by

Then there was only Southwest

One of the last two airlines that focused first on customers gave up the ghost yesterday. JetBlue announced that it will start charging for checked bags in 2015 and will be cutting passenger leg room by roughly 5% beginning in 2016. In explaining these moves, airline execs pointed to the need to satisfy the interests of the financial community:

JetBlue said its new steps and improvements in other projects would increase annual operating income by about $450 million by 2017, including $200 million from the new fare classes and $100 million annually from the new seats. … While the discount carrier has earned plaudits from customers, its financial performance has lagged behind rivals. Analysts have pressed the carrier for bag fees and tighter seating, saying it gave fliers too much for too little. … [JetBlue CEO Robin] Hayes said in an interview that the changes will improve investors’ returns without scaring away customers. “We’re very proud of our customer-first model, but we need it to deliver a similar level of return as other models,” he said. “JetBlue to add bag fees, reduce legroom,” WSJ, 11/20/14 (paywall) Continue reading →

by

OODA loops in football

Whenever the subject of OODA loops in football comes up, people usually think of a running back shifting direction to confuse tacklers, or a quick-thinking quarterback picking up a blitz, or the coach adjusting tactics to take advantages of defenders’ weaknesses.  These are all good, but they are really examples of “operating inside the OODA loop,” rather than of the “loop” itself.

Those of you with access to today’s Wall St. J. should go check out Kevin Clark’s article, “The Green Bay Packers’ New Workout Plan.”  (paywall)  There you’ll find a good example of the other piece of the OODA “loop,” the actual loop part that goes through the cycle of observe, orient, decide, act, then observe again (and so on).  “Operating inside the OODA loop,” on the other hand, mainly involves the implicit guidance and control link from orientation to action. As I explain in Boyd’s “Real OODA Loop,” both of these processes are working all the time, but depending on what you’re doing, one or the other will take precedence. and it’s worth always keeping in mind that the ability to use implicit guidance and control is not magic but (like real magic) comes from repeated O-to-O-to-D-to-A learning loops.

Anyway, you can download “Boyd’s Real OODA Loop,” as well as all of Boyd’s briefings and lots of other stuff from our Articles page.

Returning to the NFL, here’s what caught my attention:

“Chip [Kelly, head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles] is doing what Chip always does: He reads the information. He gets the feedback from every player, from all the data he gets, all the different sports science things we do,” said Eagles defensive coordinator Bill Davis. “He adjusts daily, weekly. We’re always moving the target to make sure that the players are at the optimal spot on Sunday.” (Emphasis added)

Does it guarantee victory? Of course not — the Eagles have lost three games this season — but Kelly’s team is on top of the NFC East, so it might be reasonable to think that he’s getting the most out of the players he has. And by the way, of the 32 teams in the NFL, only two have better records than the Eagles (Cards at 9-1 and Pats at 8-2).

by

New version of “Evolutionary Epistmology”

A “personal view,” in the author’s words, of John Boyd’s “Destruction and Creation” and its “centrality to the OODA loop.” In V2.3, dated September 2014, Chuck Spinney has added a new slide 21 on “not-so-brilliant” snowmobiles and made minor changes after slide 40.

As Chuck notes on Slide 21, “It never hurts to remind ourselves that most ‘New Concept Descriptions’ or ‘New Startups’ do not work so well in the real world.” If you are smart about it, this is a good thing:

The presence and production of mismatches are what sustain and nourish the enterprise of science, engineering, and technology, hence keep it alive and ongoing—otherwise there would be no basis for it to continue. Conceptual Spiral 23

In other words, out in that same real world, Chuck’s observation applies to all sides. So, who is going to win?

Download Evolutionary Epistemology as well as all of Boyd’s briefings (and my scintillating exegesis of Conceptual Spiral) from our Articles page (1.8 MB PDF).

by

A Boydian Distribution?

I’m not sure what to do with this article about the Tracy-Widom distribution, but it seems like it might contribute to Boyd’s philosophy of conflict on several levels. I’ll offer it in the spirit that Boyd spent a lot of time mining physics and biology for parts to use in his snowmobiles.

The article is “At the Far Ends of a New Universal Law,” by Natalie Wolchover in the October 15th edition of Quanta Magazine.

Usually I’m skeptical about applying physical or statistical concepts to the problems of strategy because these laws assume that the particles don’t behave like participants in a conflict, i.e., that they don’t lie, engage in deception, try to panic the scientists, and so on. As Boyd put it, on chart 132 of Patterns, instead of choosing the alternative that you think will be the most effective, select the one that your opponent will least expect, ideally something your opponent thinks is impossible. Do this just for the panic effect if nothing else.  Typically, particles obeying the laws of physics don’t do this. Continue reading →

by

Whence Fingerspitzengefuehl?

Try this: Hold your right arm out in front of you, palm up. Unless you’ve been injured, you should be able to flex your elbow easily 150 or more degrees so that your hand touches your right shoulder. Now hold it back out straight, and keeping your palm up, try to bend your elbow the other way.  How far down can you go? For me the answer is practically zero degrees. There are people, however, who can go down some distance, as much as 10 degrees.

Now let’s suppose that it’s important for you to develop the ability to go down 10 degrees, say for some special mission. How much practice would it take for you to get your elbow to to do this (holding your palm up)? Would 10,000 hours do the trick?

A quick glance at the physiology of the elbow should convince you that there is no amount of practice that would work. Some sort of surgery would be your only option.

Continue reading →

by

What’s luck got to do with it?

One of the things that used to drive Boyd nuts was trusting to “luck”: Once you’ve run through your bag of tricks, you give up and “trust to luck.” We’ve done all we can. It’s out of our hands now.

Boyd would insist that you never do this, that you keep on building snowmobiles and learning from the results right up until the end. Keep your team from “coming unglued,” as he would put it. This is not luck but lots of clear thinking, hard work, and leadership before and during the conflict.

A little of this flavor comes from a recent interview in The Guardian by Peter Thiel, of “monopoly is good” (WSJ — paywall) fame. I had never thought of “luck” as being an atheistic god, but he may have a point:

What I do think is that as a society we attribute too much to luck. Luck is like an atheistic word for God: we ascribe things to it that we don’t understand or don’t want to understand. As a venture capitalist, I think one of the most toxic things to do is to treat the people I’m investing in as lottery tickets where I say: “Well I don’t know if your business is going to work. It might, it might not.” I think that’s a horrible way to treat people. The anti-lottery ticket approach is to try to achieve a high level of conviction, to ask: “Is this a business that I have enough confidence in that I would consider joining it myself?”

In other words, Fingerspitzengefühl as an antidote to “luck.” I think this is an interpretation that Boyd would have liked.

“Uncertainty” is reality; it’s the climate of all competition, and like climate, it affects all competitors. So as Richards’ Third Law states:

If you lost because of luck, you were a loser going in.

It would be like a general blaming his debacle on rain.

Uncertainty is really nasty stuff, so you don’t want to leave it to chance. The essence of Boyd’s approach to tactics is that you don’t have to wait on acts of God — you can create the climate of uncertainty yourself, you can build your own Fog of War Machine.

by

Because they’re inside their OODA loops

How small animals sometimes beat larger rivals:

Specific traits that may provide advantages to small species in aggressive interactions included well-developed leg musculature and talons, enhanced flight acceleration and maneuverability and traits associated with aggression including testosterone and muscle development.

From “When David beats Goliath,” by Anne Craig at PhysOrg. The study was performed by Paul Martin of Queens University, Kingston, Ontario.

Should not surprise readers of this column.

by

The power of pulling together

Some of you may be familiar with the recently concluded saga of family intrigue at the Market Basket supermarket chain, whose 71 stores are concentrated in the northeastern USA. I’ve attached a commentary on this case by my friend and colleague, Joe Astrachan, of Kennesaw State University near Atlanta. Joe ran the Family Business EMBA program at KSU and is well versed in Boyd’s concepts of strategy.

Although he is addressing members of the Cox Family Enterprise Center in this commentary, I think you’ll find ideas here that will apply to any business or, for that matter, to any organization.

Comments from Dr. Joe Astrachan on “Market Basket cited in US jobs report” in the Boston Globe

Dr. Astrachan is the Wells Fargo Eminent Scholar Chair of Family Business at the Cox Family Enterprise Center, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

Reprinted here with his kind permission.

A recent article in the Boston Globe (Market Basket Cited in US Jobs Report, September 5, 2014, by Jack Newsham), highlights the importance of family business to society and should be a source of pride for family business owners and operators.For those who have not followed the Market Basket story, it is a too oft told tale of business owning families – one side without control complaining the side with control misused it for, as we scholars say, private benefits. The other side enjoyed a booming business and a loyal workforce—a CEO who by all accounts is a living representation of Jim Collin’s vaunted level 5 leadership. [CR note: Jim Collins’ book Good to Great was required reading in the EMBA program because of its compatibility with Boyd’s philosophy. Chapter 2 of the book addresses”Level 5 leadership,” which might be considered as an updating of the ideal illustrated in Chapter 17 of the Tao te Ching: The Master doesn’t talk; he acts. When his work is done, the people say, “Amazing! We did it all by ourselves.” Mitchell trans.] Continue reading →

by

A tip on grand strategy

Boyd insisted that one of the primary functions of grand strategy was to “attract the uncommitted to your cause.” If we take the prudent path and assume that all our current and potential customers are uncommitted, then as far as business goes, strategy and grand strategy are the same thing. One of the many ways that business isn’t war.

People buy from you for many reasons, and one of these is because they want to. People refuse to go anywhere near you for many reasons, and one of these is they don’t like you. So we get fanboys on the one hand and boycotts on the other.

Why, then, do some businesses alienate their own customers, giving them, as it were, reasons not to like them? How do you win that one? Here’s a neat example, “The perils of shaming bad tippers,” by Mario Castillo on LinkedIn. I think behavior like this may often result from an internal focus, maybe tough guy politics within the organization.

Of course, if you’re a monopoly, as Peter Thiel lauds over at the Wall St. J. (paywall), treat your customers any way you damn well please.

 

by

“When the going gets weird

The weird turn pro.” Hunter S. Thompson

Nice article from BusinessWeek on recruiting — and retaining — “weirdos.”  Contrast this with the rounds of interviews some companies subject prospects to, all in the name of making sure they’re a good fit.  As an alternative, spend that time and energy tying to figure out how to envelop the misfits in Einheit. And while you’re at it, jettison the smooth-talking sycophants.

Boyd quoted Gen Hermann Balck as telling him that one mark of a great commander was the

Willingness to support and promote (unconventional or difficult) subordinates who accept danger, demonstrate initiative, take risks, and come up with new ways toward mission accomplishment; Patterns 118

As the BW article’s author, Martin Davidson, put it:

Leaders should hire people who embody different traits and skills that are most important to the company’s goals. Those differences include subtle ones—such as personality, ways of thinking, or problem-solving—as well as visible differences, such as race, gender, or culture. Instead of seeing diversity as a distracting mandate handed down from human resources, leaders should use these differences to build a workforce that gives them a competitive advantage.

You can’t exploit an idea if nobody has the idea in the first place. The more weirdos, the wider range of potentially insanely great ideas.

Tom Peters once wrote that great leaders should be able to point to people in their organization whom they personally disliked, but whom they had promoted because of their value to the team.  For example:

  • If you’re a Democrat, have you promoted anybody to a senior position who worked in Mitt Romney’s campaign? Any Tea Party members?
  • If you’re an atheist, how many conservative Christians report directly to you? Muslims? Orthodox Jews?
  • If you’re concerned about global warming, do you have any climate skeptics on your team? New earth creationists?

And so on.

I remember somebody once telling me — it could have been Boyd — that “normal” people don’t do great things. It would certainly have applied to him. Would you have hired Boyd? Really?

Postscript.

Another jewel from The Doctor:

We disagree so violently on almost everything that it’s a real pleasure to drink with him. If nothing else, he’s absolutely honest in his lunacy — and I’ve found, during my admittedly limited experience in political reporting, that power & honesty very rarely coincide.