War, Chaos, and Business
Painted on the side of a building in Indianola MS, B. B. King’s hometown, pointing out overflow parking for the Main Street business district. Don’t worry, it’s paved, although the occasional visit by local wildlife can’t be ruled out.
Check out the new blog by that name featuring pictures and observations about Indianola, the South, and life in general: Plastic catfish, Delta sunsets, possums, and Club Ebony.
For those of you who may have missed it, there’s a fascinating paper in the current edition of the Academy of Management Journal, “Momentum or Deceleration? Theoretical and methodological reflections on the analysis of organizational change,” by Nikolaus Beck of the University of Lugano, and Josef Bruderl and Michael Woyode of the University of Mannheim. (Citation: Vol 51, No. 3, 413-435).
What they have found is that contrary to what was previously thought, namely that change feeds on change, that is, that the change process is self-reinforcing, the opposite is more often true. As they write, “There are good reasons to assume that prior change reduces the likelihood of subsequent change.” As a result, most previous research on the subject of change is, well, wrong. As is so often the case with statistics, the reason hinges on the existence of a hidden variable, in this case, “propensity for change,” and a few companies have a lot of it. This skews the results (421).
Why indeed? What does this simple children’s story tell us about character, adversity, and the grand sweep of life itself? Well, Mike Wyly, Col USMC, Ret., and Founder / Executive Director of the Bossov Ballet Theater, tells you in “Why See Bossov’s Cinderella?“ (24 KB PDF) Mike is one of the godfathers of maneuver warfare, so he ought to know.
If you’re going to be in the Northeast early next month, you might consider the Bossov’s production of Cinderella on the evenings of August 1 and 2 in Waterville, Maine (about 1 1/2 hours north of Portland). I’ve seen several BBT performances — you won’t be disappointed.
Tom Peters once wrote that the real work of any company is done around the water cooler and coffee pot. In an era of globalization, virtual companies, flex time, and work-from-anywhere, what’s a water cooler?
Tim Leberecht has an idea on News.com today: blogs, but with a twist:
Make it mandatory for every employee to keep an internal blog and post at least once per week. Depending on their role, employees can blog about customer experiences, sales tactics, strategy, product improvements, organizational design, competitors, market trends, and even gossip. Potential productivity losses are outweighed by the value of knowledge that is being generated and shared.
“Potential productivity losses?” Relax, he’s thought about that, too.
The essence of Boyd’s approach to competition was to keep his own orientation as closely harmonized with reality as possible, while doing every thing he could to disorient his opponents.
Because “orientation” lies within the brain, strategists ought to be interested in how the brain works. It’s not surprising, then, that Boyd was fascinated by neuroscience and included selections from that subject in Strategic Game, charts 16 and 17. In particular, Boyd was interested in how interaction with the environment shaped the development and working of the brain, and hence orientation. Boyd found this relationship to be so strong that the complete title of his primary work on strategy is “The Strategic Game of Interaction and Isolation.” This is typical of Boyd’s approach: He would find or suspect a phenomenon, but he didn’t feel he had a real understanding until he could relate it to something that could be demonstrated in science.