Alex Vohr spent 25 years in the Marine Corps and saw maneuver warfare doctrine arrive in its early years. He later led the School of Advanced Warfighting. Mark “Moose” McGrath and I talked with him about the OODA loop sketch John Boyd actually drew in The Essence of Winning and Losing.
Alex retired as a colonel. He is a Naval Academy graduate, a Vistage speaker, and the author of Speed Kills: Leveraging John Boyd’s OODA Loop to Build Organizations That Win. The book is on the Marine Corps Commandant’s Professional Reading List.
The schwerpunkt
Alex makes the case that the common four-step version, obsessed with speed, misses Boyd’s core insight. Orientation is the schwerpunkt, the focus of effort. Genetics, culture, experience and new information shape it, and it drives observation, decisions and action. Speed helps only when your orientation matches the world. He points to Blockbuster and Kodak as companies whose orientation stopped changing.
Nested loops and harmony
We talk about nested OODA loops in teams and organizations, harmonization that aligns their vectors, and planning as a way to tune orientation under time pressure. Alex separates relative tempo from raw speed and decision quality from luck. He also covers Boyd’s sources in chaos theory, biology and quantum mechanics, and books like Brian Goodwin’s How the Leopard Changed Its Spots and Frans Osinga’s Science, Strategy and War.
From doctrine to business
Speed Kills translates Boyd for organizations. Alex asks leaders to define how their organization observes, orients, decides and acts, and he moves teams toward implicit guidance and control to lower their cognitive load. He adds shared mental models, psychological safety for real feedback, and first principles over rigid templates. He also warns about OODA loop fatigue, the exhaustion that oversimplified myths about the loop create.
Where is your organization moving fast in the wrong direction?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.