The Candidates Chess Tournament starts this week in Madrid. Eight of the top players in the world meet for a gruelling month long tournament to decide who plays Magnus Carlsen next year for the World Chess Championship.
You might not hear much about it unless you’re a chess fiend (although you certainly can bet on it in Vegas and on a dozen sports wagering sites) but it’s an intense competition in which the winner gets to play the highest ranked chess player in history.
Chess as a Business Metaphor
It’s fashionable to use chess as a metaphor for business. You can’t miss the references, search Google for ‘Chess and Business’ and you’ll get 88.5 million results in less than half a second.
The links go to articles with titles like:
How Chess Can Make You Better At Business 12 lessons on business strategy from the game of Chess Principles that Make You a Better Corporate Strategist How Chess Prepared Me to Be a CEO
It is, admittedly, easy to use chess as a metaphor for business planning. The ubiquitous ‘business planning is like chess, every time you move the board changes and you have to re-plan and re-think, move again and then go through it all over again until at last …’ Along with, of course, ‘you have to look several moves ahead.’
Complexity Built on Complexity
That works along with the level of complexity in business planning and management from inception to a merger, sale, or leaving it to the next generation. In a successful business complexity always builds on complexity.
Bobby Fischer’s coach once told a non-chess-playing reporter, “after the first four moves of any chess game there are 300 billion possible move combinations.”
Fischer’s response to his coach’s comment was blunt, “People think there are all
These options, but there is only one right move.” He meant there’s a right move to start followed by a right move in response to the situation followed by . . . Not said, but implicit, is that the wrong move is catastrophic.
A Wrong Move is Disaster – in Chess and Business
That was graphically illustrated last December in the World Championship match when Carlsen’s opponent moved a single, simple pawn to the wrong square and basically handed the championship to Carlsen.
It was the mistake heard around the chess world. It left Ian Nepomniachtchi standing alone in front of the media trying to explain the inexplicable.
That’s where the metaphor loses steam.
Business Owners Have Help
Chess players are alone. When they are playing they have no coaches, no playbooks, no resources. They are expected to act and react based on their accumulated experience and knowledge.
With the board in front of them, chess players are on their own.
Business owners are only alone by choice. There’s plenty of help out there – just ask us . . . we know the one right move.