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Diseases of orientation

In Boyd’s grand scheme of things, Orientation drives action. The easiest and most reliable way to defeat opponents is to mess with their orientations so that the resulting actions are ineffective, late, or missing altogether.

It’s an ancient idea, all the way back to Sun Tzu (“All warfare is based upon deception.”), and that’s just what we have in writing. We can be sure the idea itself dates way before Sun Tzu.

In any case, a few thousand years later, Boyd added the idea of operating inside the OODA loop:

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. Strategic Game, 47

Continue reading →

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Islamic “Fundamentalism”

If your conception of ISIS imagines illiterate fanatics making suicidal charges in pickup trucks and are confused about how a glorified motorcycle gang could conquer half of Iraq and Syria, wiping out a $25 BN US investment in the Iraqi army in the process, you might want to learn more about the roots of the movement and how it is trained and led today. Such an understanding may come in handy in the future.

For background, try William R. Polk’s article, Understanding Islamic Fundamentalism, on consortiumnews.com. As he explains:

Some of [Sayyid Qutub’s] writings bear comparison to the Islamic legal classics. As a group, they have attracted a mass readership — believed to be in the tens of millions — throughout the Islamic world and have apparently influenced men as opposed to one another as the leaders of the Taliban, the Saudi Royal Establishment, al-Qaida, the Iranian and Iraqi clerics [Arabic: ulema] and now the various and competing groups of Syrian militants. Sayyid Qutub is the philosopher of the Islamic revolution.

Implicit in his writings was the idea that Islam is under attack and therefore must defend itself because failure to do so would be to contravene the intention of God. Continue reading →

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Imperial Class: A little background

If we do end up with (most) airlines converting to premium offerings and ditching coach class, we’ll be right back where airline travel started. My old friend and former boss at Lockheed, George Hamlin, has a column, “Suite Life,” that talks about this and other factoids from the era of super glamorous air travel over at Air Transport World.

As he recalls:

Airline service began by catering to a premium market. … As commercial aviation advanced, there were numerous other aircraft types that were fitted with berth-type sleeping facilities. In addition, as aircraft became larger, it also was possible to install more luxurious passenger accommodations. Continue reading →

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Fastest way to kill a company?

I don’t know, but an effective way is to move your Schwerpunkt off of cheng / chi. When this happens, your ability to generate chi will atrophy (it’s hard enough to keep it going, anyway), and eventually cheng will follow. Here’s an example.

From an article in Monday’s Wall St. J. (subscription required) on recent problems at Target:

Creative leeway—once the DNA of the chain affectionately dubbed ‘Tar-zhay’—took a back seat to rigid performance metrics.

Auftragstaktik (as we might describe it) was replaced with control:

Initiatives once left to divisional leaders to execute on their own became subject to consensus and extensive testing, say former executives. Even small projects, like a mobile app, became bogged under the weight of giant teams.

What happened out in the marketplace, what customers experienced, was predictable:

The chain “lost a lot of what used to make it unique,” says Barclays analyst Matthew McClintock. “There haven’t been exciting reasons to shop at Target in recent years.” (emphasis added)

Kill creativity and you kill agility and then … Continue reading →

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Is blitzkrieg enough?

Did the Germans win WW II?

Maneuver warfare, a modern updating of the infiltration tactics that led to the stunning German successes in 1939 through late 1941, is a better way to fight opposing military forces: Create a gap in the enemy defenses, penetrate into his rear areas, cause panic and chaos, and exploit before he can figure out what’s going on. Numbers become irrelevant and can even be a vulnerability once panic sets in. Continue reading →

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Bad news for Imperial Class?

You may recall my prediction that in about five years, the three legacy major airlines in the US will merge and discontinue coach class service. This would leave them with a 2-class product, business and a superpremium offering I called “Imperial Class.”  You can read more in the press release, available on the Articles page.

Grant Martin, however, notes in a piece on Quartz.com, that none of the all-business-class airlines, started during the last decade, succeeded. The sole survivor, Open Skies, now flies a dual coach / business class configuration. Continue reading →

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What customers want

Gregory Ciotti has an interesting column on LinkedIn today, “Why Steve Jobs Didn’t Listen to His Customers.”

The subject is market research, and the question is: Should you ask customers what they want? My answer: Sure. Why not? You going promulgate an edict: “Never ask customers what they want.”?

The big issue is what you do with this information. Well, why not just build what they say they want? Sometimes this works. If I had to guess, I’d say it works pretty often because you can reliably predict that customers want problems fixed. As Ciotti notes:

Perhaps this is the truth behind Apple’s innovation — Steve Jobs did actually listen to customers, but only to find out which problems they faced, and to identify the biggest points of friction they had.

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Figures and maps from Certain to Win

I know a lot of you have bought electronic editions of Certain to Win (“a lot” being relative, but I’m highly grateful and flattered, nonetheless) that did not have legible figures and maps. My sincerest apologies.

I’ve uploaded a PDF file with all the graphics in the book. There’s a link to this file on the Articles page.

Some electronic editions also didn’t play well with Table I on page 43. I recreated that table in an earlier post and have also added a link on the Articles page. Continue reading →