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.

Podcast about Sun Tzu and IT

Found interesting podcast today. Allthough it has been published couple of weeks ago, so some of you might have listened it already. Anyway, it is titled Intel's Former Innovation Manager Applies Sun Tzu's Art of War to Business and can be found here.

Executive summary is pretty generic and doesn't really describe contents of podcast so listening to it is needed and I do recommend listening it. Platt has in my opinion really intelligent approach to IT, he doesn't see it as be all end all solution but rather as an enabler. Also included are examples of mission type orders and cheng/chi transients.

Cheng/Chi is in my opinion one of the most difficult concepts to translate into business. In this podcast there is an example of turning certain department from cost center (cheng) which it has traditionally been to revenue center (chi). I think that is one way of applying maneuver conflict to business.

There is also companion slideshow, but page returned error when trying to download it, hopefully it will be fixed soon.


Edit: Actually, you don't have to listen to it, full transcript can be found from here.