Jolly good day Michael,

Rummaging through some of your posts I was surprised to read your statement that, "Since my mother and father were both born and raised in the western US state of Montana – Big Sky Country – that makes me a Cowboy."

You Yanks have constantly stressed motivation, training, vision and related factors other than genes as the keys to who you are. Often I wonder whether we Brits would have gotten a bigger piece of the pie after World War II if Monty had understood that as well as Ike. Of course, there would have been little difference since we in the west eschew the spoils system.

One idea if you really want to claim your heritage is to actually get in the saddle for a summer as did one of your great manchild presidents, TR. Bring your iPod and blog to your heart's content -- perhaps the change of scenery will be even more inspirational than your coffee shop with the old newspapers.

When you come back, you'll be able to claim "tenderfoot" as your ethnicity and, to paraphrase Will, you might even have a little of that "lean and hungry look."

Yours,
Bobby

Michael,
I believe the second latte was an excellent idea. The formula condenses OODA pretty well. As an aside - I was thinking this and was looking for where I had read about OODA and pulled "Building the Real-Time Enterprise" off my bookshelf and noticed an eerie similarity between the authors name and yours. Guess I don't need to say that Observe and Orient makes up the visibility section of the formula and the Decide and Act pretty much make up motivation (in a company that does not reward innovation I may decide to do nothing....). I do like the training aspect. With training greater options become available to the motivated employees. This has a dual effect since employees, supplied with the right kind of information they can trust, are enabled to make better decisions they are happier employees. I believe most of us want to do a great job. And of course happy employees don't tend to leave - so it is self-serving to a large extent. I like the formula and have the added benefit of letting you know I enjoyed your book, even though I did not initially make the connection.

Interesting reading. You may wish to consider the motivation part. Motiation is the product of desirability*ability*institutional support. Ability is enhanced by training. So, the taining part in your formula is covered in the motivation definition. Desirability is embeeded in the vision part of your formula. Institutional support may enhance or decrease the desirability and ability.

So, going back to your formula it would read like
Business Agility = (Visibility + Motivation) x Training
= (visibility+ (ability+desirability+institutional support))*training

Hello c4si,

We have a quip here in the Island Nation that in America freedom reigns while here it just rains. So forgive our dreary side, however, often we see ourselves as needing to bring you Yanks back down to earth a bit. Dear chum, your OODA formula may be mildly clever, yet assigning numerical weights to the components you describe to get an actual numeric result would be highly subjective.

As a seafaring nation -- and perhaps you'll forgive me for touting the Union Jack a bit here -- we've known for centuries about the importance of visibility, training our crews and being motivated to sail across uncharted waters. You Yanks so often forget that it was we Brits who established english as the language of business, and the sun never set or has set on the trading routes we established. Indeed, we did use real numeric values in our navigation.

Your OODA formula is more a "chip off the old block" than the product of too much caffeine. As such a Shakespearian assessment of your grand innovation might be "much ado about nothing". For real inspiration try tea, old chap.

Fondly,
RU

Thanks for the article. It was quite interesting. However, what are you views on the following:

1- Scope of visibility?
2- Adding a 't' time component to the equation so as to introduce the acceleration bit. Since one could argue that you need to achieve agility or respond to change in a fast and timely manner!

...thanks.