Chet Richards > Quotes

“The nature of war is to shape the enemy.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.59 This is a revealing statement by a man reported to have won some sixty bouts, virtually all of which ended in the death of his opponent (not surprising, when you consider that the samurai long sword, the tachi, was a four foot blade of steel, sharp as a modern razor, and strong enough to chop cleanly through a water pipe.) Once you accept Musashi’s dictum as a strategic principle, then you might ask how to carry it out, how to actually defeat the opponent’s spirit. Musashi was no mystic, and he grounded all his methods in real actions his students could take. We will encounter him and his techniques many times in this book. The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“If you’re not former military, join the Marine Corps.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Specialist or Strategist? Isn’t it true that the more you practice, the better you get? Yes, but, and this bears repeating, the intuitive mastery we are striving for is not brilliant skill at predictable tasks. As the late science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, pointed out, specialization is for insects. Humans need the mystifying ability to cope with the unpredictable and ambiguous challenges posed by thinking adversaries in the real world. Since kendo masters practice hard, don’t we need to put in long hours to develop super competence? The answer is absolutely yes. However, sixteen hours at the office doing the same things day after day simply make you a workaholic (and very likely a micromanager); they do not per se confer an intuitive skill useful in competitive situations. Tom Peters suggests that you can spot who is going to do great things by what they do on airplanes. They don’t pull out the laptop and grind spreadsheets. Instead, they “read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the umpteenth time,” or pick up insights on human behavior from the great novelists.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Look at what British military historian Basil Liddell Hart had to say: The issue turned on the time factor at stage after stage. French counter-movements were repeatedly thrown out of gear because their timing was too slow to catch up with the changing situation … The French, trained in the slow-motion methods of World War I, were mentally unfit to cope with the new tempo, and it caused a spreading paralysis among them.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“How Long Will It Take? You can’t blame people for wanting instant results. Time is money, and quickness, especially quick OODA loops, is good. But when it comes to adopting maneuver conflict / Boyd’s principles to your business, there is a lot to be learned and a lot to be done. Consider that: •   According to its principle creator, Taiichi Ohno, it took 28 years (1945-1973) to create and install the Toyota Production System, which is maneuver conflict applied to manufacturing. •   It takes roughly 15 years of experience—and recognition as a leader in one’s technical field—to qualify as a susha (development manager) for a new Toyota vehicle.150 •   Studies of people regarded as the top experts in a number of fields suggest that they practice about four hours a day, virtually every day, for 10 years before they achieve a recognized level of mastery.151 •   It takes a minimum of 8 years beyond a bachelor’s degree to train a surgeon (4 years medical school and 4 or more years of residency.) •   It takes four to six years on the average beyond a bachelor’s degree to complete a Ph.D. •   It takes three years or so to earn a black belt (first degree) in the martial arts and four to six years beyond that to earn third degree, assuming you are in good physical condition to begin with. •   It takes a bare minimum of five years military service to qualify for the Special Forces “Green Beret” (minimum rank of corporal / captain with airborne qualification, then a 1-2 year highly rigorous and selective training program.) •   It takes three years to achieve proficiency as a first level leader in an infantry unit—a squad leader.152 It is no less difficult to learn to fashion an elite, highly competitive company. Yet for some reason, otherwise intelligent people sometimes feel they should be able to attend a three-day seminar and return home experts in maneuver conflict as applied to business. An intensive orientation session may get you started, but successful leaders study their art for years—Patton, Rommel, and Grant were all known for the intensity with which they studied military history and current campaigns. Then-LTC David Hackworth had commanded 10 other units before taking over the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry in Vietnam in 1969, as he described in Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts. You may also recall the scene in We Were Soldiers where LTC Hal Moore unloaded armfuls of strategy and history books as he was moving into his quarters at Ft. Benning. At that point, he had been in the Army 20 years and had commanded at every level from platoon to battalion.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Another reason why discovering customer “wants” may not generate much in the way of useful strategy is that what customers often want is magic—something like IBM’s “server pixie dust” in their 2003 commercials, or unlimited free energy,”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Once one side considers abandoning the field, particularly if it loses the initiative, small setbacks can lead to big disasters, and collapse can occur quickly. This happened with the French.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Goals and Visions These higher purposes are sometimes called “overarching goals”97 or “unifying vision”98. Some businesses have this sense of purpose, above making enough profit to survive, or adding a few more million to the CEO’s compensation package.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“The research cited in the last chapter indicated that by picking the larger or more technologically advanced side, you can predict victory in just less than 75% of the battles studied. This sounds impressive, until you recall that by flipping a coin, you can predict victory 50% of the time. The fact that the smaller side does win, and not infrequently, is what excites our interest.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“If in your organization you have a small number of people making mistakes and performing poorly, it’s probably their fault. You should spend your time working with them, or transfer them to other jobs, or if neither of those options is feasible, remove them. If it’s much more than 10%, though, then it’s the system’s fault and you should put your effort into fixing the system and quit blaming or exhorting the people in it.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“In both the Blitzkrieg and to a lesser extent in Desert Storm, one side was able to use time as a device to offset the other’s size, technology, position, and even planning. In particular, the winners were able to make things happen that their opponents may have anticipated, but not when their opponents might have expected.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“There is a well-known name for this detachment from reality that strikes the less agile side: 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. A similar effect, a breakdown in the quality of energy, is well known to students of physics as “entropy.” The energy is still there, but it isn’t available for doing work. The insidious thing about entropy is that within a closed system, it always increases. In other words, closed systems run down. 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Dr Jonathan Shay, who studies trust and cohesion for a living, once noted that: The machine metaphor of a military unit was never apt, especially in a fight—where it counts. When you replace the carburetor of a car, it works from the get-go, if it’s the right part. It doesn’t have to practice stopping and starting with the brake linings, or learn the job of the brake linings so that the brakes and the carburetor say they can read each other’s minds. This is the way members of a tight military unit speak of each other.114”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Agility is the ability to move and adjust quickly and easily. It springs from trained and disciplined forces. Agility requires that subordinates act to achieve the commander’s intent and fight through any obstacle to accomplish the mission. (Emphasis in the original) 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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“An Alternative to Goals A reporter once asked an official from Toyota whether the company achieved “six sigma” quality—a defect rate of around 3 in a million and also the name of a quality improvement methodology that is currently fashionable. His answer typifies the Boyd approach to goals: Basically, I would say that because of our evolutionary concept, whatever we were doing becomes the benchmark for what we do next. We hold onto what we were doing so that it becomes maintainable and it is the new steady state.140 This may seem like a masterwork of obfuscation, but it is entirely consistent with Toyota’s overall guiding concept: The Toyota Production System, quite simply, is about shortening the time it takes to convert customer orders into vehicle deliveries.141 This is one of the best vision / focusing statements in the world of business. Instead of setting arbitrary goals, it tells everybody who works for Toyota that whenever they are in doubt about what to do, take the action that will reduce customer-to-delivery span time. It sets a direction, not a goal, since wherever we are this year, we will be better next year.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Futurist James Ogilvy simply denounced managing through goal setting as “bunk.” Instead, he recommends that: Organizations should tread near the edge of the future, making it up as they go along, with as much sensitivity, awareness, knowledge, compassion, feeling, and beauty as they can muster.139”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“The upshot of all this was that Boyd concluded that the Toyota Production System was another implementation of the principles he had associated with the Blitzkrieg. As odd as this may seem—a doctrine of war and a car manufacturing system turning out to be brothers under the skin—they both use time as their principle strategic device, their organizational climates share several elements, and they both trace back to the school of strategy whose earliest known documentation is Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“researcher Charles Handy at the London Business School concluded: Trust gives people a sense of belonging. When people feel they’re active members of their work community—not merely hired help—they become interested in the company’s future and willingly dedicate their time and talent.119”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“The most advanced combat doctrine belongs to the US Marine Corps, which is part of the Department of the Navy. Their manual, MCDP1, Warfighting,86 lays out a concept of maneuver warfare entirely consistent with the ideas of agility that we have been exploring: By our actions, we seek to impose menacing dilemmas in which events happen unexpectedly and faster than the enemy can keep up with them (author’s note: asymmetric fast transients) … The ultimate goal is panic and paralysis, an enemy who has lost the will to resist.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Organizations that create a climate such as that described in this chapter will naturally experience an acceleration of their OODA loops. So the question becomes how to install it. Boyd suggested, in his briefing “Organic Design for Command and Control,” that it will grow naturally if the senior management sets the proper conditions. He defines the two essential elements necessary for running any human organization along maneuver conflict—rapid OODA loop—lines as: •   Leadership—implies the art of inspiring people to enthusiastically take action towards uncommon goals. It must interact with the system to shape the character or nature of that system in order to realize what is to be done. •   Appreciation—refers to the recognition of worth or value, clear perception, understanding, comprehension, discernment, etc. It must not interact nor interfere with the system, but must discern (not shape) the character / nature of what is being done or about to be done.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Management Style In fact, the whole notion that we can “control” other human beings is a fallacy. Psychologist Michael Popkin, founder of the highly successful “Active Parenting” program, calls it the “Paradox of Control: The more you try to control a teen, the less you can influence that teen.” The reason? “Control eventually leads to resistance, and resistance to rebellion.”121 This is true of all human beings, not only teenagers. One of Boyd’s favorite expressions was “The more you try to control people, the less control you get.” Think about it. If explicit control worked, then Eastern Europe would not have thrown off communism, and the Soviet Union, which had controls the likes of which autocratic Western managers could only dream, would have survived and we would all be reading Secrets of Soviet Management”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“As the French force stopped to refuel, however, Major General Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division, joined by the 5th Panzers, ambushed them and destroyed all but 17 out of the original 175 French tanks.13 Now Rommel did something that characterizes Blitzkrieg warfare. Rather than dig in and “consolidate his position,” or otherwise savor the fruits of victory, he proceeded to use his advantage in time to neutralize his opponents’ forces and weapons. Battle-weary as they must have been, Rommel’s troops remounted their vehicles, pressed on to the west, and actually reached the new French defensive line before the French.14 As one of the German commanders summed it up after the war, “Each minute ahead of the enemy is an advantage.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“You will rapidly discover that a mutually agreed understanding—a contract of sorts—is a wonderful device for fostering a sense of responsibility among the people at your company. Because they have to consider, think, and agree, rather than acquiesce, you will sense increased morale and improved dedication. All of this, of course, reinforces mutual trust and implicit communication, which, as we have seen, are critical elements in increasing your OODA loop speed. Perhaps the greatest value of viewing responsibility as a contract is that it provides an alternative to over-control. Micromanaging is simply not allowed: Once he or she accepts the contract, the subordinate has total freedom within the constraints of the contract as to how to proceed. There is no place for the stack of reports that allow managers or headquarters staffers to second guess every decision.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Or from the British general whom the Germans credit as one of the sources of the Blitzkrieg, J. F. C. Fuller: It was to employ mobility as a psychological weapon: not to kill but to move; not to move to kill but to move to terrify, to bewilder, to perplex, to cause consternation, doubt and confusion in the rear of the enemy … 18 In other words, the purpose of Blitzkrieg strategy was not so much to cope with chaos, but to cause and then exploit it, and it is this cascading of panic and chaos that accounts for the German’s “string of luck.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“So winning requires more than the promise of survival. It must offer an idea of such power and appeal that people will, at times, neglect their other responsibilities and work nights and weekends and extend trips to make it happen.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“When applied to war, Boyd’s strategy provides ways to keep one’s own orientation intact, while taking active measures to destroy that of the opponent. Time—in particular how long it takes our side to reorient compared to how long it takes the opponent—is Boyd’s primary device for accomplishing this, which is why the name “time-based competition” also came to be applied to this approach to strategy.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Victory is achieved in the way of conflict by ascertaining the rhythm of each opponent, by attacking with a rhythm not anticipated by the opponent, and by the use of knowledge of the rhythm of the abstract. Miyamoto Musashi, samurai strategist, 17th century Japan; Nihon Services Group trans.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“Auftrag: The Contract of Leadership Once your team has achieved a high level of competence in performing individual and unit tasks, and where most communication is implicit and the need for written instructions is relatively rare, then you can start leading through missions—as opposed to by assigning tasks, for example. Although hierarchies are not the only type of human organization, I am going to use terms like “subordinate” faute de mieux. If this bothers you, substitute “the person who has the vision for what needs to be done” for “superior” and “a person whom he or she is going to ask to help accomplish it” for “subordinate.” It should be noted, though, that there are few examples of effective combat units that were participatory democracies.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business

“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.”
― Chet Richards, Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business