By the time I had grabbed my iPhone, slid to unlock, put in the passcode, found Calculator, punched in the numbers, punched in the right numbers, and read her the result, my wife had easily figured the answer to a tax problem on a scrap of paper. Worth her studying math for 12 years in school?

“No,” is the clear answer given by Simon Jenkins in yesterday’s Guardian.com, “For Britain’s pupils, maths is even more pointless than Latin.” I completely agree. For one thing, except for what she regards as the most useless subject of all times, Euclidean geometry, she wasn’t doing math, or “maths,” as they say over there, at all. She was, basically, learning to replace a calculator.

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As you may recall, the idea of playing off the expected, cheng, with the unexpected, chi, plays a major role in Boyd’s conception of maneuver warfare. Following Sun Tzu, Boyd advises engaging with the cheng, and winning with the chi. This is the strategy of deception: Go in with something the opponent believes he has figured out, ideally with some effort on his part in order to set the hook, as it were, then at the moment you believe will have the most paralyzing impact, spring the chi. Boyd has a nice summary on Patterns 132.

As I’ve mentioned before, and devoted an entire chapter to in Certain to Win, this idea translates nicely over to business. Give the customer what he expects, wants, needs.  In simple terms, the product or service you provide has to work and do what you’ve told him it will do.

But customers become bored, eventually, with this approach. To hook them for the long term, you also need the unexpected, the surprising, the delightful. This may not be just the product or service itself but could include customer service or even packaging. For years, Apple was the master of this approach.

Hiroshi Mikitani had a nice cheng / chi piece yesterday on LinkedIn: “Selling distinction in the Internet Age.” Mikitani is the founder and CEO of Rakuten, the Japanese Internet retail giant that bought Buy.com a few years ago. What’s interesting about Mikitani’s approach is that he’s advising not more delightful packaging, which you could implement as well through Internet sales as anywhere else, but shifting to a new domain entirely.

What’s important is that your business think in these terms. Harried CEOs sometimes regard anything other than getting product out the door as distractions or at best “nice-to-have,” and bean counters look on them as added costs — i.e., they get points for griping about them or worse, eliminating them. Actions like these leave you open to smarter competitors.

What I recommend instead is that from the very beginning you regard your Schwerpunkt as not the chi nor the cheng but cheng / chi.

Certain to Win has surpassed 10,700 sales.

MANY, many thanks to all of you who bought the book!!!

I am working on a new book, if “working” can be the right word (lots of distractions in an over-55 community …) In the meantime, my two papers, “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop,” and “John Boyd, Conceptual Spiral, and the Meaning of Life,” both available from the articles page, will have to stand in as updates.

CTW is also available in a special Indian edition and has been translated into Portuguese. Unfortunately, I don’t have sales numbers for them.

From Matthew Yglesias’s column in Slate:

In theory, executive compensation schemes linked to stock market performance are supposed to focus managers on the long view. But in practice, the opposite seems to be the case. In an impressive paper published in April 2013, Alexander Ljungqvist, Joan Farre-Mensa, and John Asker found that publicly traded firms systematically under-invest compared to privately held ones. The effect is larger in sectors where stock market swings are more closely tied to quarterly earnings reports, indicating that what they call “managerial myopia” is likely the culprit. In other words, when you pay executives to increase the share price, they focus on increasing the share price—even when that means focusing on headline numbers in the next quarterly financial report rather than on the long term.

Changes their orientation, in other words. If you read this closely, you can see the effect of incestuous amplification: “Of course our strategy is working! Can’t you see the share price going up every quarter?”

To paraphrase Yglesias’s argument, companies that don’t obsess on quarterly profit growth open up a range of options. If you read his entire column, you can see that the real secret of Amazon’s continued success is that it uses these options to operate inside customers’ and competitors’ OODA loops.

Fans of Boyd’s Strategic Game will recall the quote from Order Out of Chaos that Boyd included as Chart 18 and this bit of analysis from Chart 19:

Prigogine called far-from-equilibrium forms like the vortex, ‘dissipative structures.’ The name comes from the fact that to keep their shape these structures must constantly dissipate entropy so it won’t build up inside the entity and ‘kill’ it with equilibrium … [These dissipative structures] can survive only by remaining open to a flowing matter and energy exchange with the environment … The structure is stabilized by its flowing. It is stable but only relatively stable—relative to the constant energy flow required to maintain its shape. Its very stability is also paradoxically an instability because of its total dependence on its environment. The dissipative structure is autonomous (separate) but only relatively separate. It is a flow within a flow.

The idea of a dissipative structure heavily influenced Boyd’s thinking on Orientation, which he would characterize as a far-from-equilibrium process, and eventually on the entire OODA “loop” and the processes that support it:

By pulling all this together, we can see that the key statements, OODA loop sketch, and related insights represent an evolving, open-ended, far- from-equilibrium process of self-organization, emergence, and natural selection. (The Essence of Winning and Losing, 4)

New research out of MIT now suggests that the idea of dissipative structures not only explain the the OODA “loop,” but make its existence and indeed the existence of life itself inevitable:

The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. (“A New Theory of Life,” by Natalie Wolchover, in Quanta Magazine, a publication of the Simons Foundation)

Although the article doesn’t delve into organization theory, it might be that the same process operating at the macro level explains why a large degree of bottom-up self-organization can produce devastatingly effective organizations. But I speculate.

Friday, February 28 and Saturday, March 1, 2014, sponsored by the Rady School of Management at the University of California San Diego.

Chuck Spinney will present a revised version of “Evolutionary Epistemology, A Personal View of John Boyd’s ‘Destruction and Creation’ … and its centrality to the … OODA Loop.” This is absolutely the best summary of Boyd’s philosophy, and, as far as I know, the only one to connect Boyd’s 1976 paper to the OODA loop, which he unveiled some 20 years later. If you’ve found “Destruction and Creation” daunting (be honest now), “Evolutionary Epistemology” will answer a lot of your questions.

I’ll cover what went on between those two bookends. We’ll spend most of our time on Patterns of Conflict, introducing its main themes and discussing a fair number of its charts. I’ll also touch on Organic Design, Strategic Game, and Conceptual Spiral, and Boyd’s last briefing, The Essence of Winning and Losing. These are complex works that Boyd evolved over two decades, and my goal is to make their powerful ideas accessible to entrepreneurs and established business leaders.

For information on the conference, go to http://boydbusinessinnovationconference.com/, and to register, visit the Rady School’s conference site at http://rady.ucsd.edu/Exec/Open/Boyd-Conference/.

“Meditation may help with anxiety, depression and pain,” by Andrew M. Seaman, reporting on a review of 47 randomized research trials that used mindfulness techniques to treat conditions including anxiety, pain, or depression recently published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

Harvard’s Dr. Allan Goroll, who wrote an editorial accompanying publication of the study, noted how orientation governs behavior, often despite data:

The analysis is an example of an area of much-needed scientific study, because many people make treatment decisions based on beliefs – not data.

“That is particularly the case with alternative and complimentary approaches to treating medical problems,” he said. “It ranges from taking vitamins to undergoing particular procedures for which the scientific evidence is very slim but people’s beliefs are very great.”

The lead researcher, Dr. Madhav Goyal of Johns Hopkins, cautioned that the purpose of meditation is not so much to cure specific disorders but to improve quality of life in general:

Goyal said people should remember that meditation was not conceived to treat any particular health problem.

“Rather, it is a path we travel on to increase our awareness and gain insight into our lives,” he wrote. “The best reason to meditate is to gain this insight. Improvements in health conditions are really a side benefit, and it’s best to think of them that way.”

“Orientation,” as Boyd often insisted, “is the Schwerpunkt.” Always do what improves orientation and you can’t go far wrong, at least not for very long. Meditation is a powerful technique to help you do this, and I’ve long thought it should be a part of the curriculum in military leadership and civilian MBA programs.

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.

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.