How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#11

Post by philosophygeek » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?

I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble, watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile.

With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of global economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last. Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively.

I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#12

Post by tyingq » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

I imagine in many cases, what they chose to do in the past matters more than what they are doing now...in terms of survival.

Cash reserves, assets you can get loans on, percentage of workforce that are contractors or professional services, flexible contracts, reasonable real estate costs, for example.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#13

Post by Ididntdothis » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

philosophygeek wrote: post #11

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why…

“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why things are contracting, why difficult decisions need to be made, can't we just wait this one out...?“

I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of us”.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#14

Post by throwaway8291 » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

philosophygeek wrote: post #11

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why…

It's an artificial scarcity, though. We have the most productive technologies ever - we are just not very good to put a better part of them flow towards common good.

The amount of senseless applications and waste is staggering.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#15

Post by hammock » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

jph wrote: post #6

The title quote "observe, orient, decide, act" is called the OODA loop, and it turns out the OODA loop is significantly more valuable than the article lets on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop The OODA loop was developed by military strategist John Boyd, to explain how to direct one's energies to defeat an adversary and survive. Boyd emphasized that "the loop" is actually a set of interacting loops that are to…

I highly recommend the biography "Boyd" about this man. I think I got the initial reco from this site.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#16

Post by meheleventyone » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

kop316 wrote: post #7

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #2

> “ Notice that the word speed appears twice. This is not the time for committees, study groups or widespread consensus building. Even with imperfect information, the future of your company depends on your ability to make rapid decisions and start acting.” Yikes. I guess principled decisions have to go? Executive authority! It reminds me of the president in The Simpsons Movie... “I was elected to lead, not to read.”

The OODA loop was invented by Col. John Boyd during the Vietnam War and is being adapted here for the business environment. The point is for some hard decisions, you will have to act on imperfect or incomplete information. A good leader will make a decision, because doing nothing and hoping you get more info will in fact be worse than making the wrong decision. As you get more information, you can then alter or tailo…

Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible?

It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than the results of not making a decision in haste.

If you're already at the point of being forced to make decisions then you've already screwed up? You're being reactive.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#17

Post by notacoward » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:33 PM UTC

I thought the OODA concept was pretty cool when I first read about it and John Boyd. And it's fun to say. OODA Loop, OODA Loop, OODA Loop. But it has been seriously overused, to the point where nowadays it's just a shibboleth that "thought leaders" use to show their "edginess" or whatever.

The problem is that "orient" has no real meaning in most decision-making contexts, and watching people stretch it to fit is almost painful. Sure, if you adopt exactly the right point in the word's semantic field, and carefully distinguish it from its neighbors (Observe and Decide), and squint a bit, it can make sense, but good metaphors or acronyms don't work like that. They don't require a High Priest to provide interpretation. A better metaphor, which I learned in a talk on autonomous computers at a UC Berkeley CS retreat in ~2001, is:

  * Measure

  * Analyze

  * Plan

  * Execute

I might not have remembered the terminology exactly, let alone the acronym, but I think it's close. Steps 1/3/4 are roughly equivalent to the same in OODA, but step 2 is quite different. More about accuracy/completeness than about rapidity, though of course both are always important. I suppose one could substitute different words to make a catchier acronym like MAKE or MACE. If increasing dilettante appeal seems important, feel free. For me, the important thing is that we're not all fighter pilots and it's OK to have a qualitatively different decision process. Come up with your own metaphor, your own acronym, that fits your situation intuitively without such arduous adaptation.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#18

Post by aidos » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:38 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #13

philosophygeek wrote: post #11

We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder why…

“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder wh…

We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway.

Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people that previously had a really sweet ride.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#19

Post by datingscientist » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:41 PM UTC

aidos wrote: post #18

Ididntdothis wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“We've had 10 years of frothiness in venture markets. Many employees under 30 don't even know what a downturn looks like. They're used to high pay, constant calls from recruiters, and venture capital flowing into their companies. Even the companies who flop, no big deal, just go down the street to the next company. I worry that that generation is going to have the most difficulty with these changes. They'll wonder wh…

We've been trying to hire since last year and have really struggled because rates devs have been looking for on the market are well above what we could see them returning value-wise for their experience level (that's just the nature of the market, I get it). When you have people getting £130k for doing React at a fintech company... well, I just hope people are prepared for the market changes that are underway. Honest…

Consumer debt will make this harder.

Re: How to Keep Your Company Alive – Observe, Orient, Decide and Act

#20

Post by kop316 » Fri, Apr 03, 2020, 2:42 PM UTC

meheleventyone wrote: post #16

kop316 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OODA loop was invented by Col. John Boyd during the Vietnam War and is being adapted here for the business environment. The point is for some hard decisions, you will have to act on imperfect or incomplete information. A good leader will make a decision, because doing nothing and hoping you get more info will in fact be worse than making the wrong decision. As you get more information, you can then alter or tailo…

Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible? It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse…

>Isn't the point of getting inside the opponents OODA loop to force them to make decisions faster than they are able to sensibly and ergo force wrong decisions. If you get inside your own loop by hurrying your decision making forcing wrong decisions how is that sensible?

Nope. The point is if I am inside their OODA loop, I can make decisions and react quicker than the adversary. Now they are reacting to my decisions and I have the advantage.

> It also seems obviously untrue that acting on a wrong decision is better than doing nothing. The results of a wrong decision could of course be worse than the results of not making a decision in haste.

The keyword there is "could be". That's what makes leadership hard. You have to know when is enough information to make a decision, and when you need to wait. Or if you made the wrong decision, what can you do now?

EDIT: For an example, there's a small brewery down the street that cannot can all of their beer. Making beer takes 3 weeks at least. So there's predictions of COVID-19 ending in May to Sept. So what is the right choice? Do I hope that it ends early and brew beer in a couple of weeks, or do I wait until Sept? What about all of the perishable supplies I have now?

It does me a lot more harm to wait until the "all clear" and then order supplies. Why? Everybody else will do the same thing, and now I am out of beer for three weeks (and longer for other beer). That is a lot of revenue left on the table lost.

What about making it now? Well if I am too hasty, now I have beer that will skunk because I cannot sell it fast enough.

So the brewery owner needs to see what info they have now (obverse, orient), and decide and act. What will cost me more money?