More important, and this is what I find so hard to understand, the people who run retail outlets don’t seem to realize that the one thing they can offer than Amazon can’t is interaction face-to-face with real people. Instead, they appear to regard people purely as costs, and so our experiences with their sales and service forces are often, shall we say, less than satisfying.

[Note: I’m also a subscriber to Amazon Prime and my experiences have been similar.]

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Be agile and win

As we have seen, Boyd thought highly of what appears to be agility, but never used the word (with one exception) and never defined it in print. Several years after he quit distributing updated charts in 1986, he did change the “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” chart 144, to include “agility,” but he still didn’t define it.

While giving his presentations, though, Boyd would talk about agility, and he usually divided it between physical and mental (you cannot, as he would slyly remark, have “moral agility,” because that would be no morals at all!)

Continue reading →

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Why liberals lose

Juan Cole, one of our most perspicuous observers on the Middle East, ran a blog post the other day that illustrates why conservatives have such a strong hold on certain segments of our society. The item featured a map showing average life expectancy by state, and Prof. Cole’s summary was:

With the exception of Utah, there is a pretty strong overlap between lower life expectancy and deep hostility to the Affordable Care Act. Those who need it most are most opposed to it.

Fair enough. But why? Although one can sympathize with Cole’s frustration, his conclusion illustrates why liberals are struggling so hard:

Know what that is called? Fatal stupidity.

So long as liberals have that attitude, they will feed the very movement they so righteously denounce. It wasn’t that long ago, for example, that Rick Santorum was making a credible run at the GOP nomination by shouting at his audiences:

They think we’re stupid!

Boyd suggested four elements of an effective grand strategy. You can look them up at Patterns 139.  The second is:

Pump up our resolve, drain away adversary resolve, and attract the uncommitted;

Politics is all about grand strategy, about attracting the uncommitted, particularly the swing voters who hold the key to most elections. Telling yourself — that is, locking in your orientation — that they don’t agree with you because they’re stupid will probably not produce effective campaigns.

[Note: I’m not making any statement about the ACA. I’ve been on government-sponsored, single-payer health programs (TRICARE and Medicare) for a while, and they seem to work for me. But, of course, the ACA is not a single-payer program.]

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Why Boyd is Agile

Boyd virtually never uses the word “agile,” but it’s hard to read any of his presentations without running across concepts that seem like agility.

For example, you’ll find this right at the beginning of Patterns of Conflict:

Idea of fast transients suggests that, in order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop. (5)

“Fast transients,” “operate at a faster tempo or rhythm,” “get inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop” (whatever that means) certain have that agile feel.

Then a few pages over:

It is advantageous to possess a variety of responses that can be applied rapidly to gain sustenance, avoid danger, and diminish adversary’s capacity for independent action. (12)

“A variety of responses that can be applied rapidly,” sounds pretty agile (note that it is the application, not the responses themselves, that is rapid).

Boyd is closely associated with the style of combat known as “maneuver warfare.” Although that term doesn’t appear in Patterns, he does discuss a category that he calls “maneuver conflict.” and one of its components is:

Fast transient maneuvers: Irregular and rapid/abrupt shift from one maneuver
event/state to another.

Near the end of the theory section of Patterns (what follows is “Application”), in the “Theme for Vitality and Growth,” we find:

Adaptability: Power to adjust or change in order to cope with new or unforeseen circumstances (144)

Is “adaptability” the same as agility? About three years after Boyd “finished” Patterns, he redid the list on page 144. Among other things, adaptability disappeared and “agility” showed up, for only the second time in any Boyd briefing. Unfortunately he didn’t supply a definition.

Let me give one more example. In Strategic Game, which came out about a year after the final edition of Patterns, Boyd insisted 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. (42) [Compare to “fast transient maneuvers” above]

This is significant because “shifting maneuvers,” say from turning in one direction to turning in another, or from climbing to diving, or from accelerating to decelerating (or any combination) was the original definition of “agility” in the US Air Force.

It’s even more basic, though. If “operating inside the OODA loop” is the same as agility, then agility is the foundation of all Boyd’s military strategy, as you can see from chart 132 of Patterns (too long to reproduce here) and from this paragraph in Strategic Game:

Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside their O-O-D-A loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what’s really going on. (47)

From even this small sample, you should be able to see that concepts that seem an awful lot like “agility” permeate Boyd’s work and form a backbone at least to the destructive elements of his theory. Enough theory for now. We’ll explore what his ultimate definition was, and how it might apply to activities other than war, in later posts.