📚 Strategy & a pilot named Boyd (Part II: Business)

A review of Certain to Win by Chet Richards

So back in Norway, I was sitting in the car with my boss, we got to talking about books. Of course we did; people who don’t read books don’t build non-fiction reading software for power users. And for reasons I no longer recall, Tristan recommended Certain to Win. They weren’t marching orders — Tristan is not that kind of leader — but I've rarely heard him endorse anything so strongly.

I did not grow up steeped in startup culture. Mostly I grew up in a blue collar town; the entrepreneurs I knew were opening up custom tint shops and restaurants, not software companies. The professions I was interested in when I was younger were the sorts of things you would find in a children’s book: lawyer, teacher.

So now that I found myself working at Readwise in the amorphous job of “quality assurance,” I have been in some ways playing catch up.

I do have some advantages; all those years playing video games helped a lot. Probably the most valuable thing I've ever done was hang out on the internet with nerdy boys in the ‘90s. But that lets me interface with the engineers, which is useful for conversational tactics and day-to-day grasp on the culture. It’s less handy for being able to anticipate what my bosses want from me, or evaluating whether I’ve landed in a stable position — and as layoffs rock the tech industry, you bet I’m motivated to care about the bigger picture.

But if you tuned in to Part I of this review last week, could you tell that I am not really part of the target audience for Certain to Win by Chet Richards? (Here’s an Amazon affiliate link for the book, in case you missed it) Five thousand words in last week I barely talked about what makes for good business strategy…

So let’s do that now.

Building an Organizational Climate for Operational Success

Richards really went all-in on the idea that English doesnt even have the right words for the things that make businesses successful. He mostly wanted to talk about ch’i and cheng and a whole slew of German and Japanese words. I found this pretty ironic given that the USA — despite some annoying recent tax laws — is still going strong in terms of being a haven for entrepreneurs. Without getting to deep into the politics of it, I can’t think of many people who think business innovation is coming out of the EU these days. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Anyway, that aside, here are the fancy bits of jargon and what they actually mean.

Einheit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion. The idea is that to be effective, training and shared experiences must expose the organization to more and more complex and dangerous situations so that people finally learn to trust each other in the confusion of conflict. This is hard on a remote team like mine, which is one of the reasons we do things like get together every six months and go on hikes and road trips or whatever. 

Fingerspitzengefühl: Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations. It is often described as the “ability to feel the battle.” During the North African campaign, the British ascribed this seemingly mystical quality to Rommel because he always seemed to know what the British were going to do. In a software startup context like mine, I think of it is as having an intuitive feel of upcoming trends in the user community (the folks who get in at the beginning of a boom always do better), or a spidey-sense for when a user report might be related to a critical, emergent issue vs. a weird edge case. 

If I send up a flare, sometimes I don’t have time to write out the full ticket and get all of the details — perhaps it’s a Friday afternoon, or I’m notwhere near a computer. But while the optimal amount of false alarms is not zero, neither do I want to be the boy who cried wolf. Knowing when to send up that flare is hard to teach with checklists and charts, similar to how troubleshooting weird computer glitches sometimes comes down to feel and pattern-matching in a way that the checklists I wrote out when on maternity leave just can’t replicate. 

Zen and other oriental philosophies talk at great length about intuitive knowledge, but they also stress that it comes through years of experience and self-discipline. In medieval Japan, samurai warriors practiced with the long sword until it became as an extension of their arm. When the fight starts, you don’t have time to stop and think about the fundamentals. In fact, one of the goals of Japanese samurai strategy was to cause this very “stopping” of the mind in their opponents.

Developing good instincts helps you bias toward action in a useful way. When you are exhausted, you need to have the right habits, the right muscle memory. When I first started answering customer emails, it was kind of terrifying. I would agonize over every word and triple-check to make sure I hadn’t made an embarrasing email. Now, it’s second nature. 

Auftragstaktik: Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subordinate

Readwise likes to consider itself a “mission-oriented company.” My bosses are phenomenal about flexbility, and have never been anything less than supportive of me taking time off. But:

winning requires more than the promise of survival. It must offer an idea of such power and appeal that people will, at times, neglect their other responsibilities and work nights and weekends and extend trips to make it happen.

I got pregnant with my daughter almost immediately after I started (part-time) with Readwise. It was a really difficult pregnancy and I wasn’t able to move to full-time when I had originally planned. But when they asked me how long I intended go dark for maternity leave, I begged them not to (metaphorically) kick me out of slack for a few months — I wasn’t going to be able to handle email, but I still wanted to test the app, to be available to answer questions. I like working on something that helps people, I like working on an app I used for hobby usage before I was ever employed by the company.

Most of my colleagues were Readwise users long before we were hired to actively work on the app, and I think it makes for a stronger company because the idea of building better non-fiction reading software deeply appeals to us. I have certainly worked the occasional 12 hour day, or popped in to Slack to help out with a critical issue from the woods on a Saturday — you couldn’t buy that kind of engagement from me, I don’t need the money. You have to earn it — and what I need is to feel valued, to feel useful, to feel like I am making a difference.

Herb Kelleher, chairman and recently retired CEO of Southwest Airlines, brags that competitors could copy the details of his system—direct (as opposed to hub-and-spoke) routings, no reserved seats or meals, one type of aircraft, etc.—but they couldn’t copy the culture, the vibrant esprit de corps, because “they can’t buy that.”

I want to help make non-fiction reading software as good an experience as non-fiction writing software and making it as obvious and natural to use a computer to read as we do to write. I trust my boss’ leadership and vision. You can’t buy that kind of trust.

Years before I ever worked for Readwise, I volunteered a lot of time in the Obsidian user community. I ‘donated’ money to be a ‘VIP’ supporter and get access to the a smaller discord channel, but I did that because I wanted to support the team, not because I got anything in particular out of that supporter channel. I just like small, bootstrapped companies determined to help uplift the ability of humans to learn. It’s not like this is a unique phenomenon.

Consider the original Apple ad for the Mac that ran during the 1984 Super Bowl—it helped create a cadre of loyalists that have kept the company alive for 20 more years, despite the fact that for years, Apples were slower and more expensive than comparable PCs from Dell, HP, or IBM. It is not uncommon to read postings on the Mac Internet forums urging people to buy some accessory or software “to help support Apple.” Similarly, many people drive the 300 mile roundtrip from my home in Atlanta to Birmingham, Alabama, to fly Southwest Airlines, and it’s not unusual for passengers to help the cabin crew pick up trash during their famously short ground times (as I have found myself doing.) The idea is that not only does a compelling mission motivate and uplift employees, but it attracts and keeps customers and sometimes makes them fanatic adherents of the company.

Schwerpunkt: Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation

About focus, Richards had this to say:

By the middle of the 17th century in Japan the concept of focus had evolved to a high level of sophistication and had taken on the psychological overtones that we will examine later in this chapter. In his classic on strategy, A Book of Five Rings (1645), the samurai who is best known in the West, Miyamoto Musashi, removed the concept from the physical world entirely by designating the spirit of the opponent as the focus: Do not even consider risking a decision by cold steel until you have defeated the enemy’s will to fight.

It’s easy to see examples of this in the real world — the political will to fight in the Middle East is often sapped even when no one doubts that Western forces could win a straight-up fight. Those sorts of ‘wars’ are often won or lost long before forces are committed, at least in terms of ‘likelihood of achieving the stated goals’. But in business it’s harder for me to come to grips with how that advice might useful.

I liked this explanation better:

There is a way to preserve the benefits of planning while avoiding the prophetic nature and the complexity of formal decision models and which will also help you exploit the chaos of the real world. You can use strategy to give this process a shape that the human mind can work with.

The framework that I’ve put in with meal planning is a good example of this. It vastly simplifies dinner. If I think about the ingredients, think about the final form, and then just combine, it’s easier than coming up with a whole plan from scratch. Monday is bun night, Tuesday is meat and veg, Wednesday is in a bowl, Thursday is with a tortilla, Friday is some variation on pizza. Bam, so easy to slot in “chicken is on sale” or “I’m in the mood for lamb” or “I have a lot more leftover onions than I planned” into those templates and end up with something different to eat every week.

Incidentally, one of my favorite moments in the book was when Richards points out that all of this is very similar to parenting advice.

In fact, the whole notion that we can “control” other human beings is a fallacy. Psychologist Michael Popkin, founder of the highly successful “Active Parenting” program, calls it the “Paradox of Control: The more you try to control a teen, the less you can influence that teen.” The reason? “Control eventually leads to resistance, and resistance to rebellion.” This is true of all human beings, not only teenagers. One of Boyd’s favorite expressions was “The more you try to control people, the less control you get.”

Every now and then I discuss parenting, management, or teaching pedagogy with someone, and they are surprised when I opine that the fundmemtals don’t change all that much between those life stages. People are people. How I manage a toddler is not really that different from how I managed a teenager. Here are two of the five simple ways to destroy trust in any organization (including, imo, families!):

• Inconsistent messages—management proclaims one thing, actually does another.

• Misplaced benevolence—ignoring a poor performing or untrustworthy manager, or employee.

Yeah, those are risks. But getting back to schwerpunkt, the idea of playing off the expected, cheng, with the unexpected, chi, plays a major role in Boyd’s conception of maneuver warfare. From a later article on the subject, Richards explains in brief:

Give the customer what he expects, wants, needs.  In simple terms, the product or service you provide has to work and do what you’ve told him it will do. But customers become bored, eventually, with this approach. To hook them for the long term, you also need the unexpected, the surprising, the delightful.

I have definitely heard the phrase “surprise and delight” a lot in meetings, and I see the phrase pretty often online as well. Here’s one example focused on making sure to intentionally design “chocolate chip banana bread” into your business. It’s nominally a podcast, but there’s a good summary at the end and a ton of recommended books as well.

Surprise and Delight

The best Japanese carmakers routinely use their superior OODA loop speeds both to find and to shape what customers really want, whether the customers know it or not. The Japanese even have a name for it: miryoku teki hinshitsu, which roughly translates as “What the customer finds so beguiling or fascinating that he cannot live without it.”

This made me laugh a little because it’s seems like the idea of worrying about what is great before worrying about being good. Minimum viable product and whatnot. But I couldn’t help but think of romance.

Back in the glory days of OKCupid, when the only market I really cared about was the dating market, I came across a lot of profiles of people with ‘flaws’ I needed to overlook — but whose other attributes were really compelling. Successful men who traveled a lot for business, that sort of thing. My now-husband’s profile, by contrast, wasn’t terribly interesting; it was a little light on detail, if I’m being honest. A couple of photos of a reasonably normal guy, a fairly straightforward, milquetost prose section. But it was unique in that every single aspect of it — every photo, every phrase — was of something I liked. Renaissance festival photo, check. Hiking in the woods, check.

So I messaged him, because hell why not. And he answered me, because let’s be honest women don’t often message guys and it was a relatively novel experience for him. We ended up making dinner plans that I almost cancelled — something came up — but in the end I was really interested in the tapas place he was taking me out to. We (try to) go there every year for our anniversary now. I’m very happy.

This is not normal, I am not normal, if I have learned anything about business strategy it is that you shouuld not over-index on me.

But something similar happened with my house. The photos were very mediocre, the kitchen was ludicrously small for the price point, it looked like a relatively ugly three-bedroom rancher because it was a relatively ugly three-bedroom rancher (with a mutant addition on top of the enormous garage that went all but unmentioned in the listing). My husband, enormous outlier that he is, took one look at the square footage to price ratio and insisted we go look.

The rest is history, but this is not normal. Usually people fall in love with a really cool unique thing they can’t live without and put up with a bunch of subpar things because they really care about e2e encryption or owning their own data or, for me, being able to snooze my god damn emails. You want to know why I still use gmail? That’s why.

What Counts as Strategy?

At one popint, Richards includes a chart specifically pointing toward “soft” things that are hard to quantify. Basically, “We need good morale, leadership, harmony, teamwork, and a sense of mission → in order to appear ambiguous, be deceptive, generate suprise and panic, seize and keep the initiatve, create and exploid oppotunities → to cause bickering, scapegoating, confusion, panic, rout, defections & surrender.”

If real life were so linear! Stuff like “cleverness” or “skill” or “resources” is apparently easy to quantify and thus largely irrelevant to Richards’ points. But I sort of found it disappointing that this chart, ostensibly about business, was framed in terms of defeating the enemy instead of serving the customer. Perhaps that’s the collaborative woman in me — perhaps related to why there are so few female founders. I don’t know.

But if I were starting up a new drywall company in my hometown I don’t think I’d necessarily want to cause bickering, scapegoating, confusion, panic, rout, defections & surrender in my competitors. I think I’d like to imagine a world where the town is growing enough to support the both of us.

Perhaps this is naive, though. I’ve heard reasonably compelling arguments that business consolidation is really important for helping local economies succeed. Here’s one called “Want growth? Kill small businesses” that I don’t, like, personally endorse, but certainly was food for thought.

Big and nimble is hard, though — and Richards spends most of the book extolling the virtues of being nimble.

Speed Really is What Watters

The idea that operating at a quicker time pace than one’s opponent can produce psychological effects offers a way out of the “bigger (or more expensive) is better” syndrome. An opponent who cannot make decisions to employ his forces effectively—his command and staff functions become paralyzed by bickering and bureaucracy, for example—is defeated before the engagement begins, no matter how many weapons sit in his inventory. In this way, one could truly achieve Sun Tzu’s goal of winning without fighting.

The metaphor here is that a small, nimble company can take on a behemoth and win when it is not weighed down by bureaucracy and the opponent is. For years, my favorite note-taking app — Obsidian — was run by a husband-and-wife team. I wouldn’t say they ‘defeated’ incumbents like Evernote, OneNote, Notion or Apple Notes, but they certainly have carved out an impressive niche.

One way they managed it was because Silver and Licat had good judgment, built a strong user community, and had a timely vision. But another is that Licat is frankly incredibly responsive, and remarkably fast at shipping clean code. Shipping fast is a hell of a moat when it comes to business, Richards isn’t wrong about that. It’s hard to innovate against someone who can swiftly implement everything your app makes people excited about as well as all their own ideas. Obsidian’s plugin ecosystem meant that most times when a competing app came out with a neat thing, it could be swiftly implemented within Obsidian.

The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one’s efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements.

When Omnivore — a free and open source app that has some commonalities with Readwise Reader — announced they had been aquihired by Elevenlabs, my boss immediately dropped what he was doing and started working on a way to import data from Omnivore to Reader. Imagine if we had so many formal processes in place that such a feature had to go through a program manager, a project manager, a development cycle meeting, and six rounds of testing or whatever?

I assume a lot of users would have just figured something else out in the meantime and never gotten around to trying Reader.

This is one reason roadmaps can be dangerous.

This is why “roadmaps of the future” that masquerade as strategy will get you into trouble. You’ve seen them: first we’re going to do this, then that, then the other thing. As if neither the customer nor competition much mattered. As we have discussed, these are complex plans, that is, intentions, and not strategy at all.

Now, Tristan is the boss, obviously he can cut through a lot of red tape. But frankly all of us are entrusted with taking the initiative, with skipping the formalities when it makes sense, running things up the flagpole or hitting the big red alarm button. Back in January, my colleague Artem “went renegade” and implemented a feature (vertical pagination) no one had asked him to build, because he thought it would solve a problem we needed to solve. It’s a very clever innovation you can read more about here. Another company might have punished him for it.

The German organizational climate encouraged people to act, and to take the initiative, even during the terror and chaos of war. Within this climate, the principles of mutual trust and intuitive competence make much of implicit communication, as opposed to detailed, written instructions. The Germans felt they had no alternative. As the Chief of the Prussian General Staff in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, observed in the mid-1800s, the greater risk is the loss of time that comes from always trying to be explicit. Or as General Gaedcke commented about his unit in WW II, if he had tried to write everything down, “we would have been too late with every attack we ever attempted.”

Implicit communication — the raised eyebrow, the slight hesitation — is hard with a remote company, which is one reason we do video-chat meetings periodically. But it is possible. When I first started at Readwise, I personally tagged and annotated every bug report and ran my intuitions past Tristan before moving tickets on deck for the development team. I never directly interfaced with developers. But now I’m more experienced, I’ve earned trust. I sometimes ping developers directly on things where adding my boss to the loop would just slow things down. In some ways that’s obvious: as I earn trust and demonstrate competence, I gain more autonomy, more freedom, and more responsibility.

But sometimes even obvious things benefit from being spelled out and reflected on.

If I tried to sit down and write out formal test cases for everything that could benefit from being tested then I would be doing nothing but writing tasks for the rest of my life — I certainly wouldn’t have time to actually use the app, and dogfooding (how’s that for jargon?) is really valuable! The formal procedures were important in the beginning as a training mechanism, but now it is very valuable to be able to do it much more informally so that we can be speedy.

There are tradeoffs between doing things “perfectly” and doing them “at all.” I’ve always been better at doing things quickly than doing them well, internal niggles aside. Fundamentally my job is not to find every edge case possible, or to write a perfect ticket for every problem I find. My job is to support the overall strategic goals of the company within my domain. Blocking a new version for sixteen days searching for reproduction steps of a strange bug that impacted only me, only once, would not be a good use of time.

But it’s hard to thnk that way! The incentives (equity notwithstanding; I’m not terribly motivated by a maybe of far future money) are to have everything in my department ship shape and looking perfect, to ensure that no bugs ever ship to production because fundamentally it’s my fault if they do. The worst feeling is the feeling like you’ve failed the users of your app, your colleauges, in some meaningful way. It’s an awful feeling, and I don’t need someone to chastise me or “get me in trouble” to feel bad when I let the team down by having a bad ticket, or let a bug slip through. So I’m constantly fighting the urge to let the backlog build up and to do a perfect job on everything I touch. But the trade-off is something important being buried in that backlog, and finding out about that way too late.

I found it incredibly freeing to just be empowered my judgment to do what I think is best. I ask for clarification if I need extra information about the overall strategic goals, and I pay attention during the presentations and conversations when we get together in person, and so far it seems to be going fine.

When is a Problem Systemic?

Though I spent most of the book connecting dots to things I’ve seen Tristan do, there were several moments in the book where I flashed back to my time as a teacher.

If in your organization you have a small number of people making mistakes and performing poorly, it’s probably their fault. You should spend your time working with them, or transfer them to other jobs, or if neither of those options is feasible, remove them. […] If it’s much more than 10%, though, then it’s the system’s fault and you should put your effort into fixing the system and quit blaming or exhorting the people in it.

I would have given a lot to have been able to avoid the incessant pointless emails and visits from department chairs and assistant principals nagging me about (for one single lonely example) calling home individually (emails weren’t good enough) every student with a bad grade in my class, whether they had a GPA well below 2.0, whether they were chronically absent, whether their parents were already getting automated emails and phone calls from the school (they were), whether the parents or child showed any indication whatsoever they gave a single solid damn about whether the class was passed.

The amount of blame I personally received that year (my tenth year in education and the first time I was ever treated as anything but a star performer) is a big reason I left teaching, of course. But it’s hard to see how I could have been uniquely responsible for 50+ 11th graders not writing so much as a single paragraph on a standardized test in the exact same style they’d been getting four times a year since 6th grade. I had access to their other grades; they weren’t doing well elsewhere either. But the year I quit teaching I was point-blank told that my students deserved better than me, because by trying to get them off their phones and working independently and quietly while I moved around the room helping them (as opposed to ‘working’ in groups while moving around the room using their phones to do their assignments)… look, this is the wrong place to dwell on it. But the passage hit home.

The organization I was part of had deep-set problems; the entire administrative staff had been removed and replaced the year before, this was not unknown. But instead of treating it like a systemic problem, my bosses acted as though with enough effort on the part of the teachers alone, we could solve everything… and I strongly believe the methods they were pushing (e.g. group work for all non-test activities) were actively detrimental to children.

Most of the problems that drove me out of teaching were things like (1) lack of autonomy (2) horrible technology procurement practices (3) too many students per class (4) failure to restrict upper-level classes to students who had demonstrated ability (5) demands that I simultaneosly create lessons that worked in the classroom to require teacher engagement and meaningful group work while also being able to be completed at home independently. It wasn’t the kids, it wasn’t the parents — it was procurement, it was policy, it was my shockingly unreasonable bosses.

It was precisely this:

For most of us in white-collar professions, the greatest threat to mutual trust is the micromanager. Have you ever worked for a one of these people? You know the type, hacks up your report without ever bothering to explain why, moves columns around in tables, and rewrites random sentences. Even if this somehow improved the final product, do you feel that he trusts you? Did the experience improve your intuitive competence? After a while, you lose any thought of initiative or pride of workmanship. Why bother, he is going to change it anyway.

Stay Aware of the Changing Landscape

Along those lines, there was one line in particular the resonated with me.

As a result of implementing maneuver conflict, many of the existing processes and the relationships between them are going to disappear, and so it would be a waste of time and money to “improve” them.

Staying aware of the surrounding landscape is critical for good decision-making. Every now and then I see some piece of snark on the internet about how thus-and-such spends “too much time on Twitter” and not enough time “actively managing” but, like, a huge chunk of the value-add of Twitter — or Hacker News, or other social media outlets — is that it is the cutting-edge for news for decision-makers (and tech journalists). To take a non-tech example, literary agents need to anticipate shifts in the market, to be able to notice when people stop buying young adult dystopia and start buying cozy romances. When that shift is coming, how much sense does it make to agonize over the topic of the speech you’re going to give at the next DystopiaCon? Not very much!

Even aside from watching trends, though, there’s something to be said for taking time to relax, to not do “productive” work, to let the mind wander and see what there is to see out there in creative spaces.

The OODA loop stands for “Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.”

“Observe” means much more than “see.” “Absorb” might be more descriptive if it did not have a passive undertone. “Go out and get all the information you can by whatever means possible” is even closer. You can never be sure beforehand which stray idea will provide the key to unlock some fatal dilemma. […] Like the canopy on the Korean-era MiGs, anything that restricts the inflow of information or ideas can lead to mismatches (disorientations) between what you think is happening and what actually is and may also delay you from spotting (and so acting upon) these mismatches.

In the software-as-a-service world, I tend to think of customer interactions as “the front lines.” Licat and Silver (founders of Obsidian) a lot of time in Discord talking to users in the early days. Dan and Tristan (the founders of Readwise) engage on Twitter and Reddit. A lot of startups — Elicit, Tana — use Slack, especially for connecting with creators making user-facing content. Some companies (like Substack) use AI and search databases to help users answer questions, but I often wonder how much insight the people running those companies gain about user patterns and needs from that — whether they ever sit down and look at statistics on what kinds of searches are getting punched into those boxes. It seems like it would be a good idea.

Speaking of AI, the tech world is in the midst of a huge shift — and I, for one, am waiting for things to settle out before continuing to optimize my system to facilitate, say, improved search. I’m sure in a year or so personal models will get easier to tune and the APIs will become more user-friendly, etc. So like Richards points out at the beginning of this section, why waste effort when there are other useful things I could work on instead?

⁠⁠Quickness, as we know, depends upon the climate in which the OODA loop operates, and a particularly effective climate for this is the one we have called the “key attributes of the blitzkrieg”: mutual trust/unity/cohesion, intuitive knowledge; mission contract/orders; and focus of effort. This climate isn’t implemented so much as it grows naturally under conditions where people study it, embrace it, and those who use it are rewarded and those who do not are removed.

Richards makes much of the importance of the reward/remove dichotomy. There’s even a mantra: “promote those who do, remove those who do not.” Hiring well in the first place is, of course, harder.

Are Battles the Opposite of Business?

One thing that I spent some time reflecting on was that in many ways war is the opposite of business — war generally destroys value, and business generally speaking creates it. War is sort of definitionally zero-sum, even when the outcome of a war leads to a better world (I’m certainly glad of America’s independence from Britain, for one easy example). The notion that “violence doesn’t solve anything” is one of the greatest myths wrought by civilization. Regrettable though it may be, it is war that sets our borders and the threat of it that preserves the safety of our resources within it. For example, the western border of Germany remains at the Rhine due largely in part to the Battle of Teutoberg Forest, where Rome lost three of its roughly eleven legions.

Violence has solved a lot of problems for a lot of societies over the years — even if it is just to bleed off a part of the youth bulge — but as a general rule, more developed societies prefer non-violent solutions to problems. It’s why we settle things with laws instead of brawls; economic strength in lieu of military might. It’s why we try to hold elections, instead of coups. Even bulls and wolves prefer ritualistic displays of strength to actual combat, where possible.

Despite modern-day levers like sanctions or examples like the collapse of the USSR, though, business is not fundamentally about wielding economic might like a cudgel. It is about growing wealth. And although there is certainly competition out there in the business world — and the rise of mergers and monoplization is giving guys like Matt Stoller fits — I don’t know how convinced I am that you can take what works in a military context and apply it to business, any more than parenting is always a good guide for management. There are parallels, but it behooves us to be careful when applying thsoe anecdotes to our actions.

Loyalty is great and all, but can you imagine a CEO sending somebody to Leavenworth for mouthing off to middle management? Something to keep in mind when applying the lessons of war to the art of business.