Certain to Win
"The book is both an excellent primer for those new to Boyd and a catalyst to those with business experience trying to internalize the relevance of Boyd ́s thinking." Chuck Leader, LtCol USMC (Ret.) and information technology company CEO; "A Winning Combination," Marine Corps Gazette, March 2005. Certain to Win [Sun Tzu ́s prognosis for generals who follow his advice] develops the strategy of the late US Air Force Colonel John R. Boyd for the world of business. The success of Robert Coram’s monumental biography, Boyd, the Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, rekindled interest in this obscure pilot and documented his influence on military matters ranging from his early work on fighter tactics to the USMC ́s maneuver warfare doctrine to the planning for Operation Desert Storm. Unfortunately Boyd’s written legacy, consisting of a single paper and a four-set cycle of briefings, addresses strategy only in war. [All of Boyd ́s briefings are available on Slightly East of New.] Boyd and Business Boyd did study business. He read everything he could find on the Toyota Production System and came to consider it as an implementation of ideas similar to his own. He took business into account when he formulated the final version of his “OODA loop” and in his last major briefing, Conceptual Spiral, on science and technology. He read and commented on early drafts of this manuscript, but he never wrote on how business could operate more profitably by using his ideas.
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What Hacker News says
- For anyone interested in OODA, the Robert Coram biography of John Boyd, and "Certain to Win" by the Boyd disciple Chet Richards are good entry points.
The value of OODA isn't really in providing a model for individual-level decisionmaking. The value is as a model for intra-organizational conflict: that one obtains strategic advantage (i.e. tempo) by running through one's OODA loop faster than competitors or opponents. You can draw a very straight line from OODA to the Lean Startup.
- A great book on applying Boyd's ideas to business is Certain to Win by Chet Richards.
- In no particular order:
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
* Introducing Go, by Caleb Doxsey.
If you'd like to read what I think of these books, you can read my blog post about them here: http://aalhour.com/blog/2018/01/02/review-of-my-2017-reading...
- In no particular order:
* Siddhartha, Herman Hesse
* Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
* The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday
* The Daily Stoic, Ryan Holiday
* The Effective Engineer, Edmund Lau
* The Lean Startup, Eric Ries
* The Personal MBA, Josh Kaufman
* Certain to Win, Chet Richards
* Left of Bang, Patrick Van Horn & Jason A. Riley
* Native Set Theory, Paul R. Halmos
EDIT: list formatting
- Certain to Win is very good.
There's also sort of an "anthology" book on Boyd/OODA called Science, Strategy, and War by Osinga.
You can find some other random content on dnipogo.org and in the web archive for belisarius.com (I don't know why this is down now).
When reading about Boyd and his ideas, I think it's best to focus on the core concepts and reason about applications yourself. He built his philosophy bottom up (he was originally a fighter pilot). Examples like in Certain to Win are looking for parallels that exist coincidentally... or perhaps a better word is patterns ( http://www.dnipogo.org/boyd/patterns_ppt.pdf )
- apologies for the long delay in reply …
I'm not deeply-read on the topic, but here are a few others I've liked …
· Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards. This one in particular analyzes heavily blitzkrieg tactics, and how disorientation and morale are some of the most effective "weapons." Has many good cross-references.
· The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Military strategy and conflict philosophy. Basically, the philosophy that undergirds the blitzkrieg: lots on gaining advantage, using morale, turning "deficiencies" in to advantages, etc.
· Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. It's rah-rah and a bit repetitive, but has some good bits on team dynamics, element of surprise—if nothing else, an interesting glimpse in to the dynamics of high-functioning military units.
So far, Grunt has touched on military uniform fashion design and its role in psyche … we'll see where else it goes, but an enjoyable read thus far.
