(2024-11-28) Konik Strategy A Pilot Named Boyd Part2 Business

Eleanor Konik: Strategy & a pilot named Boyd (Part II: Business). So back in Norway, I was sitting in the car with my boss, we got to talking about books...for reasons I no longer recall, Tristan recommended Certain to Win. They weren’t marching orders — Tristan is not that kind of leader — but I've rarely heard him endorse anything so strongly.

The professions I was interested in when I was younger were the sorts of things you would find in a children’s book: lawyer, teacher.

So now that I found myself working at Readwise in the amorphous job of “quality assurance,” I have been in some ways playing catch up.

Five thousand words in last week I barely talked about what makes for good business strategy…
So let’s do that now.

Building an Organizational Climate for Operational Success

here are the fancy bits of jargon and what they actually mean.

Einheit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion.

Fingerspitzengefühl: Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations (Fingertip Feeling)

In a software startup context like mine, I think of it is as having an intuitive feel of upcoming trends in the user community (the folks who get in at the beginning of a boom always do better), or a spidey-sense for when a user report might be related to a critical, emergent issue vs. a weird edge case.

If I send up a flare, sometimes I don’t have time to write out the full ticket and get all of the details — perhaps it’s a Friday afternoon, or I’m notwhere near a computer. But while the optimal amount of false alarms is not zero, neither do I want to be the boy who cried wolf.

In medieval Japan, samurai warriors practiced with the long sword until it became as an extension of their arm. When the fight starts, you don’t have time to stop and think about the fundamentals. In fact, one of the goals of Japanese samurai strategy was to cause this very “stopping” of the mind in their opponents.

Developing good instincts helps you bias toward action in a useful way.

Auftragstaktik: Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subordinate

Most of my colleagues were Readwise users long before we were hired to actively work on the app, and I think it makes for a stronger company because the idea of building better non-fiction reading software deeply appeals to us.

I want to help make non-fiction reading software as good an experience as non-fiction writing software and making it as obvious and natural to use a computer to read as we do to write. I trust my boss’ leadership and vision. You can’t buy that kind of trust.

Years before I ever worked for Readwise, I volunteered a lot of time in the Obsidian user community. I ‘donated’ money to be a ‘VIP’ supporter

Consider the original Apple ad for the Mac that ran during the 1984 Super Bowl—it helped create a cadre of loyalists that have kept the company alive for 20 more years

Schwerpunkt: Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation

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.

But in business it’s harder for me to come to grips with how that advice might useful.

I liked this explanation better:
There is a way to preserve the benefits of planning while avoiding the prophetic nature and the complexity of formal decision models and which will also help you exploit the chaos of the real world. You can use strategy to give this process a shape that the human mind can work with.

one of my favorite moments in the book was when Richards points out that all of this is very similar to parenting advice.
In fact, the whole notion that we can “control” other human beings is a fallacy

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.” 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.”

Every now and then I discuss parenting, management, or teaching pedagogy with someone, and they are surprised when I opine that the fundmemtals don’t change all that much between those life stages. People are people. How I manage a toddler is not really that different from how I managed a teenager

But getting back to schwerpunkt, the idea of playing off the expected, cheng, with the unexpected, chi, plays a major role in Boyd’s conception of maneuver warfare

Give the customer what he expects, wants, needs. In simple terms, the product or service you provide has to work and do what you’ve told him it will do. But customers become bored, eventually, with this approach. To hook them for the long term, you also need the unexpected, the surprising, the delightful

Surprise and Delight

The best Japanese carmakers routinely use their superior OODA loop speeds both to find and to shape what customers really want, whether the customers know it or not. The Japanese even have a name for it: miryoku teki hinshitsu, which roughly translates as “What the customer finds so beguiling or fascinating that he cannot live without it.”

This made me laugh a little because it’s seems like the idea of worrying about what is great before worrying about being good

Back in the glory days of OKCupid, when the only market I really cared about was the dating market, I came across a lot of profiles of people with ‘flaws’ I needed to overlook

My now-husband’s profile, by contrast, wasn’t terribly interesting

But it was unique in that every single aspect of it — every photo, every phrase — was of something I liked.

something similar happened with my house

What Counts as Strategy?

At one popint, Richards includes a chart specifically pointing toward “soft” things that are hard to quantify. Basically, “We need good morale, leadership, harmony, teamwork, and a sense of mission → in order to appear ambiguous, be deceptive, generate suprise and panic, seize and keep the initiatve, create and exploid oppotunities → to cause bickering, scapegoating, confusion, panic, rout, defections & surrender.”

I sort of found it disappointing that this chart, ostensibly about business, was framed in terms of defeating the enemy instead of serving the customer

Big and nimble is hard, though — and Richards spends most of the book extolling the virtues of being nimble.

Speed Really is What Watters

An opponent who cannot make decisions to employ his forces effectively—his command and staff functions become paralyzed by bickering and bureaucracy, for example—is defeated before the engagement begins

For years, my favorite note-taking app — Obsidian — was run by a husband-and-wife team. I wouldn’t say they ‘defeated’ incumbents like Evernote, OneNote, Notion or Apple Notes, but they certainly have carved out an impressive niche.

When Omnivore — a free and open source app that has some commonalities with Readwise Reader — announced they had been aquihired by Elevenlabs, my boss immediately dropped what he was doing and started working on a way to import data from Omnivore to Reader.

Imagine if we had so many formal processes in place that such a feature had to go through a program manager

This is one reason roadmaps can be dangerous. (Project-oriented Roadmaps are counter-productive for Software Product Teams)

But frankly all of us are entrusted with taking the initiative, with skipping the formalities when it makes sense

Back in January, my colleague Artem “went renegade” and implemented a feature (vertical pagination) no one had asked him to build, because he thought it would solve a problem we needed to solve

If I tried to sit down and write out formal test cases for everything that could benefit from being tested then I would be doing nothing but writing tasks for the rest of my life

There are tradeoffs between doing things “perfectly” and doing them “at all.” I’ve always been better at doing things quickly than doing them well

When is a Problem Systemic?

Though I spent most of the book connecting dots to things I’ve seen Tristan do, there were several moments in the book where I flashed back to my time as a teacher.

If in your organization you have a small number of people making mistakes and performing poorly, it’s probably their fault

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. (see Deming 94%)

it’s hard to see how I could have been uniquely responsible for 50+ 11th graders not writing so much as a single paragraph on a standardized test in the exact same style they’d been getting four times a year since 6th grade. I had access to their other grades; they weren’t doing well elsewhere either.

The organization I was part of had deep-set problems; the entire administrative staff had been removed and replaced the year before, this was not unknown. But instead of treating it like a systemic problem, my bosses acted as though with enough effort on the part of the teachers alone, we could solve everything… and I strongly believe the methods they were pushing (e.g. group work for all non-test activities) were actively detrimental to children.

Most of the problems that drove me out of teaching

wasn’t the kids, it wasn’t the parents — it was procurement, it was policy, it was my shockingly unreasonable bosses.

It was precisely this:
For most of us in white-collar professions, the greatest threat to mutual trust is the micromanager. (micro-management)

After a while, you lose any thought of initiative (agency) or pride of workmanship. Why bother, he is going to change it anyway.

Stay Aware of the Changing Landscape

Along those lines, there was one line in particular the resonated with me.
As a result of implementing maneuver conflict, many of the existing processes and the relationships between them are going to disappear, and so it would be a waste of time and money to “improve” them.

*The OODA loop stands for “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.”

“Observe” means much more than “see.” “Absorb” might be more descriptive if it did not have a passive undertone. “Go out and get all the information you can by whatever means possible” is even closer. You can never be sure beforehand which stray idea will provide the key to unlock some fatal dilemma.*

Speaking of AI, the tech world is in the midst of a huge shift — and I, for one, am waiting for things to settle out before continuing to optimize my system to facilitate, say, improved search. I’m sure in a year or so personal models will get easier to tune and the APIs will become more user-friendly, etc. So like Richards points out at the beginning of this section, why waste effort when there are other useful things I could work on instead?

Quickness, as we know, depends upon the climate in which the OODA loop operates, and a particularly effective climate for this is the one we have called the “key attributes of the blitzkrieg”: mutual trust/unity/cohesion, intuitive knowledge; mission contract/orders; and focus of effort.

Are Battles the Opposite of Business?

One thing that I spent some time reflecting on was that in many ways war is the opposite of business — war generally destroys value, and business generally speaking creates it.

Violence has solved a lot of problems for a lot of societies over the years

but as a general rule, more developed societies prefer non-violent solutions to problems. It’s why we settle things with laws instead of brawls; economic strength in lieu of military might. It’s why we try to hold elections, instead of coups.

business is not fundamentally about wielding economic might like a cudgel. It is about growing wealth. And although there is certainly competition out there in the business world — and the rise of mergers and monoplization is giving guys like Matt Stoller fits — I don’t know how convinced I am that you can take what works in a military context and apply it to business.