On Winning

OODA loops in Lean Startups

2009-10-06T15:25:00.003+03:00

Eric Ries from Startup Lessons Learned-blog held interesting presentation at Government 2.0 Summit. Where he talks about rapid experimentation as a reason to why some startups succeed and some die. The ability to perform more experiments per dollar. And direct mention of OODA included as well :)

His blog goes to my reading list.

(Found via Lean Blog)

Is there a way to survive crisis without firing people?

2008-11-25T09:27:00.003+02:00

Henrik Mårtensson at Kallokain thinks so. He has a blog post up titled 19 Ways to Survive the Crisis Without Firing People where he does lot of acronym dropping, but at the same time managed to give at least to me some new things to look into.

Especially Donella Meadows list of places to intervene in System was interesting. Managed to skim trough it, but I think I'll have come back to this list after I have given some thought to it.

OODA as basis for business strategy

2008-11-05T20:23:00.003+02:00

Long time and no posts. Shame on us.

I have been trying to write, but it seems that every succesful company could be used as an example of one or another management principle if you just spin it enough. I think that has raised my bar too high when looking for that true example of company utilizing maneuver conflict. Or I have just been too lazy.

Luckily there is atleast one company that has openly based their strategy on Boyd's principles. There is writeup about them on Chet Richards' blog by Jim Bowes, writer of Secrets of a Midnight Entrepreneur. OODA Loops in Contract Manufacturing tells interesting story on how they utilized low cost software solutions to support their strategy and not other way around.

Ofcourse, being the manufacturing guy that I am would've kept manufacturing inhouse, but outsourcing volume manufacturing to experienced partner rather and try to build up manufacturing capacity in addition to product development and spread resources too thin can be wise solution for startup.

Technorati revealed this blog to me. They have nice presentation on Lean principles and OODA in software startups. Ideas seemed sensible to me.

Webcast on principles of Principles of Business Strategy

2008-06-18T19:44:00.002+03:00

I have stumbled upon blog Kallokain by Henrik Mårtensson but really haven't had time to read more. His most recent post includes webcast on business strategy principles and what tools Apple has used in battle against phone giants.

In addition to nice overview of principles in the webcast I recommend reading comments, they provide some useful insight as well.

On other note, I have Fast Strategy on its way from Amazon and I'll report back when I'm finished reading it.

Fast Strategy

2008-06-04T14:03:00.002+03:00

Has anyone read Fast Strategy by Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen? Review of it in Amazon is promising:

In their Introduction, Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen assert that strategically agile companies "not only learn to make fast turns and transform themselves without losing momentum but their CEOs and top teams also have higher ambitions: to make their companies permanently, regularly, able to take advantage of change and disruption. They want their organizations to learn to thrive on continuous waves of change, not to periodically and painfully adjust to change, in an alternation of periods of stability and moments of upheaval. Put differently, they want [everyone in] their companies [at all levels and in all areas] to learn a new competitive game: the fast strategy game - a game where nothing can be taken for granted, where no competitive advantage edge may last, where innovation and the constant development of new capabilities are the only sources of advantage."

Doz and Kosonen respond to critically important questions such as these:

What separates winners from losers in this "game"?
How differently are the winners led?
How are they organized?
How do they make decisions?

Sounds pretty much like maneuver conflict, or what do you think?

CMM or Constraints Management

2008-03-17T15:10:00.004+02:00

Meant to write something about SKI on Troughput blog allready some time ago, but forgot about it. Now it popped up again from my Google Alerts. Just a generic comment on Bob Nardelli at helm of Chrysler, but in the post there are two books that I hadn't heard of before. Any of you read either of these and could give some comments?

The Logical Thinking Process: A Systems Approach to Complex Problem Solving by H. William Dettmer

A major rewrite of Dettmer's classic Goldratt's Theory of Constraints, this new edition presents a whole new approach to building and applying logic trees. The logical thinking process referred to in the title is nothing less than a broadly applicable, systems-level approach to policy analysis. Dettmer has streamlined the process of constructing the logic trees while simultaneously ensuring that the results are more logically sound and closer representations of reality than ever before. He explains an easier, more logically sound way to integrate Current Reality Trees with Evaporating Clouds. His new version of the thinking process "retires" the Transition Tree in favor of the marriage of a more detailed Prerequisite Tree and critical chain project management. This book contains new examples of logic trees from a variety of real-world applications. Most of the diagrams and illustrations are new and improved. Explanations and procedures for constructing the logic trees are considerably simplified. Completely new to this edition is a unique graphical software application - Transformation Logic Trees, designed primarily to create thinking process logic trees and only secondarily for other flowcharting uses. Provided on the accompanying CD-ROM is a full-function, unrestricted copy of version 1.0 for new and experienced users of the thinking process alike to use in building their logic trees. Appendix J in the book provides more information on how to install and use the software.

And
Strategic Navigation: A Systems Approach to Business Strategy by H. William Dettmer

There are many parallels between the business world and the military world: both must always be wary of the competition; both must be able to adapt to rapidly changing conditions; and if either falters the results could be devastating. Yet while military leaders have employed essentially the same strategies for thousands of years, business leaders often feel the need to try the latest fad in an effort to capture lightning in a bottle and lead the company to success. In Strategic Navigation: A Systems Approach to Business Strategy, best-selling author H. William Dettmer explains how sound, proven strategies used by great military leaders from Sun Tzu to Schwarzkopf can also be easily and effectively used in the business world.

Dettmer begins the book by introducing the conceptual framework of military strategy and maneuver warfare, which dates back over 2,300 years to the time of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. He first explains how the time-tested principles of war planning and military execution can be readily applied to non-military uses, such as commercial business, not-for-profit organizations, and government agencies, leading to considerable benefits in coherence and focus. Dettmer then introduces a logical, systematic tool set to help you translate the military strategy ‘template’ into action, which can then be applied to nearly any industry or business type. The system described by Dettmer is quick and easy to use, flexible enough to accommodate changes in the external environment, and supports the creativity of both strategists and executors.

Apple designing snowmobiles?

2008-03-14T20:28:00.004+02:00

Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple held a presentation at South by Southwest. Summarized here by Tech Beat. Isn't following quote something in the line with Boyd's Snowmobiles concept or am I completely wrong?

This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to "go crazy". Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work.

This sort of arrangement encourages designers to design snowmobiles and not restrict flow of thoughts but at the same time deliver actionable results.

Implementing Boyd?

2008-03-14T12:36:00.005+02:00

Can Boyd's principles be really implemented in business? Chet Richards talks about that in excellent article.

This part:

That is, if the employees didn’t commit to making the system work, it wouldn’t move at all. The Toyota Way is why they do it for Toyota and don’t for most other manufacturing companies. The other important point about the Toyota Way is that the system is always getting better at whatever it does. As one Toyota exec put it, whatever we do this year is baseline for next year. A lot of companies talk continuous improvement (kaizen), but few achieve it. Their organizational climate is why.

got me thinking about blog few blog posts in couple lean blogs.

Ron Pereira of Lean Six Sigma Academy is on study tour in Japan currently and he wrote about spark plug factory where people have perfected their flow to the point that they don't even need kanban cards or similar accessories to help them control the process. How could this be achieved without highly motivated and committed workforce?

On similar note in Evolving Excellence Dan Markovitz wrote a piece about respect for people. He attendet LEI summit and there one of the speakers claimed that:

Everyone at these conference focuses on tools like value stream mapping and 5S. But the tools are only 25% of the story. Lean is about peple, not about waste. Focus on the employees -- all other benefits are just by-products.

And that kinda rings a bell with motivated, committed workforce creating great results.

Boyd videos

2008-03-07T09:49:00.002+02:00

If some of you have missed these, there are few videos from Boyd Q&A session in youtube. Part 1 is mostly about fighters, in parts 2 & 3 Boyd talks about Toyota Production System and last and shortest is about correct questions.

These videoes can also be found from here and there is also audio about Conceptual Spiral. Thanks for Chet Richards for reminding me about these.

Are there any other videoes about Boyd available?

How to measure decision making?

2008-03-06T15:43:00.003+02:00

Was reading an article about Chrysler decreasing their decision time drastically and that led me to thinking about metrics that could be used to measure decision making. Couldn't think of any besides the obious of length of decision process. Brief googling didn't make me much smarter either. Please provide links if I have been blind and overlooked something.

I would think it would be good to start with question if measuring decision making is even necessary? I think so, if for nothing else then atleast to provide company leadership a tool to improve their work. I don't mean looking for some ratio for correct decision divided by total decicions. Correct decisions are somewhat subjective and more often than not made with not enough information. So decision might've been correct given the information available at the time but incorrecet when looking back with better information.

I'm thinking more in line with measuring speed of decision making or reaction speed or something. A way to tell if company is adaptable and agile.

Supply Chain Councils SCOR model has pretty long list of different metrics so decided to check them out. There were few almost-but-not-quite metrics, mainly ones that measure different timeframes.

Average Release Cycle of Changes
Cycle time for implementing change notices divided by total number of changes.

High amount of changes lowers this metric this but high amount of changes is not good in itself.

Manufacturing Cycle Time
Total time from order to delivery

This includes several cycle times with different start and end points. These measures really don't tell anything about other operations inside company besides manufacturing. Important metric but not what I am looking for in here.

Cumulative Source/Make Cycle Time
The cumulative external and internal lead-time to build shippable product (if you start with no inventory on hand, no parts on-order, and no prior forecasts existing with suppliers), in calendar days.

This could actually describe companys ability to respond to sudden changes in product mix.

ECO (Engineering Change Order) Cycle Time
The total time required from request for change from customer, engineering, production or quality control to revise a blueprint or design released by engineering, and implement the change within the Make operation.

Quite good measure of ability to change.

Management Decision Timeframe Ratio
The ratio of the time needed to make a decision about a particular process divided by the cycle time of that process. (This generates a number that is better if it is lower). For example, if an operation can be performed in 2 hours, and it takes 4 hours to make a decision about that operation, the ratio would be 200%. The timeframe would be affected by the time it takes to collect data, process information, develop knowledge and evaluate the situation, and implement the decision.

I think that this is one of the best SCOR has to offer. Could be also expanded by including cost of one cycle time so we could calculate price of decision.

Upside Production Flexibility
The number of days required to achiece an unplanned sustainable 20% increase in production.

This could be useful as well. But why 20%?

My googling did reveal this paper by Katsuya Takii in which he provides following measure for adaptability:

The difference between actual and predicted input (the residual) can be considered as the firm's reaction to changes. If the correlation between the changes and the residual is large, we can infer that the firm's ability to appropriately adapt to change is high.

Paper concentrates on effect of prediction ability on projected profits. Even though he presents subject matter in convincing way I am inclined to disagree with his starting point. I can believe that better forecasting would lead to better profits but my ideal company can respond so fast to changing conditions that it makes predicting obsolete.

Thoughts, comments?

Toyota product development

2008-03-04T16:55:00.002+02:00

Found interesting article from part two of Andy Wagners two part Boyd introduction at Lean Blog. Matthew May at Elegant Solutions provides two examples of Toyota creating creative tension to encourage innovation and to cut product development lead times.

He also asks important question about the burden faster cycles unleash to organization. Are they paying for faster product launches with decrease in quality and how they can overcome these problems?

Is decreased quality inevitable result of ever faster cycles? Are faster cycles worth the quality hit?

Wagners blog posts are both worth a read as he makes some comparisons with OODA and Demings PDCA and PDCA's applicability to decision making. He also makes comparison between development of F-16 and Toyotas product development. Part I, Part II.

Belisarius merging with Certain to Win blog

2008-03-02T20:20:00.003+02:00

Chet Richards is merging content from his blog Certain to Win with Belisarius.com. New site can be found from address www.chetrichards.com.

Strategic Intuition

2008-02-15T18:12:00.003+02:00

Here's something interesting: Strategic Intuition by Columbia professor William Duggan.

How Does Strategic Intuition Work?

Flashes of insight are so important that scholars have written about them for centuries. The best description comes from an early classic of military strategy, On War by Carl von Clausewitz. The word “strategy” entered the English language in 1810, when Napoleon’s success as a battlefield general made him emperor of Europe. His enemies started studying how he did it so they could learn it too and defeat him. Clausewitz’s account of Napoleon’s strategy matches amazingly well what modern neuroscience tells us about flashes of insight.

Clausewitz gives us four steps. First, you take in “examples from history” throughout your life and put them on the shelves of your brain. Study can help, by putting more there. Second comes “presence of mind,” where you free your brain of all preconceptions about what problem you’re solving and what solution might work. Third comes the flash of insight itself. Clausewitz called it coup d’oeil, which is French for “glance.” In a flash, a new combination of examples from history fly off the shelves of your brain and connect. Fourth comes “resolution,” or determination, where you not only say to yourself, “I see!”, but also, “I’ll do it!”

Interesting - I didn't know of this when I studied expert intuition last summer. However, our conclusions (I was working with a cognitive scientist) were broadly similar.

Teaches you to write about your ideas a lot faster...

Interesting view on OODA

2008-01-09T16:40:00.000+02:00

For starters I must apologise for lack of posting. It is shameful that blog which writes about momentum and tempo comes to grinding halt. Anyway, I hope that we both have more time to post in future. And that we get that book club started that we talked about in december.

Now to the meat of this post:

Incentive Intelligence has interesting view on OODA. Given that blog focuses on incentives in Business it doesn't come as a surprise that they relate working incentive program as a way to accelerate organizations OODA loop.

Any company that has a platform for rewarding and recognizing those that contribute to its success - whether that's employees, customers or channel partners - will have the ability to react and influence behavior more quickly - shortening the O.O.D.A. loop.

I see incentives as another the enablers to make fast transients possible. As with lean, using the technique itself doesn't guarantee success but it makes it possible and is one component more adding speed to flywheel.

Boydian 'book club' of sorts

2007-12-10T16:17:00.000+02:00

I have been thinking about running some sort of reading club about Boyds briefings for some time now. And it was one of the first ideas for this blog.

My idea was to divide briefing at hand to bite size chunks and give people few days to read it and then publish our thoughts about it and then continue discussion about it in comments. Mainly about how would principles in each chunk apply to business.

Anyone interested? Suggestions on which briefing to start with? I was thinking about Organic Design for Command and Control.

Podcast about Sun Tzu and IT

2007-12-10T15:54:00.000+02:00

Found interesting podcast today. Allthough it has been published couple of weeks ago, so some of you might have listened it already. Anyway, it is titled Intel's Former Innovation Manager Applies Sun Tzu's Art of War to Business and can be found here.

Executive summary is pretty generic and doesn't really describe contents of podcast so listening to it is needed and I do recommend listening it. Platt has in my opinion really intelligent approach to IT, he doesn't see it as be all end all solution but rather as an enabler. Also included are examples of mission type orders and cheng/chi transients.

Cheng/Chi is in my opinion one of the most difficult concepts to translate into business. In this podcast there is an example of turning certain department from cost center (cheng) which it has traditionally been to revenue center (chi). I think that is one way of applying maneuver conflict to business.

There is also companion slideshow, but page returned error when trying to download it, hopefully it will be fixed soon.

Edit: Actually, you don't have to listen to it, full transcript can be found from here.

Innovative Management - Gary Hamel, Lowell Bryan and McKinsey & Co.

2007-11-30T17:42:00.001+02:00

A very interesting article in McKinsey Quarterly:

Innovative Management: A Conversation with Lowell Bryan and Gary Hamel

I'm going to return to this later in detail, but in short, it seems that management gurus are thinking along the same lines as we are:

Gary Hamel: The outlines of the 21st-century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. In terms of the future of management, we’re at the beginning of what will be a fairly long journey. You can see some of the pieces starting to come together, but we’re not there yet.

So - decision-making at low levels; wide frontage for creativity; emergent, "recon pull" strategy...

Literature - articles

2007-11-29T16:03:00.000+02:00

We will collect information about articles related to Boyd that we have read or are about to read into this post. Articles will be listed chronologically in the order they were read.

Articles we have read

Fast-Cycle Capability for Competitive Power
by Joseph L. Bower and Thomas M. Hout

Reading queue

Maneuver Warfare: Can Modern Military Strategy Lead You to Victory?
by Eric K. Clemons and Jason A. Santamaria

How Managers’ Everyday Decisions Create—or Destroy—Your Company’s Strategy
by Joseph L. Bower and Clark G. Gilbert

Literature - books

2007-11-29T15:46:00.000+02:00

We will collect information about books related to Boyd that we have read or are about to read into this post. Books will be listed chronologically in the order they were read.

Books we have read

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
by Robert Coram

Certain to Win
by Chet Richards

The Mind of War: John Boyd and American Security
by Grant Tedrick Hammond

Maneuver Warfare Handbook
by William S. Lind
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

vSentes Campaing Manual: How to create and Execute Effective Marketing Campaigns
by Mike Smock

Reading queue

Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd
by Frans Osinga

The Japanese Art of War: Understanding the Culture of Strategy
by Thomas Cleary

What’s the use of all this?

2007-11-28T17:23:00.000+02:00

After publishing that last post, I didn’t feel like continuing my conference presentation or my Master’s thesis (funny how you always find ways to procrastinate) and instead decided to write about the futility of it all.

Now this doesn’t have much to do about the fact that here in Helsinki, we now have daylight for about 8 hours, tops, per day, but more about the fact that there are reams and reams of paper written about how one should manage a firm or build a strategy to get filthy rich.

And what good are they doing?

Even though I lambasted the RBV and core competencies on the previous posts, I cannot deny that they, too, have their uses. However, what we’re sometimes seriously lacking is a simple, common-sense view of a dynamic competitive situation, something that’s so simple that you could actually learn most of it without doing a Ph. D.

Since most managers do not have Ph. D.s, and evidently some of them are doing very well, business must not be rocket science. (My own experience pretty much confirms this - for those of you who haven’t tried consulting in any form, let me tell you that even at the very highest levels the decisions are not always made with unlimited rationality and superior intelligence.)

I’m not deluding myself thinking that managers would particularly need a new management hypothesis, even if that’s as good as this Boydian one, but there are still uses for a simple theory. Panu, my co-writer, could tell you all about why - should you want to improve your performance - you must first have a hypothesis so you can compare what really happens to what you expected to happen, and then make adjustments to your intuition so that next time you understand the process even better.

Boyd’s theory of maneuver conflict is simple, fits competitive situation, and explains quite a lot without going into details. It certainly doesn’t explain everything, but it explains enough so that it is useful.

That’s why I like it.

And that’s why I’m convinced that writing this blog isn’t waste of time.

Resource-Based View and Core Competencies: Results, not Objectives!

2007-11-28T17:14:00.000+02:00

Resource-Based View of the firm used to be (well, still is - I guess the jury is out on this one) one of the most influential theories about understanding strategic management. Here’s one take on why I’m looking for something else.

Resource-Based View claims that sustained competitive advantage is derived from the “resources and capabilities a firm controls that are valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and not substitutable” (Barney et al. 2001). Resources can be things such as assets, organizational characteristics, processes, aptitudes, information and knowledge controlled by the company and its employees (Barney 1991).

Then, competitive advantage is defined as something that allows the company to earn above-average returns, compared to other firms in the same industry.

In other words, you win if you have and can continue to have something that other firm’s don’t have, and can combine those somethings into something else (that’s called the product) that is better than what your competition can do.

This leads us into the idea of Core Competency (Pralahad & Hamel 1990), which has been used often to justify all kinds of business activities from outsourcing to training. In short, it’s about the idea that there are activities what you can do better than the competition, and others where someone else is a better choice - and that you should concentrate on the things you can do really well. If that core competency is sustainable, then it is sustainable competitive advantage. In technical terms, that would indicate the presence of piles of money and stock options.

Coyne, Hall and Clifford (1997) open the definition a little by proposing that for a competency to be a core competency, “the skills or knowledge must be complementary, and taken together they should make it possible to provide a superior product.” Leonard-Barton (1992) says that core competency should differentiate a company strategically.

This is sound advice and a neat, not to mention hugely influential theory. The problem is that it doesn’t really give any directions of what to do as practicing managers or consultants.

Like many others have noted (for example, see Priem & Butler 2001), the entire resource-based view smacks of tautology and circular logic. Almost everything can be a “resource”, so you can pick any successful company and point out that those and those are the core competencies.

Even the inter-evaluator agreement inspires confidence only rarely. For example, some say that Volvo’s core competence is safety - and others tell it’s really in the sourcing process of high quality components. Probably someone else could say that it’s the managerial skill to pick good people to lead the sourcing process…I sometimes wonder how many Master’s thesis are written about the subject and how many of those agree with each other!

Other criticisms from Priem & Butler are that one can get to the same result via different resource configurations, and that - interestingly enough, since we and others are sometimes equating marketplace with battlespace - the role of product markets is underdeveloped in the argument.

What’s more damning is that resource based view and core competency thinking (incidentally, this applies to most business research) are really good at telling you what you’ve done well after the fact, but for guidance on future directions?

What I say isn’t that RBV and core competencies should be ditched, but that they (especially core competencies) should be seen as results instead of objectives.

And more specifically, they should be seen as results of long-term Boyd cycling the competition. That’s where those competences are forged: in the crucible of training, practice, and success, which leads to increased internal cohesion, elimination of needless or harmful practices, better morale, and intuitive understanding of the environment, among others.

In academic-speak, competencies are path dependent, meaning that in order to achieve similar capability, one must go through similar experiences. (Although note again that one can achieve similar outcomes through entirely different capabilities. There are water desalinization plants and aquifer drills, and both use quite different competencies to produce drinking water.)

In other words, there are no true shortcuts to happiness - and I’ve noticed that this is something that just isn’t understood by many people, no matter what their rank or bonuses. The story of General Motors trying to copy Toyota’s practices is just one case in point.

Core competencies are not something that one can just start doing and say, “we have these core competencies”. They are emergent, in other words. And here’s the rub: there’s no way of predicting company’s future core competencies from a set of resources it possesses, unless you take some absurdly abstract position and say that a company’s core competency is in creating core competencies... Which, when you think about it, brings you back to out-cycling the competition and therefore creating the capability.

So here’s a trick question: why do you need to out-cycle your competition to develop a sustainable competitive advantage?

Quick research note - what indicates that a company is exploiting uncertainty? Or trying to reduce it?

2007-11-22T14:30:00.000+02:00

In a Clausewitzian conflict, one's aim is to minimize your uncertainties, that is, to decrease friction.

In a Boydian conflict, one aims not to eliminate own uncertainties, but increase and exploit those of others.

Are there any external indicators which could be used to assess whether some activity is aimed towards reducing own uncertainties, or exploiting the existing ones (or creating new ones)? Could we classify some actions as inherently reducing and some as inherently exploitative? For example, could we say that radical innovation is typically exploitative, whereas incremental innovation tends to be uncertainty reducing?

Could we analyze a company from an external viewpoint and derive whether its strategic moves are towards exploitation or reduction?

(Note - I'm involved in a new product development research at Helsinki University of Technology's FutureLab of Product Design, and this blog also doubles as an extension to my research diary. Therefore, I do speculate much and test out ideas which might, with further thought, not make any sense at all. So please don't order rotten eggs and vegetables yet, but do feel free to comment. ;))

Business, sports and war: can we use analogues?

2007-11-21T13:03:00.000+02:00

A comment dismissing military analogues from business thinking at George Stalk Jr's article (see previous blog entry) made me write this post.

It is our opinion that direct comparisons from military or sports are mostly meaningless in business contexts, except where they are used as metaphors to aid understanding. Even then, there is an evident risk that the listener interprets the metaphor too literally or doesn't understand it at all (for example, I fail to understand a lot of metaphors involving baseball). This is the major danger in reading classic books of military strategy - say, Sun Tzu's Art of War, or von Clausewitz's On War.

If the reader thinks only about tactics and manouvers, she has failed to think about underlying issues that are common in all competitive situations.

Competitive situations - that is the key. Although athletic, military and business conflicts are played out in completely different landscapes, with very different motives, and totally different resources, they all involve competition against and often include cooperation with other humans. The major difference is that business has more win-win outcomes, whereas sports and war tend to be zero-sum games, but even this delineation is not exact. There are business situations which are zero-sum games (competition in stable markets) and sports events which have win-win outcomes (some "ladder" type leagues, where "giving" points to opposing player might help at the long run, for example by blocking more fearsome team from play-offs).

If one concentrates on what are needed for success in all of these activities, I suspect that faster decision making - OODA loop, in fact - surfaces at some point. Some other principles that I suspect, but cannot yet prove (that's why we're having this blog) include

-using strength against weakness, instead of strength, and going where the competition isn't
-doing what the opponent is not expecting, and being able to rapidly change posture from obvious to unobvious (ch'i/cheng or Fast Asymmetric Transient)
-the importance of situational awareness

...and so forth. John R. Boyd and his disciples nailed these principles of winning in competitive situations; that they were derived from the study of military history isn't relevant to the discussion. What we in this blog are interested in is how to apply these findings to business; we know what needs to happen, now we need to find out how to make that happen.

However, a word of warning for all Boyd and competitive strategy enthusiasts: if you refer to military strategy or terminology the odds are that your message is misunderstood. Much of this is simply because words "military" and "strategy" connotates something destructive, violent and undesirable; business is not war, and your listeners do not want it to be. As a result, they tend to focus on details and not on the message.

One example from a small workshop I delivered to product development students and specialists at Helsinki University of Technology: I was lecturing on the possibility of using "decision-making exercises" (see Gary Klein's books Sources of Power and Power of Intuition) as a way to give product designers more decision-making practice. In my lecture material/further reading list, I had included U.S. Marine Corps "MCDP-1 Warfighting" as a reference, both because I had referred to the military as one early user of decision making exercises, and as a freely available example of mission-type orders and the importance of quick decision making.

Now bear in mind that this was in Finland, where 80-90% of males go through military service and probably a majority of those present in the class were reserve officers or NCOs, therefore being at least somewhat familiar with military, and that there were other "further readings", too -

yet one student questioned that is military strategy really relevant to what the workshop participants are doing (he was right, it isn't, really - the reference was mostly historical) and commented that he, at least, would have strong feelings against using lessons from any military in any business.

I hope I did manage to explain to him some concepts of competitive strategy and the importance of fast decision-making later on, but I think the lesson is clear: military arouses passions both for and against. If you want to get your message through, avoid them.

More about 'being inside'

2007-11-21T10:28:00.000+02:00

ReportonBusiness.com has nice article titled Got a competitor on your radar? where Senior partner from Boston Consulting Group of Canada describes how Canadian manufacturer of men's suits, Peerless, uses faster OODA loops as competitive advantage.

It would be interesting to hear comments from company representatives because in my opinion this article pretty much describes lean company, but company website doesn't mention neither, lean or OODA. What the company itself calls what it is doing? Is lean driving force behind their ability to cycle OODA loops faster?

Real advantage requires something uniquely active and not easily achieved. The speed of the OODA loop is rooted in systems thinking. Typically, less than 10 per cent of the total time devoted to any work in an organization is truly value-added. The rest is wasted.

This is measure that is often mentioned in lean articles as well, it is said that typical company has about 3-5% of value added work compared to Toyota who have around 14% of value added work.

This paragraph is sums 'being inside' to extent:

In business today, the difference in OODA loops among competitors is separating winners from losers. Organizations that consistently operate within the OODA loop of their competitors win. These organizations are faster than their competitors in developing and introducing new products or services, delivering their products and services, and resolving customer dissatisfactions. Organizations that pre-empt the moves of adversaries throw the loser into confusion and into a reactive cycle.

But still, I have yet to come clear definition of what being inside opponents OODA loop in business means and how one can spot it. Is being fast enough? I don't think so.

Did some searching at BCG website and found previous article, published in 1987 in New York Times, in which this one is based at. Almost word to word.

How can you tell if someone is inside opponents OODA loop?

2007-11-20T16:27:00.000+02:00

This question is one the defining questions of this blog. And I started thinking about it more again after reading this blog post.

Fast reaction to your opponents actions is not getting inside his decision cycle. It is still reacting, when you should be the one whose actions your opponents have to react to.

Google got inside Facebook’s decision loop with Open Social. Apple got inside the cell phone industry’s decision loop with the iPhone.

Did Google really get inside Facebooks loop or merely reacted with their own similar product? And Apple, did they really surprise market with product that steals the profits from competitors pockets with practically no effort at all on their part? Where their competitors all 'what the fuck' when these products were announced?

I don't think so and I'd even say that both of these were mere reactions to their competitors.

One might even say that Nokia got inside Apple with it's own touchscreen phone. And what about HTC Touch which was available in Europe before iPhone.

It isn't getting inside opponents loop if you can't take advantage of your successes and consolidate. And repeat. And repeat. It doesn't matter if you get inside your opponents cycle once. You have to do it over and over again until you have beaten all opposition into oblivion.

I don't think that I have answered this question yet so I have to return to this in future. But point I want to make is that it is too easy to claim that company got inside competitors OODA loop after one success while wasn't necessarily able to sustain that success.