The basic idea, which applies to any form of human conflict, is to get everybody in the organization to use their creativity and initiative to achieve the goals of the organization. Boyd’s FESA climate is designed to do just that. But it takes a lot of effort to build the culture where this climate can operate. For example: “A common outlook possessed by “a body of officers” represents a unifying theme that can be used to simultaneously encourage subordinate initiative yet realize superior intent.” (Patterns, 74)

Apparently, Milliken has gone through this process over the years and built an effective climate. As Boyd insisted in Conceptual Spiral, the driving force must be the creation and exploitation of novelty — before competitors can understand what you’re doing and before customers get tired and go somewhere else.

Not all their ideas work, of course. Roger Milliken was an ardent protectionist for many years and spent a lot of money trying to erect and maintain barriers to foreign competition. Fortunately, though, he didn’t bet the company on this version of the Maginot Line.

Novelty is not only produced by the practice of science/engineering and the pursuit of technology, it is also produced by the forces of nature, by our own thinking and doing as well as by others. Furthermore, novelty is produced continuously, if somewhat erratically or haphazardly. Now, in order to thrive and grow in such a world, we must match our thinking and doing, hence our orientation, with that emerging novelty. (28)

Adds the original page numbers, which may seem a little odd because for readability this edition spreads several of Boyd’s originals over two or even three pages.  All of these will have the same number.

Also corrects a number of typos, esp. in the “Examples from Science and Technology,” pp. 9-12 (and note that p. 12 in the original takes three pages here).

This version replaces the one dated February 2011.  It should also appear shortly in the John Boyd Compendium on DNIPOGO.

I was living in Mississippi in 1963 when the story takes place, and despite some of the criticism you may have read, the movie accurately portrays the attitudes of part of the white elite of the time.  For one thing, unlike some of the uneducated redneck population, the white power structure did not, by and large, consider itself racist.  There’s a line in the movie where Hilly (wonderfully played by Bryce Dallas Howard, Hollywood elite herself, and raised in Connecticut) tells Skeeter to be careful because there are racists out there and she could get hurt. This is while Hilly is pushing a law to require bathroom facilities for the black help to be moved outdoors.

For more on this attitude, which seems so patronizing to us today, read William Alexander Percy’s 1941 memoir, Lanterns on the Levee, where he writes in all seriousness, for example, that every southern white man is “owned” by at least one black man (who essentially regards him as another parent and funding source.)  And Percy was considered scandalously liberal for his day.

The movie also hints that there were educated southerners — incidentally, Faulkner perhaps being the best known — who understood the evils of segregation but resented being lectured on the subject by “outsiders.”  Remember that the folks who counted in Mississippi in 1963 had parents born in the 19th century.  Memories of invasion, conquest, and occupation by the North were still fresh down there.  And now here comes another wave.  This certainly does not excuse the harm done to black and white by segregation (White man’s shame, black man’s burden — Rev. Dr. M. L. King,  Jr.), but it may help explain attitudes.

Finally,  most of the movie was shot in Greenwood, about a hundred miles north of Jackson, and the town where my wife was born.  Although it was somewhat jarring to see an aerial shot of Greenwood, population maybe 20,000 at the time, portrayed as the state capital that was 10 times its size, the scenes filmed in the surrounding lush Delta countryside are worth the price of admission.  Greenwood, incidentally, was also the girlhood home of Bobbie Gentry (“It was the 3rd of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day …”) and is today probably best known for the company that makes Viking ranges.

And really finally:  Although Skeeter went to Ole Miss, where she apparently picked up the backbone that distinguished her from her Junior League contemporaries, the author of the book, Kathryn Stockett betrayed her Jacksonian roots by graduating from Alabama (!) And to make matters worse, Octavia Spencer, whose portrayal of Minnie Jackson should land her an Oscar nomination (Viola Davis as Aibileen Clark would be the other) is an Auburn alum.

This brings up a point that was perhaps inevitable.  The roles of the maids are uniformly powerful and gripping.  Unfortunately most of the whites are 2D, the only exceptions that spring to mind being Emma Stone as Skeeter and Jessica Chastain as the Darryl Hannah-ish (as in Steel Magnolias) Celia Foote.  The others are either caricatures — although Ron Howard’s daughter gives it all it’s worth as Hilly — or wasted (Academy Award winners Sissy Spacek and Mary Steenburgen).  A nod, though, to Chris Lowell for  bringing some dimension to the role of Skeeter’s love interest.

Anyway, see the movie, which gives a brief peek at a time in our history when America ultimately did the right thing.

In the past, my Mac OS upgrades have been hit or miss.  They’ve all installed OK, but I’ve ended up having to manually move iTunes libraries — the last time getting my purchased music but losing everything else — and then having problems with re-authorization.  Or trying to find passwords to reinstall aps and e-mail accounts, etc. Still, they were easier than reinstalling Windows XP.

This time, I bought a cheap external hard drive, ran Time Machine once, then disconnected it and put in Snow Leopard (from a family pack left over from my wife’s installation), erased the hard drive (not necessary, but I wanted a clean install), and launched.  As it was finishing, it said, roughly, that if you happen to have a Time Machine backup, I can import all your apps, user info, iTunes libraries, e-mails and settings, etc.  Boy, do I ever, plugged in the external, and said go.  About half an hour later, I was in business — e-mail, iTunes, movies, login info and the lot.

A quick trip to the app store, a three hour download and installation, and voila, Lion.

Because my wife occasionally lets me use her iPad2, I was familiar with the basics of using Lion.  It’s great. I was able to scare my wife out of two years growth when I rang her iPad from my FaceTime app.  If my computer had a touchscreen and no keyboard, it would now be an overweight iPad.  My guess is that in a couple of years, the only difference between an iPad and a MacBook will be the attached keyboard on the laptop.

So instead of improving the laptop, Apple is growing the iPhone / iPad into its replacement.  Who would have thought, almost 10 years ago to the day, that a fat, overpriced portable music player would be the future of personal computing?  Makes you wonder where they’re going with all this.

Just for a second, my blood froze.  Primal memories of military training long ago.  Then I told myself:  Get a grip!  You’re retired.  You’re Air Force.  You’re a colonel, fer crissakes!!  It seemed to help.

Sure glad he’s on our side.

Tempo:
Timing, Tactics and Strategy in Narrative-Driven Decision-Making

by Venkatesh Rao
(Ribbonfarm, 2011; 154 pages)

Reviewed by Chet Richards
July 25, 2011

A good book is read more than once while accumulating copious notes in its margins and on the blank pages that the publisher has thoughtfully provided before and after the text. Venkatesh Rao has written a good book.

Good books do not confirm the reader’s long-cherished beliefs. Such books are worse than useless because they lock mindsets into place, making the agility one needs to cope with an unpredictable world even harder to achieve. The late American strategist, John Boyd, considered such agility — the ability to come up with new tactics, ideas, and weapons and employ them effectively while under fire — the cornerstone of his strategy.

Rao draws on Boyd in several places, as well on sources ranging from the topical, such as Gladwell and Taleb, to the foundational (e.g., Camus and Clausewitz), to the downright obscure — know anything about The Archeology of Garbage? Do the words wabi and sabi ring a bell?

The result is a synthesis, what Boyd called a “snowmobile,” that combines concepts from across a variety of disciplines to produce a cornucopia of new ideas, insights and speculations. You may be confused, challenged, outraged, and puzzled (some of the language can be academic), but you’ll rarely be bored because every chapter, often every page, has something you can add to the parts bin for building your own snowmobiles.

Let me highlight just a couple, of special interest to folks familiar with Boyd’s concepts. Near the end of the book, Rao introduces an expanded version of “legibility”:

A piece of physical reality is legible if it is obviously the product of coherent human agency, a deliberate externalization of a mental model. When human and natural sources of order are harder to tease apart, you get greater illegibility (p. 133 — and I warned you about the academic language).

Then a couple of paragraphs later, he claims that:

Used with adversarial intentions, Boyd’s OODA can be understood as a deliberate use of illegibility to cause failure.

At first, this seems silly. Boyd only considers conflict between groups of human beings (Patterns of Conflict, 10), so all uses of his strategic concepts would seem to be prima facia examples of legible phenomena. On the other hand, and this is an example of what makes Rao’s little book so valuable, some commentators, such as Stalk and Hout in 1990’s Competing Against Time, point out that victims of a Boyd-style attack can rarely identify the cause of their problems — often blaming bad luck or incompetent, self-serving and treacherous idiots in their own organizations. Boyd made this clear in his own work, such as in Patterns of Conflict, 132, when he suggested that his victims would exhibit a variety of traumatic symptoms including confusion, disorder, panic, chaos, paralysis and collapse — indicating unrelenting attack by forces outside the scope of their own mental models.

Rao characterizes Boyd’s OODA loop (actually, the concept of operating inside the OODA loop) as

the core of a deeply creative and philosophically elegant enactment style that is based on many of the same themes inspiring this book: tempo, entropy, and creative destruction. (118)

Coming from someone who had not read the Boyd source materials when he wrote the book, this is an amazingly perceptive comment, for these run through Boyd’s work like Norns weaving the fates of men. Perhaps his unfamiliarity with the original briefings, however, led him to make one characterization that is incorrect, although widely believed:

The central idea in OODA is a generalization of Butterfly-Bee: to simply operate at a higher tempo than your opponent. (118)

Boyd does appear to make this claim, specifically on page 44 of his briefing Strategic Game of ? and ?

The ability to operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than an adversary enables one to fold adversary back inside himself so that he can neither appreciate nor keep up with what’s going on. He will become disoriented or confused [leading to his collapse].

The title of this chart, however, is “Illuminating Example.” In the beginning of Patterns of Conflict, his magnum opus that pre-dates Strategic Game by about a year, Boyd claims that

[The] idea of fast transients suggests that in order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside our adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop. (5, emphasis added)

For the purpose of collapsing adversaries, Boyd’s strategy is about operating inside OODA loops, where the ability to operate at a faster tempo or rhythm is one specific practice (although, as the example above shows, one that can be quite useful at times.)

There are so many ideas in this book that I’m going to quit here and leave the rest of them to you.

As for where to go from here, Rao might write more about tempo. This will seem strange to him, I’m sure, but pages go by with hardly a mention of the concept. This means that we need another book from him. I’d suggest expanding on some of the concepts that he raises but doesn’t find space to develop. Here are three ideas:

• The influence of tempo on the morale and cohesion of opposing groups. Boyd, as noted above, made this part of his strategic framework, as did the Japanese. Musashi, writing in 1645, for example, claimed that a samurai could use an advantageous rhythm to arrest the motivation of an opponent, no matter how powerful that motivation was. Rao offers us glimmers on p. 31, when he mentions disruption, and on p. 144 addressing shared mental models (a pillar of Boyd’s favored organizational climate), but he can mine this lode much more deeply.
• Musashi was drawing on Japan’s Zen tradition. Rao mentions two elements of the Zen aesthetic, wabi and sabi, (p. 146) and he might continue developing this theme. Zen, the Sun Tzu text, and later Japanese concepts of strategy, as outlined in one of Boyd’s favorite books, Cleary’s The Japanese Art of War, share a close relationship.
• Finally, I’d like to see more from Rao on strategy itself. He defines a strategy as a “cheap trick,” the recognition of an “exploitable pattern” in unfolding events (pp. 76, 120). But this is incomplete: Will any “cheap trick” do? Do we stop at just one, as Rao’s pattern, the “double Freyberg triangle,” would suggest (p. 74)? And doesn’t that pattern make us predictable? For all this, though, Rao’s definition is tantalizing close to Boyd’s. If you consider a cheap trick to be an intention — because we don’t know if our attempt to exploit the pattern will work — then his concept is reminiscent of Boyd’s definition of strategy, which begins with “a mental tapestry of changing intentions … “

So many ideas on every page. Buy this little book, study it, sometimes nod in agreement, and sometimes throw it across the room.

Visit the Tempo blog at http://tempobook.com and Rao’s personal blog at http://www.ribbonfarm.com

Occasionally the principle itself gets rediscovered.  You may be familiar with the “Wow! Factor” or Tom Peters’ “the Pursuit of Wow!”

Here’s one of these from the Wall St. J. last Friday.

A couple of comments:

1.  “Exceeding expectations” is OK, but it makes it sound like “expectations” is a linear scale and all you have to do is score higher.  He’s on the right track, but there’s more to zheng / qi than a freebee every now and again.  For one thing, if that’s your approach, then customers will come to expect it.

2.  And there’s something I don’t like about “under-promise, over-deliver.”  Something about it just makes me uncomfortable.

Still, his conclusion that “… when you give them something more than they expect — faster service, extra help, more options, early delivery and so on — you end up with the loyal, raving fans you need to propel your business into the stratosphere” is certainly consistent with what we expect from zheng / qi.

How to Turn Customers Into Loyal, Raving Fans

By MIKE MICHALOWICZ

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304203304576447823427183788.html

Do you want satisfied customers or do you want customers who are so thrilled with your company they become loyal, raving fans? I’ll take option No.2. Satisfied customers may come back a second or third time; they may even become regulars. But unless you exceed expectations, your satisfied customers could just as easily become your competitors’ satisfied customers.

Read more (subscription required)

About the Author

Mike Michalowicz is the author of “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.” He is an advocate of a business philosophy by the same name, believing the greatest business successes come from underfunded, inexperienced entrepreneurs. His website is www.ToiletPaperEntrepreneur.com.

Reposted with permission from: http://chuckspinney.blogspot.com/p/criteria-of-sensible-grand-strategy.html

The Bush administration’s theory and practice of grand strategy could be summarized in the sound byte, “You are either with us or against us.” But the art of grand strategy is far more subtle than this, and it is now clear that Bush’s primitive conception led to all sorts of problems at home and abroad.

So, what makes up a sensible grand strategy?

The late American strategist, Col John R. Boyd (USAF Ret – see bio) evolved five criteria for synthesizing and evaluating a nation’s grand strategy. Boyd’s brilliant theories of conflict are contained in his collections of briefings entitled a Discourse on Winning and Losing, which can be downloaded here. Here, I will briefly introduce the reader to what I will call Boyd’s criteria for shaping a sensible grand strategy.

Boyd argued [Patterns, 139] that any country should shape its domestic policies, foreign policies, and military strategies in pursuit of its goals in a way that a nation’s decisions and actions work to:

You might also note an interesting take on zheng/ qi (cheng / ch’i) near the end of the interview.

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/06/22/t_ls_motorola_apple.fortune/

Today, the expected might be great gas mileage and quality, and the unexpected is sex appeal, as an article in Wednesday’s WSJ vividly illustrates.

“Gorgeous design costs no more than boring design,” says [head of Hyundai's US Operations, John] Krafcik.

There have always been exciting small cars — the BMW 3-series, for example — but Krafcik is talking about a Hyundai Elantra that retails for about $22,000.

“These are vehicles people are proud to own,” [Autonation CEO Mike Jackson] says.

Apple, of course, plays this game extremely well, also.

EYES ON THE ROADMAY 25, 2011
Auto Makers Sweeten the Recipe for Small Cars
Goodbye, Hand-Crank Windows and Hello, iPod Docks; Car Buyers’ Interest in Compacts Rises Along with Gas Prices

By JOSEPH B. WHITE

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304066504576343201704359810.html
(subscription required)

The cheap-looking, cramped, “econobox” car is dead.