![]() ![]() The German Blitzkrieg commander Heinz Gaedcke explained that one of the essential reasons for the success of the Blitzkrieg was that the German commanders all trusted each other implicitly. Everyone knew that when they were faced with a decision, they should make whatever decision caused that number to go up.Įinheit translates to something like “mutual trust.” Having a clear focus, and emphasizing that over any particular tactic, empowers those around you to make decisions for themselves instead of having to run everything by you.įamously, Facebook kept the number of users on huge TV screens around their office for many years. In non-military terms, it is probably best understood as focus or the main priority. In military terms, it is usually the geographic point of attack. Schwerpunkt literally translates as center of gravity or emphasis, There were three central concepts to the Blitzkrieg that Boyd studied: Schwerpunkt, Einheit and Fingerspitzengefühl. The Blitzkrieg strategy employed by the Germans was much more fluid. It was less like flowing water and more like banging stones. World War I had been a long, protracted series of trench warfare. It is a model for strategy.īoyd’s primary focus of study for strategy was the German Blitzkrieg.īefore the Second World War, German generals had gone back and studied earlier military strategists and designed the blitzkrieg style to emulate the maneuver warfare styles of Sun Tzu and Genghis Khan rather than the attrition style of World War I. The OODA loop is often seen as a decision making model, but can be more accurately described as a model of individual and organizational learning and adaptation. This is a pretty cool thing to think about but it’s not intuitively obvious to me how I would operate differently in my life or business or investments by “becoming like water.”Īs I was reading through The Art of War, I thought of the work of John Boyd, another military strategist most famous for his idea of the OODA Loop. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. You must be shapeless, formless, like water. Bruce Lee when talking about his fighting style famously said: This metaphor has been echoed by many other strategists. Water is at once full of power and empty of form, impossible to attack and impossible to resist. When the water is released it rushes down in a torrent, just as our attack is irresistible.” When water accumulates in a deep canyon, no one can measure its amount, just as our defense shows no form. When the victorious get their people to go to battle as if they were directing a massive flood of water into a deep canyon, this is a matter of formation. It flows away from where you are strong to wherever you are weak. ![]() You can neither strike it offensively nor resist it defensively. If you are standing in the ocean as the waves come at you, punching or pushing at the wave is a strictly futile effort, the water simply redirects around you to the points where you are weak. Water is strong offensively and defensively. Genius, in Sun Tzu’s explanation, is to behave like water. The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting according to the opponent is called genius.” The central metaphor of Sun Tzu’s work is water.Ī military force has no constant formation, water has no constant shape. Your company being outcompeted by a competitor stinks, but your country being invaded and decimated and many people dying is like way, way worse so there’s a big incentive to get the strategy right. Though it can be abused, war is a helpful metaphor to think about conflict because the stakes for being right are really high. Its aim is invincibility, victory without battle, and unassailable strength through understanding the physics, politics, and psychology of conflict. The Art of War applies to competition and conflict in general, on every level from the interpersonal to the international. A more accurate title would be “The Art of Not Going to War Unless You Really Can’t Avoid It And Then Still Avoiding Fighting as Much as Possible.” That’s a bit of a mouthful, so probably best to stick the original, but you get the point. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is a book nominally about, well, war. ![]()
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