Miyamoto Musashi via Wikipedia
Short but excellent, Chet Richards’ Certain to Win brings the underlying principles of 4th generation warfare to contemporary business and management. It’s a lot of Sun Tzu and Musashi mixed with von Clausewitz, Rommel, Patton, and Boyd. The bottom line is that organizations work best when they have clear visions, well-practiced skills, implicit trust amongst all contributors, and the commitment constant course corrections.
Supervisors deliver a picture of business needs, employees dissect and modify the problem statement, and then commit to delivering a solution. Communications flow rapidly in all directions, allowing teams to coordinate without slowing down and allowing leadership to stay in touch with the edges of the organization.
The concept of Schwerpunkt dominates the narrative here: A commonly held vision or overarching goal allows each unit of the organization to make decisions that continuously move them towards the goal. Toyota’s lean manufacturing Schwerpunkt was to continuously strive to decrease the time between order placement and order fulfillment. Everything else was secondary to that goal.
The only way to build the organizational culture required for this style of agility is to preach it at the top, incentivize all employees to buy in, and tactfully remove middle managers who don’t come along. Seeking and acting on bad news is seen as a critical component in strategy so employees are encouraged and protected in this mission.
Summary
Excellent read. It expands on some of the denser Eastern military philosophy you may have already read and frames it in a contemporary, easy to understand setting. Consider reading the biography “Boyd – The fighter pilot who changed the art of war” if you prefer a more holistic approach to the topic.
Related articles
- Summary and Review of The Art of War by Sun Tzu, Translated by Thomas Cleary (bookstove.com)
- Want to Learn Japanese History? Start with Sengoku (sebastianmarshall.com)
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