Boydian 'book club' of sorts

I have been thinking about running some sort of reading club about Boyds briefings for some time now. And it was one of the first ideas for this blog.

My idea was to divide briefing at hand to bite size chunks and give people few days to read it and then publish our thoughts about it and then continue discussion about it in comments. Mainly about how would principles in each chunk apply to business.

Anyone interested? Suggestions on which briefing to start with? I was thinking about Organic Design for Command and Control.

Innovative Management - Gary Hamel, Lowell Bryan and McKinsey & Co.

A very interesting article in McKinsey Quarterly:

Innovative Management: A Conversation with Lowell Bryan and Gary Hamel

I'm going to return to this later in detail, but in short, it seems that management gurus are thinking along the same lines as we are:

Gary Hamel: The outlines of the 21st-century management model are already clear. Decision-making will be more peer based; the tools of creativity will be widely distributed in organizations. Ideas will compete on an equal footing. Strategies will be built from the bottom up. Power will be a function of competence rather than of position. In terms of the future of management, we’re at the beginning of what will be a fairly long journey. You can see some of the pieces starting to come together, but we’re not there yet.

So - decision-making at low levels; wide frontage for creativity; emergent, "recon pull" strategy...

Push and pull systems (1)

http://www.johnhagel.com/creationnets.pdf

An interesting article on open innovation and creating "creation nets" to capture value -

but one of the most interesting parts is a table on page 15 where "traditional" and "creation net" approaches to innovation are compared.

Creation nets are, when compared to traditional organizations (I'm paraphrasing here, read the whole article - it's good!)

1) focused
2) have multiple participants, which can be individuals as well as institutions
3) dispersed, rather than concentrated
4) pursue parallel innovation
5) coordinate through integration events, not stage gate reviews
6) use "constitutions" and norms for governance, rather than process manuals
7) outcome definitions tend to be high level performance specs ("prevent x from happening") rather than detailed blueprints ("use part y")
8) mobilize using pull, not push systems
9) review performance via appropriation and re-use (if something is good, it is used again)

Is it just me, or does this sound remarkably like Boyd's concepts for manouver warfare, blitzkrieg etc?