Boyd

"Boyd emphasized the primary role of cheng/ch’i: •   Cheng / ch’i maneuvers were employed by early commanders to expose adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses (á la cheng) for exploitation and decisive stroke (via ch’i) 163 •   Use cheng/ch’i scheme to achieve an expenditure of energy or an irruption of violence—focused into, or through, features that permit an organic whole to exist164 •   Establish focus of main effort (ch’i / Schwerpunkt) together with other related efforts (cheng / Nebenpunkte) and pursue directions that permit many happenings, offer many branches, and threaten alternative objectives (note: which ties multiple thrusts into the cheng /ch’i scheme)165 •   The ultimate goal is to “generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic chaos… to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about collapse.”166 •   . . . to gain a feel for the different ways that the cheng/ch’i game has been (and can be) played167   Unlike Sun Tzu, Boyd examined all forms of human conflict, but his conclusion was the same: cheng / ch’i maneuvers are fundamental to any strategy for defeating your opponent."

"Robert Coram, author of Boyd, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War,"

"Southwest, as we have seen, does put the emphasis on tending the culture, and its average pre-tax return on revenue since 1979 has been 12.7%, compared to the Big 3’s 0.6%153 If adopting this culture and strategy is indeed the Schwerpunkt for your organization, then like a military commander, that is where you should place yourself. Ordering your subordinates to learn Boyd’s strategy, without making it the focus of your own efforts, will rightly be viewed as the latest flavor-of-the-month sham."

"Chuck Spinney, a close colleague of Boyd’s, tells of sitting in on an interview Boyd conducted in the early 1980s with two German generals, Hermann Balck, whom the Germans regarded as one of their top field commanders, and his chief of staff, F. W. von Mellenthin. Boyd set out a simple scenario and then asked Balck to show him how he and von Mellenthin worked together in the field. Balck asked von Mellenthin for his assessment and then sat with an intent but perfectly blank expression while von Mellenthin play-acted a response. Balck immediately made his decision, whereupon he became expressive and highly animated. Suddenly he was back at the front and trying to convey quickly and completely what he wanted done. Spinney concluded that during the appreciation phase, Balck was closely observing von Mellenthin, but was also careful not to influence von Mellenthin by even the smallest gesture. During the leadership phase, he was trying to ensure that he did influence von Mellenthin as strongly and as quickly as possible, using a mixture of verbal and physical cues that von Mellenthin had learned to interpret, and leaving quite a bit unspoken."

"Boyd’s definition: Strategy is a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many…"

"Clausewitz illustrates friction thorough the simile that doing things in battle is like moving in water. This doesn’t sound too bad, but imagine that you are trying to escape from a pursuing sheriff’s posse. Hounds are braying; bullets are zinging overhead. Suddenly you run off a bank and plunge into a river. As you thrash around waist deep, you find that the faster you try to go, the harder everything is. Your life depends on moving faster, but you can’t, and the harder you try, the more frustrated you get. It won’t take much of this before panic begins to sink in, and you lose the ability to make effective decisions—very much like the effects Boyd and Sun Tzu aim for. They don’t come directly from the physical difficulty of moving through water so much as from not knowing how far away the dogs are and from the fact that nothing you’re trying seems to be making the situation any better and you’re running out of ideas fast. It’s not industrial strength…"

"When discussing the notion of grand strategy, Boyd concluded that: What is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents, but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries. Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve…"

"My plan in this book is to introduce Boyd’s philosophy of conflict, for which I’ll use the term “maneuver conflict,” by examining how it works in the two primary areas where it has been applied: in armed conflict as maneuver warfare and in manufacturing as the Toyota Production System, or as it is more widely known, “lean production.”"

"Bill Lind, a colleague of Boyd’s and the author of one of the classics of maneuver warfare, a book that belongs on every strategist’s bookshelf, Maneuver Warfare Handbook,49 wrote that: Both leadership and monitoring are valueless without trust. The “contracts” … of intent and mission express that trust … that his subordinates will understand and carry out his desires and trust by his subordinates that they will be supported when exercising their initiative."

"Another less egregious but more common way to destroy trust is to succumb to the temptation to control everything. Boyd called this an “obsession for control,” and assigns it much of the blame for the bloodbaths that occurred from the mid-1800s to the end of WW I. Most people realize that over-control is the opposite of trust. Yet, many managers still practice it in ways that even they may not realize."

"Boyd inferred that if you can do things before the other side reacts, you can greatly increase your chances of winning, and it doesn’t make much difference how big or how strong the other guy is. Asymmetric fast transients, in other words, appeared to do a much better job of explaining real world results than simple counts of weapons or assessments of technology."

"Boyd insisted that by employing trust, focus, mission, and intuitive competence we not only arrive at a future we find acceptable, but we can move the future to where we want it to be, that is, we can also affect when and how the mark moves."

"In a competitive situation, the less agile competitor will begin to act like a closed system and the fog of war, or the fog of business, for that matter, begins to grow within. And fog plus menace, as Boyd often noted, is a good formula for generating frustration and eventually, panic."

"Boyd’s followed the logic that since we cannot predict exactly what a future war might look like, we need to find general patterns, the “common elements” as he termed them, that will apply to any battle, conflict, or war."

"Musashi summarized it, in the translation by Hanshi Steve Kaufman, which was Boyd’s favorite: Practice is the only way that you will ever come to understand what the Way of the warrior is about … Words can only bring you to the foot of the path …”"

"Musashi, who gave up bathing and other activities generally associated with personal hygiene, still insisted that his disciples be open to all areas of knowledge—that they cultivate the arts in particular—and he produced calligraphy and watercolors that are admired today. “Orient” is the key to the process. Conditioned by one’s genetic heritage, surrounding culture, and previous learning, the mind combines fragments of ideas, information, conjectures, impressions, etc., to form the “many-sided, implicit cross-references,” which become a new orientation. How well your orientation matches the real world is largely a function of how well you observe, since in Boyd’s conception, “observe” is the only input from the outside. Like the canopy on the Korean-era MiGs, anything that restricts the…"

"Boyd insisted that “ch’i” and “Schwerpunkt” are essentially the same, that is, finding and exploiting the magical element should be what gives…"

"that in the OODA concept as Boyd envisioned it, competition is not a simple cycle. This is a critical idea that is often misunderstood: You are simultaneously observing any mismatches between your conception of the world and the way the world really is, trying to reorient to a confusing and threatening situation, and attempting to come up with ideas to deal with it. It is the quickness of the entire cycle, and in particular, the time it takes to, in Boyd’s language, “transition from one orientation state to…"

"Boyd was famous for browbeating his audiences with the mantra, “People, ideas, and hardware—in that order!”"

"Boyd got the idea for “O-O-D-A” loops (he used dashes indicate that the steps are not distinct, but flow into each other) from observing the effects of jerky, unexpected, and abrupt maneuvers in air-to-air combat. After deciding that it was his quick OODA loops that allowed him to fight this way, Boyd defined “agility” in these terms: A side in a conflict or competition is more agile than its opponent if it can execute its OODA loops more quickly. This generalizes the term agility from air-to-air combat and from warfare in general. It also turns out to be equivalent to the definition floated in chapter II, the ability to rapidly change one’s orientation, since it is orientation locking up under the stress of competition and conflict that causes OODA loops to slow and makes one predictable, rather than abrupt and unpredictable. Speed, that is physical velocity, may provide an important tactical option, but it is not The Way.77 In fact, speed increases momentum, which can make one more predictable."

"In the last chapter, we saw that to create an explicit model of combat, business, or the economy, we had to assume that these activities proceeded according to predictable, mathematical patterns—that they form systems.42 We also found that on many occasions, the smaller or less technologically advanced side won, confounding the predictions of the models. The reason for this reversal, in business and in war, appears to be that these smaller organizations were able to avoid or negate the larger’s advantages in size and strength. Somehow they had managed not to become systems in the eyes of their larger opponents. This might lead one to suspect that in any competitive endeavor, if you can be modeled (“sand-tabled,” as Boyd referred to it) you aren’t using strategy at all, and you can be defeated."

"Such “implicit decision making” is another way to look at the notion of “intuitive competence.”73 For groups, explicit decisions, which are how the decision stage of the OODA loop is usually interpreted, can serve to set and when needed to shift the main effort, that is, they can focus and give direction to large numbers of individuals. If, however, you look at Boyd’s final version of the OODA loop in the Appendix, you’ll see a couple of “Implicit Guidance and Control” arrows, reflecting that most decision making…"

"the fog of war. Boyd’s observations on the effects of agility boil down to the conclusion that by becoming more agile than your competitors, you can cause the fog of war to grow in their minds, thereby decreasing the quality of their decisions and eventually attacking their abilities to make effective decisions altogether."

"Deceit and Ambiguity in Every Form of Competition Like Sun Tzu, Boyd emphasized the primary role of cheng/ch’i: •   Cheng / ch’i maneuvers were employed by early commanders to expose adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses (á la cheng) for exploitation and decisive stroke (via ch’i) 163 •   Use cheng/ch’i scheme to achieve an expenditure of energy or an irruption of violence—focused into, or through, features that permit an organic whole to exist164 •   Establish focus of main effort (ch’i / Schwerpunkt) together with other related efforts (cheng / Nebenpunkte) and pursue directions that permit many happenings, offer many branches, and threaten alternative objectives (note: which ties multiple thrusts into the cheng /ch’i scheme)165 •   The ultimate goal is to “generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic chaos… to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis, and bring about collapse.”166 •   . . . to gain a feel for the different ways that the cheng/ch’i game has been (and can be) played167   Unlike Sun Tzu, Boyd examined all forms of human conflict, but his conclusion was the same: cheng / ch’i maneuvers are fundamental to any strategy for defeating your opponent."

"Boyd described “maneuvering in time” as jerking the enemy between menacing dilemmas until he comes unglued. As Marine Corps doctrine states (see the excerpt at the end of chapter III), the goal is to create confusion and panic and thereby collapse the enemy’s will to resist."

"Orientation, as Boyd insisted in all his briefings, is what guides and shapes the OODA loop. “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt,” he insists, shaping the way we interact with the environment.149 “Installing” the culture means “shaping the character or nature” of the company, which means the same thing as changing the orientation of not only the organization but of the people in it. The idea is that installation (or…"

"The same implicit, organic quickness and initiative also powers successful businesses. Note that I am not saying that the specific tactics of maneuver warfare—or any other form of warfare—apply to business. However I am claiming that Boyd’s underlying strategy—the use of time as a shaping and exploiting mechanism, and the emphasis on a…"

"Boyd decided that the F-86 won because it could generate something he called “asymmetric fast transients.” A “transient” is a shift from one state68 to another, “fast” refers to the time it takes to make the shift (not, as is often thought, the velocity of the aircraft itself), and “asymmetric” means that one side is better at it than the other."

"This might lead one to suspect that in any competitive endeavor, if you can be modeled (“sand-tabled,” as Boyd referred to it) you aren’t using strategy at all, and you can be defeated."