John Boyd is one of those cases where having someone more dedicated to writing down his ideas would have been hugely helpful. This is the largest single deposit of his ideas that he ever produced, and his legacy among the military really does mostly boil down to his giving the same presentation to hundreds of officers.
There’s a few books which are by his understudies and collaborators in the military, but they did not contain much more detail for the inputs to Boyd’s thought process that I could tell. I selected Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd for the purpose, which has more rigorous investigation into these elements. I haven’t finished it yet; it suffers from the combination of being stiff to read and also put-it-down-and-think-about-it-y.
Turning to the organizational side of things, there are a few spots in the business literature which emphasize decisions as the center of gravity. About two years ago I found one on HBR from 2010 about organizing the whole company around decisions. This is an appealing idea to me, because on reflection company growth seems to be a weirdly thoughtless process, wherein people notice they have problem X, so hire a team dedicated to X, and then assign all X-like responsibilities to them, and then so on with problem Y. This is fast and simple, but it breaks as soon as X, Y, Z are sub-problems of a larger problem. As an added benefit, if you commit to decisions up front you have no choice but to resolve the strategy questions explicitly, else you have nothing to go by.
In general, it seems like specialization of labor never works unless there are very few degrees of freedom.
There’s another HBR article which is about Kahneman’s forthcoming book on variance in decision making. The pitch there is that even if you have professional experts, with access to the correct information, endowed with the power to make the necessary decisions...the decisions they actually make are all over the map. Even two different experts in the same company. Even the same expert at two different times. That being said, it remains the case:
Make a decision > Abide by decision > Goodness of decision
John Boyd is one of those cases where having someone more dedicated to writing down his ideas would have been hugely helpful. This is the largest single deposit of his ideas that he ever produced, and his legacy among the military really does mostly boil down to his giving the same presentation to hundreds of officers.
There’s a few books which are by his understudies and collaborators in the military, but they did not contain much more detail for the inputs to Boyd’s thought process that I could tell. I selected Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd for the purpose, which has more rigorous investigation into these elements. I haven’t finished it yet; it suffers from the combination of being stiff to read and also put-it-down-and-think-about-it-y.
Turning to the organizational side of things, there are a few spots in the business literature which emphasize decisions as the center of gravity. About two years ago I found one on HBR from 2010 about organizing the whole company around decisions. This is an appealing idea to me, because on reflection company growth seems to be a weirdly thoughtless process, wherein people notice they have problem X, so hire a team dedicated to X, and then assign all X-like responsibilities to them, and then so on with problem Y. This is fast and simple, but it breaks as soon as X, Y, Z are sub-problems of a larger problem. As an added benefit, if you commit to decisions up front you have no choice but to resolve the strategy questions explicitly, else you have nothing to go by.
In general, it seems like specialization of labor never works unless there are very few degrees of freedom.
There’s another HBR article which is about Kahneman’s forthcoming book on variance in decision making. The pitch there is that even if you have professional experts, with access to the correct information, endowed with the power to make the necessary decisions...the decisions they actually make are all over the map. Even two different experts in the same company. Even the same expert at two different times. That being said, it remains the case:
Make a decision > Abide by decision > Goodness of decision
I think this is why I am so enamored of reasoned rules.