Sublime

President Wilson named one of his brightest generals to lead the incursion into Mexico: John J. Pershing. In a controversial move a decade earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had promoted Black Jack Pershing, over 762 superior officers, directly from captain to brigadier general. For the Mexican operation, Pershing selected several of the Army’s most promi

Leavenworth’s “applicatory method” drew heavily upon military history to analyze the quandaries faced by an army’s high command and to devise solutions under rapidly changing conditions. Students learned, through map exercises, to plan and control the movement of troops from afar.

The book is: Car Guys vs. Bean Counters: The Battle for the Soul of American Business.

As Ed worked throughout the eighties, he continually refined his ideas and teachings around Profound Knowledge. Those six management principles he originally taught at Nashua soon morphed into his now-famous “14 Points for Management,” which he outlines in Out of the Crisis.

The idea of the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop owes a lot to ideas from maneuver warfare, especially John Boyd’s OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop. The most accessible introduction to Boyd’s ideas is Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards. http://ericri.es/CertainToWin

It’s not hard to appreciate the bureau’s plight. Everybody wanted standards—it’s not as if manufacturers took pride in making incompatible hoses. It’s just that each firm desperately wanted its way of doing things to be the standard way, and for good reason. Losing a standards war meant having to retool, which might require purchasing expensive new

As Pershing’s chief of operations for the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I, Fox Conner directed the development and successful deployment of American combat forces in France. Pershing considered Conner to have been “a brilliant soldier” and “one of the finest characters our Army has ever produced.” Pershing paid tribute to Con