When asked this question, Motolola Mobile CEO Sanjay Jha gave a most interesting answer because he talked about culture rather than limitations of the iPhone4 or iPad2.  He noted that companies have a tendency to adopt a defensive mindset when they have had a run of market successes.  He did, however, suggest that Apple is well aware of this problem, which is one of the most difficult in strategy (“Victory makes you stupid,” attributed to the elder von Moltke).

You might also note an interesting take on zheng/ qi (cheng / ch’i) near the end of the interview.

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/06/22/t_ls_motorola_apple.fortune/

Tomorrow I fly from Atlanta to LA, where I’ll be holding a seminar and giving a keynote at the Lean Software and Systems Conference 2011.

When I made the reservation, my wife and I were traveling the Southland looking for a place to retire.  But I had to fly from somewhere, so I chose Atlanta faute de mieux.

Well, as luck would have it, the right answer was Savannah.  Delta, in its down home customer-oriented way, said “No problem.”  We’ll fiddle with our computers for 30 seconds and reprogram you out of SAV (through ATL, of course) for a mere $800. Additional.

Or, I could buy a one-way, SAV-ATL, for $300, connect with my original reservation, and drive my second car (now in storage in Atlanta) back to Savannah.  I don’t know how far SAV is from ATL, but you can drive them easily in about 4 1/2 hours.  $300.

At this point, I decided to check Greyhound.  For $55, they took me from downtown Savannah, which is closer to my house than the airport, to ATL in that same 4 1/2 hours.   The bus had leather seats, free WiFi, and no charge to check a bag (which they hand you about 30 seconds after you get off the bus).  Left and arrived on time.

So the airline was charging six times as much to get me there maybe 2 hours earlier.

Obviously the number of routes where this trick will work is limited, perhaps to cities 300 or so miles apart.   But at least here in the East, there are a lot of those.  If the bus lines can keep their level of service up and their prices down, it’s going to be hard for airlines to hold on to that chunk of the business.  Ironically, the most successful US airline, Southwest, started not as competition for other airlines but for busses — short point-to-point routes at high frequency and low cost.

[Those of you familiar with Boyd’s strategies may recognize a little cheng / ch’i here.]

[using the updated English transliterations for cheng and ch’i]

A vivid example in today’s Wall St. J. illustrating how Toyota let its Lexus brand lose the magic it has had for 20 years.  Here’s the punch line:

Mr. Dailey found the interior of the BMW 328xi more to his liking, and bought one. “In the most basic of 3 Series you still feel a little pampered,” Mr. Dailey said. “In the Lexus, it was a different story” [referring to the “awful plethora of plastic trim” inside a comparably priced Lexus.]

The idea of zheng / qi is that you engage with the expected, zheng, while closing the sale with the unexpected qi.  This is the same pattern described in Chapter 5 of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, but applied in a way appropriate to business.

The zheng / qi pattern is an aspect of the ancient strategic principle of shih, and for a good introduction, you might consult David Lai’s short monograph, “Learning From The Stones: A Go Approach To Mastering China’s Strategic Concept, Shi,” available from the Army’s Strategic Studies Institute.

I explore some of the implications for business in chapter VI of Certain to Win.

“The study demonstrates that the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.”  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-illuminates-pain-social.html

This is edging close to the Boydian framework. The full title of “Strategic Game,” for example, is Strategic Game of ? and ?, where the question marks are “interaction” and “isolation.”

Perhaps of more importance to business, Boyd puts huge emphasis on maintaining the moral ties that hold groups together.  For example, he suggests that “moral defeat” could be considered as “Triumph of fear, anxiety, and alienation over courage, confidence, and esprit when confronted by menace, uncertainty, and mistrust.” (Patterns 121)

To avoid “moral defeat,” organizations should work on improving their agility and internal harmony, while using such tools as Auftragstaktik to pump up initiative.  The result will be more cohesive, effective groups and a possibly less painful overall experience.

management approach for family business — Chapter 24 of the Handbook of Research on Strategy Process, edited by Pietro Mazzola and Franz W. Kellermans (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010, ISBN 978 1 84844 044 9.  Also available as an e-book from their site.).  Coauthored by Joe Astrachan, me, Gaia Marchisio and George Manners, all of the Cox Family Enterprise Center at Kennesaw State University.  Look for it in an academic library near you.

Deep stuff — very academic — but covers the waterfront of the research (i.e., as distinguished from the speculation) on the process of strategy.  As the co-editors describe it:

While strategy content focuses on the subject of the decision, strategy process focuses on actual decision making and its associated actions.  Strategy process research examines the process underpinning strategy formulation and implementation. … Although aimed primarily at the academic community, many of the contributions speak to a wider audience.

Expensive, but if you’re into this sort of thing, probably indispensable.

The “strategic game,” as Boyd called it.  It can be played on three levels — physical, mental, and moral — but victory at the moral level level usually trumps the other two.  There are few exceptions in war and practically none in business and politics.

Picture this:  You’re a grossly overweight state governor.  Fiscal times are the worst since the Great Depression.  Plus you’ve just given $800 million away to your richest constitutents.  How, then, do you take on a much larger group of citizens making an average of less than $70,000 per year?

No problem.

As Boyd would advise, you need to lay out a strategy that focuses on the moral level of conflict, that is, you want to get the majority of consitituents to identify with you and your cause not because you’re a brilliant orator and can win them over by logic (although that can work, too), but simply because they identify with you and feel you’re cause is right.

Boyd lays this out in Strategic Game, charts 46-57 and particularly charts 47-49 and 56.

With all that in mind, read “How Chris Christie Did His Homework.”  By the way, I’m not in the least interested in who’s “right” or “wrong” in this case but in who played the moral card the smartest (or, to put it another way, how the largest and most powerful union in New Jersey made every mistake in the book.)

There are strong lessons in this for business because business has a large moral component.

[All of Boyd’s materials are available at http://dnipogo.org/john-r-boyd/]