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Roll over, Beethoven

And tell Deming the news.

I don’t know what to say. As long-time readers of this blog, both of you, may recall, I’ve tried to cut Marissa Mayer some slack.  She inherited a difficult situation as the new CEO of Yahoo, and new leaders sometimes do dramatic things to signal the start of a new way. Patton was a master of this.

But now, she’s apparently decided to implement the worst leadership idea imaginable, one that even I can’t explain away. According to Kara Swisher’s article in All Things D, “‘Because Marissa Said So’ — Yahoos Bristle at Mayer’s QPR Ranking System and ‘Silent Layoffs,’” she’s introduced a ranking system for employees that forces managers to place their people on a bell-type curve. This means that some people are going to be ranked as sub-standard — possibly leading to being fired — no matter how good their performance actually is. In other words, if you, as a manager, have done the hard work of building a great team, you’re still going to have to offer up some percentage of your people.

What this does is introduce conflict into the team as people compete with their teammates not to end up in one of the bottom rankings. It puts a big premium on gamesmanship, brown-nosing, and in the current job market, maybe even sabotage. In other words, it’s a world class Einheit eraser, and without Einheit, you’re never going to have a world beating team. Well, you might if you choose your competition carefully.

To make matters worse, she doesn’t seem to be applying this same mechanism to her own team. As one employee put it:

Will the ‘occasionally misses’ classification apply to L2 and L3 execs also? At every goals meeting, we find senior staff who missed even the 70% goals. Thus, by definition, they should be classified as ‘occasionally misses.’ Two such classifications, and that person should be let go, amiright? How about we set an example for the rest of the company and can a few of the top execs who miss (or who sandbag their goals to make sure they ‘meet’)?

Which reminds me of Boyd’s concept of “moral isolation,” which he recommended you apply to your adversaries and not do their job for them on yourself:

Morally, adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well being to the detriment of others (i.e. their allies, the uncommitted, etc.) by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold.  (Strategic Game 47)

What about Deming? Oh yeah. Some of you may dimly recall his Fourteen Points. Here’s number 11:
Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective. (emphasis added).
And his reasoning was virtually the same as mine: you kill any chance at unity and eventually the organization descends into a pit of backstabbing and CYA.
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Acquisition reform? It’s simple

Here’s the latest from USAF Lt Col Dan Ward, the guru of the “fast, inexpensive, simple, tiny” movement in US acquisition reform. He begins by noting that while car manufacturers are reducing the time it takes to design and build their products, military contractors are barreling in the opposite direction.

In “Changing Acquisition Culture: What & How,” Colonel Ward explains this phenomenon and offers several concrete suggestions for reversing the trend. This is an area that I’ve worked in a little, and my colleague, Chuck Spinney, has worked in a lot. Think you’ll find Col Ward’s ideas interesting.

Published by the Center for National Policy in Washington, D.C.

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Formlessness in space and time

In chapter six of the Sun Tzu text, we read:

Therefore, when you induce others to construct a formation while you yourself are formless, then you are concentrated while the opponent is divided. (Cleary trans., p. 106)

Boyd loved this concept. He called it the principle of dispersion, parodying the Army’s emphasis on concentration. The idea is that the opponent has to be on guard everywhere, while you know what you’re doing. Boyd took it even further: You can disperse not only in space, but combine it with dispersion in time, so that the opponent cannot recover from the first attack before the second is upon him. And the third. And the fourth. Think of how you reacted the last time things started happening faster than you could cope. Against a linear formation, you don’t need every attack to succeed. Often one will be enough, if it can penetrate and cause the opponent’s formation to begin to collapse. The next group of forces streaming in can complete the job. Boyd called this “operating inside the OODA loop.”

Where else do we see formations? How about football? What would Boyd’s principle of dispersion / operating inside the OODA loop look like there? For a great example, check out “Ditka vs. Ryan: The Feud That Fueled the ’85 Chicago Bears” (in the print edition as “Hate, Jealousy, and Da Bears,” p. D10) by Rich Cohen in Friday’s Wall St. J. (paywall). This should give you the idea:

“As organized and experienced as that group of players were from the Chargers, they’d seen nothing like it,” [Chicago safety Doug] Plank said. “Mad dogs. Wild men. Coming from every side. A jail break. By the end, Dan Fouts did not know where to look: Should he try to find the open man downfield, or should he simply brace for impact?”

It was this confusion, planted in the mind of the quarterback, that made the 46 [the Bears’ code name for this type of defense] hum.

When briefing the section of Patterns of Conflict that deals with Clausewitz and Jomini, Boyd would critique these guys for their emphasis on order. He usually told the story of how despite this obsession, Jomini almost discovered the idea of operating inside the OODA loop. Jomini had written of a cavalry attack, where the usual tight formation broke down, and in the resulting confusion, the attackers broke through and won. Jomini concluded that the attack had succeeded in spite of the breakdown in the formation. Boyd said, “No! It succeeded because of it.” The Union attack on Missionary Ridge, November 25, 1863, is another example. In each of these cases (and many others) there was confusion, and one side could exploit it before the other could figure out what was happening.

So it isn’t that there is a balance or trade-off between structure / form and agility / formlessness. Formlessness, as the Sun Tzu text insists, creates its own form, and as Boyd noted, this often happens in time as well as in space.

Incidentally, the idea that only one attack has to succeed also carries over into football. Here’s Plank again:

“Football is chess,” Plank said. “You can capture all my pawns, but if I tip over that king [the opposing quarterback], I win.”

[By this way, perhaps this will answer the question of why Ender’s Game is so popular among the maneuver warfare crowd.]

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You build snowmobiles; snowmobiles build you

Your DNA is actually an on-going project of building snowmobiles, according to an article in this weekend’s Wall St. J. (paywall):

So stretches of DNA can be copied in particular cells and then pasted elsewhere, producing a novel DNA sequence … Transpositions also occur in the brain. Fred Gage and Alysson Muotri of the Salk Institute and colleagues first showed that human transposons are activated in stem cells in the brain around the time they are becoming neurons. In other words, when you make a new neuron, that old boring DNA sequence that you inherited isn’t good enough. Thus, the brain is a mosaic of neurons with different DNA sequences. “Genes Often Get Shuffled in Our DNA Deck,” by Robert M. Sapolsky

I don’t know what this means, but it is absolutely fascinating. As the article mentions, the vast, vast majority of snowmobiles don’t work, but a vital few do. Plants are especially good at this game, and bacteria, the most successful life form on the planet — you are, basically, just a life support mechanism for a bunch of bacteria — are masters.

 

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Why we need the Army, part I

This is the first in a series of posts by guest commentators to answer my complaint that I hadn’t heard a coherent, logical answer to the question of why we still need the Army.

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Yes, we do need an Army
by Lucretius

While my answer may not be as coherent as Mr. Richards would prefer, the USAF, USN, and USMC bring assets to the fight that while together may succeed in meeting the mission; without one of them, we may not succeed as quickly or as effectively in countering the threat(s) to our foreign interests or homeland.

We have instead created a system of redundancies and bloated administrative processes which bog down both the definition of the threat(s) and how to address it/them. Our entire military is shackled by a congress that has few members (or their extended family members) who have worn the uniform which frankly has resulted in DoD being curtailed by political (hidden and otherwise) agendas, vagaries, and shifting bipartisan bickering. Continue reading →

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Living with Amazon, part II

Last post noted that independent booksellers are holding their own against Amazon, and even increasing in numbers. They couldn’t do this if they were just more expensive versions of Amazon — sell a small selection of the same books, just at a higher price.

Here’s the problem in a nutshell: What Amazon’s doing is working great. So you have to find something that Amazon isn’t already doing, which is sell a huge range of stuff, deliver it quickly, take it back if you don’t like it, and recommend other stuff based on your buying and browsing history. And — let me emphasize that — and for which customers will pay enough money to give you a viable business venture.

Continue reading →

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Bookstores: How to live with Amazon

Something to do with orientation — be something they’re not. 

I buy a lot from Amazon primarily because I live in a place where there isn’t that much retail. But I always try my local stores first, and if I find it there, I buy it there.

So from my standpoint, they don’t compete.  Turns out, that’s a good key to success, and not just for bookstores (athletic gear is another), as Leo Mirani points out in a recent post at Quartz.com:

The reason? There is very little difference between big, impersonal chain stores selling books and a big, impersonal website selling books. Independent retailers, on the other hand, have a lot to offer that Amazon cannot: niche coffee, atmosphere, serendipitous discoverability of new titles and authors, recommendations from knowledgable staff, signings and events, to name a few.

Actually, there’s a lot of difference “between big, impersonal chain stores selling books and a big, impersonal website selling books,” much of it having to do with being disappointed. But that’s a topic for another post.

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National entropy

Maybe the reason that the Chinese continue to do so well is that China is smarter than we are. Simplest explanation I can come up with.

I don’t mean that individual Chinese are smarter than individual Americans, but suppose in a celestial experiment, the usual Martian were asked to gaze down upon both the US and China as organisms and select which one seemed to be more intelligent. On the one hand, the China organism would appear to be engaging in various self-improvement exercises, while the US organism spends most of its energy running up and down the street barking at cars, knocking small children off bikes, and chasing its ideological tail.

Consider: Soon, more Chinese will ride their high-speed train system than Americans will fly our airline system. You wanted to compare Chinese train ridership with American??? Compare high-speed train ridership???

As Keith Bradsher describes the benefits in an article in today’s New York Times:

Productivity gains to the economy appear to be of the same order as the combined economic gains from the usual arguments given for high-speed trains, including time savings for travelers, reduced noise, less air pollution and fuel savings, the World Bank consultants calculated.

Companies are opening research and development centers in more glamorous cities like Beijing and Shenzhen with abundant supplies of young, highly educated workers, and having them take frequent day trips to factories in cities with lower wages and land costs, like Tianjin and Changsha. Businesses are also customizing their products more through frequent meetings with clients in other cities, part of a broader move up the ladder toward higher value-added products.

My old friend, Bill Lind, now heads the Center for Public Transportation at the American Conservative. Hey Bill, time to get to work.

As a side note, the economic and social gains China gets from better integrating its population seem to confirm the value of physical contact, even in this age of virtual everything.

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Do we still need the Army?

This is a question I raised in A Swift, Elusive Sword back in 2001. I still haven’t heard a coherent answer.

The issue was — and is — that because the Army is designed for war on land, and because the advent of nuclear weapons has rendered war impossible except against weak, non-nuclear powers such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and because the USMC augmented by USAF and USN airpower and the forces of our allies are vastly more than adequate to engage in conventional warfare against Third-World opponents (and if our allies aren’t with us, should we be doing it at all?), why do we still need an Army? This is not an argument that the Army is incompetent, just irrelevant.

My suspicion is reinforced by a series of wargames recently conducted by the Army itself. As reported by Sidney Freedberg on the web site, Breaking Defense, “Adversaries around the world are catching up. By the 2030s some countries – or well-connected non-state forces such as Hezbollah – may challenge or even exceed American capabilities in a few key areas.”  So despite billions spent on R&D, the advanced technology labs of Hezbollah are outpacing us. This being the case, there is no sign that spending even more billions cannot be similarly negated.

Furthermore, even if we invest the money needed to stay ahead, techwise, it won’t be enough. As Freedberg opens his piece:

A massive wargame held here this week to explore the “Deep Future” of warfare in the 2030s demonstrated a stark truth — one that Clausewitz enumerated in his famous work, On War — there’s no substitute for sheer numbers, no matter how much high technology the Army buys.

We now have a situation with the Army that the more money we pump into it, the less advantage we get. Can you extrapolate this trend? It’s not clear that spending more provides no additional capability, relative to likely opponents, although inclusion of Hezbollah does make one wonder about this.

This is a case of zugzwang, a term originally from chess, where it means that it’s your move, but any possible move would make your situation worse (leads to a mate by the opponent, for example).  You’re not allowed to pass on your move in chess, for those who haven’t played in a while. The term has been broadened to include situations where you’re behind the power curve, that is, doing more just makes things worse. When one factors in the costs of more R&D spending and more people, especially in our current economic condition, spending more and getting less at the margin does hurt our ability to survive and prosper as a country.

The only solution is to quit playing this game. Invoke the Wookie Gambit and hurl the board to the floor. While you’re at it, re-examine the assumptions that got you into this position, in this case that a) a replay of WWII is still a reasonable planning scenario, and b) what decides the outcomes of conflicts are technology and numbers, in that order, which is about as far from the principles of maneuver as one can get (see, for example, Patterns of Conflict, chart 115, or Stephen Biddle’s excellent Military Power, pp. 20-25 — “technological superiority is no better than a coin flip for predicting victory and defeat.”)

It’s difficult to examine assumptions from within the system, even if the resulting problems are understood by the members of the organization. You can see this from Freedberg’s article. So the only alternative that makes sense is to wind down the Army as an organization that did its job but which we no longer need nor can afford.

This is not something that can happen immediately, and for the first decade or so, it won’t be cheap. Weapons programs typically have hefty cancellation clauses, for example, and the country must play fair with those who committed their careers to the Army. There will also be indirect costs: Weapons programs and force build-ups are the only fiscal stimulus programs that can make it through Congress, so ending them will put a further burden on the economy. But within a couple of presidential cycles, the benefits will become obvious as the country redeploys its treasure, manpower and brainpower.