Chet Richards

Posting will be sporadic, if that.  Back late next week.

As luck would have it, Caroline Brothers has an article in today’s NYT that points out three examples of airlines taking advantage of chaos in the marketplace to improve their positions at competitors’ expense. None of these, with the possible exception of Lufthansa, appears to involve the strategy of the TPS — anyone with experience in lean and knowledge of the airline industry like to comment?

But they do illustrate the idea of shih, which involves creating circumstances now that we’ll be able to exploit in the future (More detail in If We Can Keep It, pp. 106 - 108).

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Here’s another nifty case study that uses the OODA loop to describe a successful turnaround effort*.

Compellingly titled “An analysis of Stelton’s turnaround from an agility perspective,” (2.2 MB PDF) it describes the actions of an entrepreneur, Michael Ring, to rescue a proud but faded Danish manufacturer of stainless steel dinnerware. Stelton was burdened by a product line that at one time was quite innovative and successful but by the turn of the 21st century, the company had developed bureaucratic atherosclerosis and had entered what appeared to be its terminal phase. Should sound familiar to afficianados of the airline and automotive industries.

The paper is the bachelor’s thesis of Jesper Bergmann at the Copenhagen Business School. Bergmann is also a successful entrepreneur and the founder of a multi-national custom clothing business. Bergmann’s advisor on the project was Ole Strömgren, who has taught courses using Boyd’s strategies for at least 10 years (I first met Ole at the inaugural Boyd Conference in Maine, July 1997).  Ole is the author of “The Importance of Evolutionary Epistemologies for Exploring the Limits of the Asian-Pacific Nation State,” (335 KB PDF) published on Belisarius.com in November 2003.
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*Pun quite unintentional

You certainly wouldn’t want to do it when times are good — the incumbents, flush with cash and the political power it buys, will crush you. You want to strike when they are weak, confused, and fixated on the one thing they understand: slashing costs, that is, customer service.

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