Burton learned from Boyd that if a man does the right thing, it does not matter how overwhelming the odds against him. There always is a way to victory. “No matter what the situation is, no matter how bleak or how dark things appear, how scary, there is always a way out,” Burton says. “It works every time. And it all goes back to Boyd’s ideas on

“You can’t change big bureaucracies until they have a disaster.”

No matter how optimistic he is, when a man reaches sixty it is more difficult to cling to the idea that he is middle-aged. He stands at the threshold of old age and senses the increasing speed of time’s winged chariot. Intimations of mortality grow stronger.

“You must have inductive thinking,” he said again and again to the Marines. “There is not just one solution to a problem,” he said. “There are two or three or five ways to solve a problem. Never commit to a single solution.”

“You synchronize watches,” Boyd shouted, “not people.”

while wars take place between nations, every person experiences some form of war; conflict is a fundamental part of human nature. To prevail in personal and business relations, and especially war, we must understand what takes place in a person’s mind.

to shape the environment, one must manifest four qualities: variety, rapidity, harmony, and initiative. A commander must have a series of responses that can be applied rapidly; he must harmonize his efforts and never be passive. To understand the briefing, one must keep these four qualities in mind.

A commander can use this temporal discrepancy (a form of fast transient) to select the least-expected action rather than what is predicted to be the most-effective action. The enemy can also figure out what might be the most effective. To take the least-expected action disorients the enemy. It causes him to pause, to wonder, to question. This means

The most amazing aspect of the OODA Loop is that the losing side rarely understands what happened.