Chet Richards

"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’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…"

"Musashi’s particular field, fighting to the death with Japanese swords, is not much in demand today, but his method for honing a feel for competition until it seems magical applies to anything. His method begins by working with the sword, doing basic exercises until the weapon becomes virtually an extension of the student’s arm. This is like technical excellence—learning to do the expected well. Musashi is clear at many places in his book that although such expected excellence is essential, it is not the key to victory. You cannot become so technically proficient that you are assured of winning every fight: If you achieved a 97% chance of winning a fight, which would be spectacular against people who train just as hard as you do, your odds of surviving 25 fights is less than 50%. Musashi won 60 duels, so clearly he was not thinking of taking that kind of risk. He wanted no risk at all.171 For that, one needs to develop an ability to do the unexpected and then exploit its result quickly. The key to this strategy is a different type of training, where students practice generating ch’i and using it with cheng as instinctively as they previously practiced manipulating the sword. The training…"

"Sun Tzu put it in the last chapter of The Art of War: No reward is more generous than that for a spy … There is nothing…"

"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.”"

"Bruce Henderson, in the definitions above, related plans to strategies but defined strategy as the search and the plan as the result."

"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."

"Sun Tzu (c. 5th century B.C.), who is still widely studied today, dismissed the fascination with size thusly: “Numbers alone confer no advantage.”"

"What does it take to win? This question occupies the rest of the book, which will base its answer on a concept known as agility, another word that has lost its original meaning through careless application. Boyd, however, used the term in a specific sense, to mean the ability to rapidly change one’s orientation—roughly, worldview—in response to what is happening in the external world."

"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."

"Armed with this view of strategy, a few military leaders began to explore alternatives that eventually led to the Blitzkrieg—ways of operating that encouraged initiative on the part of subordinates to flow around lethal threats and search for advantage elsewhere. We have seen the results."

"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."

"The main emphasis of the Toyota Production System, for example, is on constantly reducing the order-to-delivery span. This concept is not, however, a suitable focus for Toyota as a company, since it doesn’t say anything about what car to deliver in a shorter time span. In other words, if shorter order-to-deliver were all, Toyota would still be building better and better 1976 Camrys, faster and faster."

"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."

"Now it is true that as a precondition to intuitive knowledge, the aspiring warrior or executive must practice basic skills so well that they become second nature. In Japanese samurai fencing, kendo, the student practices day and night until “sword becomes no-sword; intention becomes no-intention.”"

"Sun Tzu had concluded that, “He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious.”"

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

"Sun Tzu was careful to say that certain victory involves both cheng and ch’i. He goes on to explain that each contains ways to create the other, and that there is no limit to these combinations.157"

"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!”"

"Discuss it for a few minutes (or whatever it takes) to convince yourself that you and Susan both have the same mental concept of what needs to be done. Then give her a little time to think about the matter. A top caliber subordinate can get quite blunt: She may question whether your idea makes sense and whether you have offered her enough time or resources to do the job. This questioning is key to transferring ownership of the job, and your answering these serves the same purpose that answering objections does in any selling job, what salespersons call “closing on objections.”"

"Peters’ advice to put down the same management text everyone else is reading (including his!) and study human nature through novels and biography."

"Boyd called this, “building snowmobiles,” from an observation that a snowmobile is made up from pieces of other things (treads from a tractor, engine from an outboard motor, etc.) that someone in a spark of creativity visualized could be ripped apart and put back together to serve this new purpose."

"If a general who heeds my strategy is employed, he is certain to win. Sun Tzu1"

"As we saw, the Chinese of Sun Tzu’s day insisted that the war was won or lost before the action began, and much of the Art of War concerns preparing a culture that is certain to win. Pre-war activities and decisions also form part of the level of conflict known as grand…"

"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."

"Consider the original Apple ad for the Mac that ran during the 1984 Super Bowl—it helped create a cadre of loyalists that have kept the company alive for 20 more years, despite the fact that for years, Apples were slower and more expensive than comparable PCs from Dell, HP, or IBM.96 It is not uncommon to read postings on the Mac Internet forums urging people to buy some accessory or software “to help support Apple.” Similarly, many people drive the 300 mile roundtrip from my home in Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, to fly Southwest Airlines, and…"

"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."

"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."

"Tom Peters’ Thriving on Chaos."

"It would be nice if a company’s highest-level focus also served the purposes of grand strategy (attract the uncommitted to our side, while pumping up our morale and deflating that of the competition)"

"Operational agility stems from the capability to deploy and employ forces across the range of Army operations. Army forces and commanders shift among offensive, defensive, stability, and support operations as circumstances and missions require. This capability is not merely physical; it requires conceptual sophistication and intellectual flexibility. Tactical agility is the ability of a friendly force to react faster than the enemy. It is essential to seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative. Agility is mental and physical. Agile commanders quickly comprehend unfamiliar situations, creatively apply doctrine, and make timely decisions.81 The Army considers initiative practically an object of worship, so you can see what a strong statement this is. On the other hand, they don’t bring out the notion that tactical agility is more than the ability to “react faster than the enemy”—nor do they consider the effects a more agile force has on the mind of its opponent. Note that the Army omits the time element from operational agility, making it more like “flexibility” than Boyd’s concept of agility."

"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."

"From war: The art and science of employing the armed forces of a nation or alliance to secure policy objectives by the application of threat of military force. US Army Field Manual 100-5, Operations, 1986."