I haven’t written a Building Snowmobiles post in awhile and thought these two tidbits were worth putting up. Col John Boyd continues to influence folks to this day and it is neat to see where he pops up at.
The first sighting is a series of videos that were posted by Jason Brown. According to his twitter handle, he is an AF officer and author at a website called General Leadership. They are videos of John Boyd giving his Patterns of Conflict briefing to some congressional staffer’s. The sound quality sucks and I think a crowd funding campaign to clean up the audio of these would be awesome. I am sure some group could clean it up and give it justice. Here is a quote about the process of getting these transferred to youtube.
Published on Jan 4, 2015
This is a video of John Boyd delivering his Patterns of Conflict lecture. The audience appears to be a group of Congressional staffers in former Iowa Congressman Jim Lightfoot’s office. The year of production is unknown, but my best guess is mid-to-late 1980s. I copied this from a tape in the Boyd Collection at the USMC Archives at Quantico, Virginia, in 2007. The tape’s audio wasn’t the best quality (recommend using headphones). The lecture is over 6 hours, so I’ll probably have to break this into 12 or more parts. Each part takes a long time to upload, so it will be a few days/weeks to get the entire lecture online. Boyd’s acetate slides are washed out, but you can follow along with the slides by downloading Patterns of Conflict here.
Very cool and the series can be found at this youtube channel if you want to watch the whole thing. Jason Brown has conveniently chopped up some very interesting portions of this presentation. If you have headphones, I suggest you use those in order to get better clarity. The first video is Boyd discussing two heavyweights of strategy and war–Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu, and why he thought Sun Tzu got it right.
The second sighting of Boyd was over at Chet Richard’s blog. He just downloaded an outstanding slide presentation done by Dean Leane. He was the CEO of CRH of North America, and he applied the concepts of Boyd and his associates, to the strategic direction of the company. Here is what he did.
I asked my staff to read 4 books: Certain to Win, Boyd by Robert Coram, Maneuver Warfare Handbook by Bill Lind and Warfighting by the USMC. Although my people were sometimes puzzled by this curriculum, I was able to get most of what we were trying to get across stuffed into the assembled noggins.
Between 2000 and 2010, CRH North America went from no presence whatsoever to the largest supplier in its market sector in the NAFTA region. If anyone thinks this is easy, then I suggest they try it.
What sucks though is CRH eventually sold to their competitor. Meaning they did such a good job, that their competitor made a ridiculous offer to buy the company. Which is actually a good thing as well. If you can’t beat them, then buy them I guess. lol Good stuff and I highly recommend checking out all the new material to ‘get orientated’. –Matt