But few of them bother to learn the deeper underpinnings of their trade. They spend countless hours flying fast jets, endlessly training the same maneuvers, constantly risking their lives. Most fighter pilots (or so I’m told) are courageous and intuitive people. Really know your stuff and learn beyond the boundaries of your core expertise. That’s all impressive, but what can startups learn from a man like that? There are three main points: 1. The quick collapse of Saddam Hussein’s forces was a direct result of Boyd’s unconventional strategic approach. As a specific example, Boyd is credited with developing most of the American strategy for the successful 1991 first Gulf War against Iraq. He developed the concept of the OODA loop (more about it below) that brought a highly dynamic and decentralized view of decision making and leadership to military commanders. He is credited with many of the innovations that made the F-15 and F-16 fighter planes possible, both seen as revolutionary designs at the time (although military bureaucracy watered down many of Boyd’s most cutting-edge ideas).īut the most lasting legacy of Boyd’s work is his writing and teaching about new approaches to military strategy. Later in life, Boyd worked as a strategist, engineer and military scholar in the Pentagon and beyond. Outfit not recommended for investor pitches. Not coincidentally, that’s a combination you often find in the best entrepreneurs as well. His advantage was a combination of the daredevilry typically found in fighter pilots in combination with a deep understanding of the underlying principles of air combat. Boyd spent the first years of his career as a pilot and made a name for himself as “Forty Second Boyd” because he was able to beat any opponent in an air combat dogfight within 40 seconds. The military was the original source of advanced strategic thinking, and there’s still a lot to be learned from this domain.Ī few months ago, I stumbled upon the fascinating biography of John Boyd, a legendary military fighter pilot and military strategist (through Venkatesh Rao’s complex, but very inspiring blog). Of course, military metaphors are a bit overused in business, but only if you’re being too simplistic. A good example are some ideas that were originally developed for military air combat, but are easily applied to startup reality. Porter’s wildly overused Five Forces framework is the canonical example for a static and analysis-heavy approach.įor fresh thinking, it’s often useful to look beyond the boundaries of your own industry or domain and try to apply principles found elsewhere to the world of startups. The frameworks proposed by most authors might give you a better understanding of what your competitive landscape is right now, but there’s typically not much useful advice for how to apply these insights into your own strategy and leadership process. Second, they tend to be heavy on the analysis and light on action. Most of these books suffer from two issues that make them not overly useful for startup leadership teams: First, they are often written with fairly static, mature markets in mind where building lasting competitive barriers is still possible – not exactly the reality of today’s rapidly changing technology markets. There’s of course plenty of management literature about competitive analysis, differentiation and strategic positioning versus the competition. While most of this should be driven by a deep understanding of customer needs, it’s also essential to know what other players in your market are doing to avoid commoditization. And finally, it’s essential to build a product that has a genuine advantage over the other players in the industry. Employees want to be motivated by the feeling of working for the best company in the industry. Your salespeople need to explain how you’re different (and better) every day to potential customers. Having said that, the subject of competition comes up all the time for startups: Investors want to know why they should fund you and not somebody else who seems to do something similar. A lot of wise people, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, rightfully suggest that you should focus most of your energy on the customer and the problems you’re solving for him or her, not on your competitors. One of the worst mistakes a startup can make, particularly at its earliest stage, is to obsess too much about competition.
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