Although the OODA loop and other Boyd concepts are written into Air Force doctrine, Boyd's name is relatively unknown in his own service. Some believe that his influence is waning in the Marine Corps, the branch that once embraced his thinking the most enthusiastically. Among Boyd's old friends and admirers, many of whom gather every Wednesday night at the Fort Myer Officers' Club outside of Washington, DC, some wonder if they are fighting a losing battle. "The group is fading," says Tom Christie, one of Boyd's closest collaborators and now director of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon. "We're all getting older, and we didn't inculcate John's ideas into younger people coming up."

Yet Boyd's ideas themselves are growing more relevant -- in military operations and in business competition. In the wake of the Gulf War, Pentagon officials credited Boyd's thinking on maneuverability for the rapid attacks that crippled Iraqi forces. Today, many military strategists believe that the way to counter terrorists is to think as they do -- to employ speed, ambiguity, and deception. One way to look at the tragedy of September 11 is that, for a moment, the terrorists got inside our OODA loop.

The phenomenon is magnified by the rapidly declining half-life of any good idea through ever-faster pace and ever-more-demanding dimensions of the competitive arena. The dogfight, it seems, is just getting hairier. So what happens to the OODA loop, some wonder, as technology increasingly compresses the flow of information, driving decision making ever faster? On one hand, observes retired Colonel Ted Hailes, a professor at the Air War College, "in the drive to make OODA loops smaller and faster, man's role in the loop is being reduced or preformulated." Think of program trading on Wall Street, for example. Grant Hammond theorizes about evolution toward an "OODA point."

On the other hand, it may be that technology compresses just one part of the loop, that the wide, instantaneous availability of data creates an environment of complete transparency. In such a world, it would be impossible to gain advantage from observation, since all competitors would see the same thing. Orientation, then, would grow even more important: The data is worthless, after all, without our interpretation. And that means Boyd was more right than even he could have imagined: The future of business will belong to those innovators who can build snowmobiles.

Keith H. Hammonds (khammonds@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior editor. Read John R. Boyd's "A Discourse on Winning and Losing" and related works on the Web (www.d-n-i.net/second_level/boyd_military.htm).

Sidebar: How to Isolate Your Enemy

Colonel John R. Boyd saw isolation as a critical strategic device -- in effect, the opposite of the information-rich environment that pilots (or companies) need in order to operate effectively. In isolation, he argued, a competitor had no hope of observing and adapting to a changing environment. Isolating your enemy, Boyd saw, could become a powerful tool to make his OODA loop inoperable, cutting off the flow of information both in and out of the organization. In his 14-hour briefing, "A Discourse on Winning and Losing," Boyd described three strategies for isolation.

"Physically we can isolate our adversaries by severing their communications with [the] outside world as well as by severing their internal communications to one another. We can accomplish [the former] ... via diplomatic, psychological, and other efforts. To cut them off from one another, we should penetrate their system by being unpredictable.

"Mentally we can isolate our adversaries by presenting them with ambiguous, deceptive, or novel situations, as well as by operating at a tempo or rhythm they can neither make out nor keep up with. Operating inside their OODA loops will accomplish just this by disorienting or twisting their mental images so that they can neither appreciate nor cope with what's really going on.

"Morally our adversaries isolate themselves when they visibly improve their well-being to the detriment of others ... by violating codes of conduct or behavior patterns that they profess to uphold or others expect them to uphold."