Chet Richards

During the Adaptive Leadership Conference, retired USMC Colonel Mike Wyly recounted the Corps’ experience in implementing maneuver warfare. Although Boyd was involved in this effort, he didn’t invent maneuver warfare (and the term never appears in Patterns). Maneuver warfare dates back to World War I and rests on the same philosophical base as the Toyota Way. And like the Toyota Way, maneuver warfare took about 25 years to install to the level where it became the accepted doctrine of the organization.

The experiences of both the USMC and Toyota share several common elements that you may find useful when trying to instill these ideas into your own organization:

• A focus on action. The only purpose of the theory is to guide your actions, to suggest what actions to take. This stuff is not telekinesis — nothing counts until you do something in the real world. Both Taiichi Ohno at Toyota and Mike Wyly and his team in the Corps were constantly looking for ways to show that groups within their organizations that used their ideas outperformed those that didn’t. The lessons absorbed from each mini-implementation helped shape the doctrine and also smoothed the next round of implementation.
• The support of the people at the top. Any implementation activity can be killed and killed quickly in its early stages by eliminating its advocates. This ultimately happened at both Toyota and the Marine Corps but not until a critical mass of practitioners had been created. Another role of the senior leadership is to write the rules for promotion. If you have made a compelling case, then at some point, the top management of the organization must promote those who subscribe to the new doctrine and put those who don’t where they can do no harm.
• Do your homework. If you expect the organization to bet its future on your ideas, you not only have to be right, you have to be able to sell your concepts to an initially skeptical leadership team. A good way to demonstrate an acceptable level of mastery is to publish your conclusions. “A prophet is not without honor,” the Bible notes, “except in his own country.” Articles in the Marine Corps Gazette or Harvard Business Review help overcome this.

It’s worth repeating that Boyd’s work, like that of Sun Tzu, is not something that you can implement directly. Instead, Boyd describes a philosophy of competition based on moral strength, mental agility, and physical ability (in that order) and an organizational climate that encourages creativity and initiative harmonized to achieve the organization’s goals. In other words, it’s the why and the what. The “how” is what you have to work on. You can use the Marine Corps manuals and the descriptions of the Toyota Way as guides, but what works for them after a quarter century of doctrine and implementation co-evolving will not work for you, at least not right out of the box.

By the way, it doesn’t have to take 25 years. As Police Lieutenant Fred Leland told us at the end of the Adaptive Leadership Conference:

This was an outstanding class. I was honored to attend and meet each of you. The only negative I have was that it could have been longer. I personally can not get enough of Boyd and the topic of adaptive leadership. This stuff saves lives!