Business isn’t war, but we can learn a lot from it.

With all due respect to Kevin O’Leary, and any success hungry 20-somethings out there pouring over Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” or Musashi’s “Book of the Five Rings” with a highlighter ( I was one of you, many years ago ), business and warfare are fundamentally different domains.

The chief distinction is that war is an affair of mutual antagonism between belligerents. Business on the other hand, despite having occasional flare ups of intense competition, is based fundamentally on the willing cooperation between a producer of some good or service and their customer base. Much of what would be considered good sense in warfare makes bad business practice – and is probably illegal if not merely immoral. The majority of marketing hype trying to pass off military strategy and tactics as a template for the business world is just that – hype. But the two fields are not without overlap and there are valuable lessons that we can port from one to the other.

What business and war have in common is the mobilization of large groups of human beings towards the achievement of difficult objectives under conditions of scarcity. The absolute best text on the lessons of war applied to business is, in my not so humble opinion, Chet Richards’ Certain To Win: The Strategy of John Boyd Applied to Business.

(While John Boyd was a fascinating and brilliant man, I don’t want to get sidetracked into writing a biography. You can read more about him here.)

John Boyd’s theories predate the Agile software development manifesto that birthed all of our favorite industry buzzwords and systems (SCRUM, Extreme Programming, etc), and Chet Richards was one of the first Westerners to travel to Japan and study the Toyota Production System that birthed today’s “lean manufacturing”, Six Sigma and Kanban organizational systems. Properly understood, all of these organizational methodologies are interpretations and implementations of the fundamental rules of culture and competition identified by Boyd and extrapolated by Richards.

I believe it is vital for American businesses to understand the lessons that Boyd and Richards have been trying to teach us for forty years if we are to compete in the growing global marketplace. All too many businesses adopt, for example, SCRUM software planning without understanding the real purpose, and so have all the right artifacts but modest to non-existent results. The real way to grow is not to adopt the latest industry buzzwords or send our employees to costly certification programs, but to change our thinking and see the world in a new and more holistic light.

This post is an introduction to a series of posts exploring the ideas contained in Certain to Win. I hope you find it useful for your business and your personal development. If you’re so inclined I recommend you pick up a copy of Chet Richards book on Amazon and follow along. Make sure to keep your highlighter handy.

– Brendan