Into the Storm

38

Eliminate Friction

 

Strategy #8Step up to conflict—and deal with the things that slow you down.

 

When I was in graduate school, a professor related an interesting story about a potential research pitfall. During World War II, as the story goes, the U.S. military wanted to determine the optimal placement of armor on aircraft. Their approach involved studying planes returning from bombing missions over Europe, then recording the location of shrapnel damage and bullet holes. It seemed logical that additional armor should be placed where the damage was the greatest.

A group of operations researchers were called in to confirm the military's findings. ...