Angles make the difference

The right move in the wrong position is the wrong move

Let us analyze different fighting scenarios: standing and ground fighting. In both cases you need to create or be at the correct angle for moves to be effective and create maximum damage or leverage.

First let’s take a standing blow easy to recognise and used in many fighting sports involving kicking: the round middle kick. Generally speaking, the round middle kick is a kick that targets the middle section of your opponent’s body, including mainly the stomach and the ribs, and can also affect the pectoral and pelvis areas. This kick can vary depending on the martial arts. More traditional martial arts, such as Karate, Taekwondo and Kung Fu, employ more of the foot and toes surface in the round middle kick, whereas the more power-oriented arts and sports, such as Muay Thai, Kickboxing and MMA, try to use more of the shin. In all cases the movement is a circular one with the leg and the hip rotating. The more of an expert level you pose, the more you will employ the thrust of the hip.?

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While this kick can be thrown standing in front of your opponent, if you move with the standing leg (the leg that will stay on the ground as you kick with the other) at a forty-five-degree angle sideways and towards your opponent, the power of your kick will be greatly improved. If you then move towards your opponent as you create that forty-five-degree angle, then you will also increase the surface area you can strike. Finally, if you step on the toes of the standing leg and rotate your foot at one hundred and eighty degrees as you stand, that angle will create a hip thrust thereby increasing your kicking power at a level of hitting with a baseball bat.

In the following picture you can see a perfect round middle kick as described above.?

As we can see, the same move can dramatically change its powerful effect all because of the forces created by the appropriate angles.

Let us analyse the same principle for another quite typical ground attack: the triangle. This is a move that involves placing the head and one arm of your opponent between your legs so that your inner thigh, and the pressure created by his inner arm’s shoulder, blocks the flood of blood to your opponent’s brain via their neck arteries. After just six seconds, and no matter how strong you are, you will go to sleep. This move is also one of the most effective moves that is being taught to women as a self-defence move.?

The difference here as opposed to the round middle kick, is that if the right angle is not created, not only you will not create any damage or blood flow cut, but you will most likely end up in a compromised position and your guard will be passed.

In order for the triangle to be effective and the six seconds starting to be effective, you need to shrimp out with your hips to create an almost ninety-degree angle between your opponent’s neck and the centre of your hip. This will create the maximum force from your thigh and the closed triangle on his shoulder, consequently blocking the blood flow to his head.

The following picture shows the two ways the triangle can be performed and you can visibly note the difference in the angle created in the picture on the right.

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Look at the hip and head position of the attacker, which is the guy on the bottom in the second picture on your right, and notice he is almost at ninety-degrees.?

Very often in life we see things from the wrong perspective or “angle” and they appear to be completely different than they really are. If we put things in perspective, we can better understand a situation and, just as in the cases shown above, we can alter the intensity of that situation or even change it from being a success to a complete failure.

Practical application:?

once again let us go back to my years as managing director of COMAU in Russia. Just as I started working for COMAU in Moscow, back at the headquarters in Torino a new and relatively small business unit was being born: the aerospace division. This division represented a total of €40 million in annual sales compared to the more than €1.2 billion for the company globally. The purpose of this aerospace division was not really clear to anyone, apart from the understanding that, for line builders, automotive margins were very low and therefore the non-automotive industrial automation represented a potentially more profitable endeavour. In Russia, especially during the years 2008-2010, there was a big market both for civil and military aerospace industrialisation for new models. We started pitching to a part of UAC (United Aircraft Corporation) whose member companies include development, production, sales, operational support, warranty and servicing, modernisation, repair, and disposal of civil and military aircraft.?

I cannot get into the different companies we were pitching to, for confidentiality reasons. But I can say that we were working on different assembly and even construction of wing parts for a new mid-range Passenger aircraft. We started pitching the process engineering and as we were working with them the project grew and grew. We had an eighteen-month negotiation period with meetings at the highest level of this extremely big, bureaucratic government-run organisation. After winning the initial process engineering part, and running it in front of them, we won the entire project for €430 million. Of course, this was easier said than done, and this is where the “angles make the difference” lesson can be applied. The Russian government, especially at that time, had a very strict concept of intellectual property rights on everything they bought. In our case they wanted to own the project and the intellectual property rights of the process. For those who are not familiar with the industrial automation world, companies that provide automation solutions try to standardize their solutions as far as possible in order not to “reinvent the wheel” every time which runs the risk of mistakes, and also increased engineering costs. The IP issue was a deal breaker for COMAU, given that this was a high risk and non-core business project representing almost thirty per cent of global sales. But it was a fundamental point.?

There’s a story about Postnik Yakovlev, the architect who built the beautiful and unique St Basil’s Cathedral on Moscow’s Red Square, between 1555 and 1560. Some people say it’s a myth, some say it’s true. The story goes that Ivan the Terrible blinded Yakolev so that he could never build something as beautiful again.?

I related this story to COMAU’s CEO. Imagine having such a history about property rights, I told him, and then 500 years later dealing with the national pride of a wide range of airplane construction. Basically, client wanted to make sure we would not be able to build something as beautiful again, exactly like the Yakovlev myth. Given that COMAU was acting as an integrator anyway, we decided to split the project so that we could have the different companies – Robotics, Process, Construction, Autoclave etc. – invoice directly. We would then run the project as the enacting integrator, rather than the seller of the solution. The Russians knew very well that without the entire team together they could not repeat the same thing, yet they got what they wanted: the process was theirs as a whole, but the intellectual property of every piece of the project belonged to each individual company. Effectively we “changed the angle” of our attack, as in the second case in BJJ, otherwise the attack would be nullified and lost.

What are you currently doing in your company that is not quite working, even though you have all the elements together for it to be a success? How can you “change the angle” and make it a success?