Blog
Lessons from the Grand Masters
31st January 2008
Are there useful lessons for people wanting to be successful in business from mastering the skills of chess? This is a question I like to ask of students who come for an interview in Economics for our sixth form. One doesn’t have to be a great expert in the game to come up with some relevant ideas and it usually elicits some interesting responses. Students are pretty good at pinpointing for example the importance of having a strategy; being flexible to respond to previous moves, knowing the rules of the game and how best to value the moves that each piece can make, exploiting the lessons that can accumulate with experience and also in weighing up the risks and the advantages of a particular move.
Of course in many ways a game of chess is almost completely divorced from the complexities and uncertainties of business. For starters, the opening moves in a conventional game of chess start with all of the pieces in the standard position. (How much harder would it be to compute the best strategies if all of the pieces were positioned randomly at the start?). Indeed it is safe to say that success in a business world where consumer preferences are forever evolving and where the sands of competition rarely stay in place for a few moment, is much more complicated that playing a game of chess.
I was reminded of this by reading John Kay’s superb short piece in the Financial Times yesterday marking the death a fortnight ago of Bobby Fischer the legendary US Chess Champion. John’s articles for the FT are available through his web site and I do recommend a visit to his site to unearth a number of gems, especially if you are interested in some of his ideas on business strategy.
His final two paragraphs are gems!
“The rules of chess are well-defined and uncomplicated, there is a single opponent and rarely more than a handful of legal moves. Compared with fighting the war in Iraq, mapping the future of the telecommunications industry, or planning the economic development of China, chess is simple and predictable. But chess is still too subtle to be defined by a single narrative and too complex for models to be more than illustrative. People who hold to a single idea, or a fixed design, generally lose in chess, as they lose in battle, in business and in economics. Great chess players apply a variety of principles, they sense patterns, they hold a formidable range of models and analyses in their mind without being a slave to any of them.
As in chess, so it is in business and finance. We cope with an uncertain world through incremental and mostly unsuccessful innovation, not through extensive visions of the future. That is both why computer chess is not very interesting and why market systems outperformed planned economies. And why people who seek to remodel politics or business with grand designs are as mad as Bobby Fischer and far more dangerous.”
Geoff Riley
Geoff Riley FRSA has been teaching Economics for over thirty years. He has over twenty years experience as Head of Economics at leading schools. He writes extensively and is a contributor and presenter on CPD conferences in the UK and overseas.