Webcast on principles of Principles of Business Strategy

I have stumbled upon blog Kallokain by Henrik Mårtensson but really haven't had time to read more. His most recent post includes webcast on business strategy principles and what tools Apple has used in battle against phone giants.

In addition to nice overview of principles in the webcast I recommend reading comments, they provide some useful insight as well.

On other note, I have Fast Strategy on its way from Amazon and I'll report back when I'm finished reading it.

Apple designing snowmobiles?

Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple held a presentation at South by Southwest. Summarized here by Tech Beat. Isn't following quote something in the line with Boyd's Snowmobiles concept or am I completely wrong?

This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to "go crazy". Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other's antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work.

This sort of arrangement encourages designers to design snowmobiles and not restrict flow of thoughts but at the same time deliver actionable results.

How can you tell if someone is inside opponents OODA loop?

This question is one the defining questions of this blog. And I started thinking about it more again after reading this blog post.

Fast reaction to your opponents actions is not getting inside his decision cycle. It is still reacting, when you should be the one whose actions your opponents have to react to.

Google got inside Facebook’s decision loop with Open Social. Apple got inside the cell phone industry’s decision loop with the iPhone.

Did Google really get inside Facebooks loop or merely reacted with their own similar product? And Apple, did they really surprise market with product that steals the profits from competitors pockets with practically no effort at all on their part? Where their competitors all 'what the fuck' when these products were announced?

I don't think so and I'd even say that both of these were mere reactions to their competitors.

One might even say that Nokia got inside Apple with it's own touchscreen phone. And what about HTC Touch which was available in Europe before iPhone.

It isn't getting inside opponents loop if you can't take advantage of your successes and consolidate. And repeat. And repeat. It doesn't matter if you get inside your opponents cycle once. You have to do it over and over again until you have beaten all opposition into oblivion.

I don't think that I have answered this question yet so I have to return to this in future. But point I want to make is that it is too easy to claim that company got inside competitors OODA loop after one success while wasn't necessarily able to sustain that success.

Boyd in Business, elsewhere in the internet #1

I'll try to make this recurring post every once in a while when I find direct discussion about Boyd in Business around the net.

First up is Mike Smock in vSentes blog and a four part series where he interprets Boyds four questions from The Strategic Game of ? and ? (pdf at d-n-i.net) into marketing.

What is Strategy?
What is the Aim or Purpose of Strategy?
What is the Central Theme and What Are the Key Ideas that Underlie Strategy?
How Do We Play to This Theme and Activate These Ideas?

Robert Greene, author of books Power, Seduction and War has article titled OODA and You. Discussion about article and Boyd in Business continues in this forum thread called The OODA Loop & You; The strategy of allowed chaos. Allthough most of the examples covered still revolve around armed conflict.

John Martellaro writes in the Mac Observer article titled Hidden Dimensions - Apple, the OODA Loop and Staying The Course about how fast apple is running it's OODA loop and who if any is inside Apples loop.

Other than those linked now and obvious ones at Belisarius.com there isn't that much written about Boyd in Business. Technorati searchs pretty much end up with general descriptions of OODA but nothing specific.