Change is hard. Managing in an uncertain world is hard, and winning in this environment is even harder. All of these things make it very difficult to keep your head in the game and to be competitive. John Boyd was an officer, military pilot, and a military strategist that dedicated much of his life to thinking about thinking. I find his ideas captivating and timely.
John Boyd, was a maverick U.S. Air Force colonel and fighter pilot, who never ran a company, yet his ideas have quietly shaped many of the world’s most adaptive organizations and leaders. His genius was not in tactics but in synthesis. He fused physics, philosophy, and human psychology into a unified theory of adaptation—showing that victory, in war or business, comes not from strength or scale, but from speed of learning.Boyd’s central revelation was simple but radical: survival and winning depends on the ability to adapt faster than the environment, and faster than your adversaries can disorient you. The organizations that thrive are not those that predict the future perfectly, but those that can sense, decide, and act faster and more coherently than competitors.
