#197: Leadership Lessons (from Colonel John Boyd)
Dear Friends
On 6 March, one of my teachers, Prof Edward Webster passed on. This weekend was his funeral and memorial service.
It is said that when an elder dies it is as if a library has burned down. In Eddie’s case, the metaphor is even more appropriate. His work filled libraries. He inspired others to read and enrich their thinking and made it possible for activists outside of universities to access learning and knowledge. His impact spanned generations and enfolded thousands.
Karl von Holdt’s tribute gives you a measure of this giant.
This year many countries, including South Africa, have elections. Eddie’s life epitomised and embodied all that democracy once stood for. It reminds us of the responsibility we carry.
/ strategy
Today’s letter introduces us to Colonel John Boyd (Thank you to DataProphet founder Frans Cronje for recommending Robert Coram’s Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War).
To some, he was one of the century’s greatest military strategists, and yet, he was mostly vilified by the military hierarchy. His work centred around those who went into battle – soldiers, pilots, Marines. He cared little for accepted wisdom, for politicians or executives.
Coram’s book is an outsiders’ tale, an all-too-real rarely told story, of bureaucratic fights, whose triumphs are partial, but whose legacy is nevertheless important.
Amusingly, “Boyd” continues the anti-establishment battles with many scathing asides about generals who although unnamed are described in sufficient detail to be identifiable.
Frans cautioned that it was not the best-written of books. It is flawed and, nonetheless, is a fascinating account of bureaucratic warfare and an innovative thinker.
Although today a statue of Boyd stands in the Marine Corps Research Center alongside a model of the F16, a plane whose design was championed and shaped by his work, he died living in financial precarity and with strained relations with his children, celebrated and dismissed in equal measure.
Coram describes him speaking with such volume that he’d spray spittle over his listener. In arguments, he’d repeatedly jab opponents’ chests with his finger, on two occasions whilst holding a lit cigar, with predictable outcomes. He’d call colleagues in the early hours of the morning and speak for hours, testing ideas – one home eventually installed a ‘Boyd’ line, so that other calls could get through.
It is easy to be distracted by his eccentricities, but Boyd could also command officers and senators’ attention for hours on end. As much as he derided politics, he could play the game.
He was meticulous in his research, advising proteges, “You can never be wrong. If you make a technical statement, you better be right. If you’re not… you’ve had it”.
He relentlessly refined presentations to ensure that his message landed and actively established and worked networks to bypass bureaucratic obstacles (he’d distribute multiple copies of his ideas, ‘little brothers and sisters’, an early precursor of ‘going viral’).
The first part of his career was as a fighter pilot and then as an instructor.
It’s astonishing, but until the 1960s, no one had developed a strategy for aerial combat. Success and survival were attributed to individual genius.
Boyd changed that. He spent months pouring over the data and speaking to successful pilots seeking to understand how they’d won their battles. It’s a lesson we can all use – look for our repeated successes, understand their mechanics and abstract them into our own formula.
The resulting Energy Manoeuvrability Theory emphasised that it was the plane and the pilot’s ability to respond rapidly to changing circumstance that determined the outcome more than either’s absolute abilities.
He carried these insights into the second phase of his career at the Pentagon.
Coram tell us, “Civilians… think that the real business of the Pentagon has something to do with defending America. But it does not. The real business of the Pentagon is buying weapons”.
This led to over-engineered, wonderfully expensive weaponry and weak testing protocols. Boyd fought both.
Until Boyd’s interventions, briefs for new planes were driven by metrics – must climb to this height, must attain this speed – and each department would add components suiting their concerns, until the planes become ineffective.
For example, maintenance insisted that the plane have a built-in maintenance ladder. They argued it would add ‘just’ twenty pounds. Boyd knew that “dozens of subtle additions are caused by the ladder until finally the ladder adds not twenty pounds but two hundred” and rejected it.
What projects do you have underway that have a maintenance ladder attached?
The generals cared about vanity metrics, building the fastest plane or the plane that could climb the highest. Boyd only wanted to know how all the elements connected to best serve the pilot.
His insights ensured that the F-16 is one of military aviation’s nimblest planes and that the F-15 had a bubble canopy giving the pilot maximum visibility. He knew for pilots to succeed, they needed to see.
Seemingly self-evident, but how often don’t we design systems that make it hard to see what is happening?
Towards, the end of his career, Boyd zeroed in on military strategy. He distilled lessons from the world’s greatest generals into a presentation entitled Patterns of Conflict.
Running to more than 190 slides, it was longer than four hours. He refused to give it unless his audience would commit the time. He never gave an abbreviated version.
How often do we make decisions costing money and affecting lives, and simultaneously say, ‘we don’t have time to talk about it’?
Boyd was unbending. If you want to learn, you must take time to think.
There’s a lot to say, the book is 460 pages long. At some point, I will share with you his views on trust, manoeuvrability, synchronisation, and entropy, but we’re out of space today.
// self
Boyd would tell young officers that at some point in their career they’d be confronted with a choice of doing the right thing or taking a title. He’d ask, do you want to ‘do something’ or ‘be someone’? In his world, it was either or, he saw no possibility that one could achieve both.
In a poignant line, Corum writes, “Because he had no father, he did not know how to be a father. But because of Art Weibel and Frank Pettito he did know how to be a mentor”.
I wondered what might have happened had he explored position and contribution, father and mentor.
/// soul
Coram’s book provides powerful insight. Yet, I cannot write about military strategy without acknowledging what war is.
John Wenzel was a WW2 pilot who, at 99, was tormented by nightmares. He Bombed the Nazis. 75 Years Later, the Nightmares Began, tells his story.
Wenzel never spoke about the war. In its immediate aftermath, he painted in the day and drank at night. He called them his dark times, saying to a grandnephew that “he was a mess then”.
Old warriors would gather in bars, but ‘war stories’ were not their thing. They drank alongside each other in silence, needing the closeness not having nor wanting the words.
Their silence was celebrated as humility. It was that. It was also that words could not hold the horror.
Wenzel reflects “There was no place to talk about it, and no way to express myself”.
In later years, his daughters would ask him questions about the war. He never answered, until the memories returned in nightmares.
It was a story I knew well.
My Uncle George, the man who was my de facto grandfather, served on D-Day (he wasn’t an uncle either, at least not in the familial sense, but he played both roles well).
For years, as a young boy seduced by fictional tales of war, I asked him for stories. He always refused.
Then, one day, in his eighties, he suddenly declared “I wrote a bit about the war. Let me get it for you”.
My Aunt Joan leaned forward and whispered, “He still has nightmares you know”. “What’s that? What are you whispering?” he asked as he came back into the lounge. “Nothing” was, of course, the answer. He grunted and handed me a yellowed fragment of an old Croxley writing pad, ten pages in all.
He poured a second brandy, unusual for him, whilst I read. When questions formed on my lips he’d shake his head, and when I finished reading, he took the pages back. We never spoke about them. His sons gave them to me after he died.
He entitled it, “George Watson’s War Memories or A Great Emotional Experience or The Futility of War”.
He dedicated it “To all the poor bloody troops who were slaughtered in the fight for Freedom, Democracy, Capitalism, Communism and all the other isms and the right for the peoples of the world to go on slaughtering each other in the cause of freedom etc”.
He describes landing on a ‘beautiful Normandy Beach’ at low tide with machine gun fire slicing them down (he acidly observes “to confuse the enemy of course, who wouldn’t think that anybody could be so bloody stupid as to want to run all the way across that open beach”, the kinds of tactics that Boyd spent his career fighting), of Allied soldiers crushed by their own advancing flail tanks, of watching his friend die next to him blood pouring from his mouth, of the incoming tide pulling bodies into the surf, whilst grenades exploded around him.
My Uncle George and John Wenzel fought Fascism and still, war haunted their sleep. Neither could speak about it until near the end of their lives. That is war.
I am grateful to @but_i_thought for her ceasefire stack. It is a gentle reminder that this is the world we should want.
With love
Karl
PS: This NYT obituary will tell you more about Boyd.
PPS: Today’s letter was much longer than normal. Next week’s will be much shorter. If you’d like to read all ten pages of Uncle George’s reflections, email me and I’ll share them with you.