What do you think businesspeople can learn about winning from chess? This is what it means to be a chess player, and I cannot imagine that it is very different from what it takes to be a top-ranked CEO. The world chess masters with whom I have competed over the years nearly all share my belief that chess is a battleground on which the enemy has to be vanquished. There is nothing cute or charming about chess it is a violent sport, and when you confront your opponent you set out to crush his ego. My one caveat would be that when businesspeople use chess as a metaphor, they may sometimes unintentionally sentimentalize what’s involved in winning, because they see chess as a kind of clean, intellectual engagement. Now imagine all the possibilities faced by companies with a whole host of corporations responding to their new strategies, pricing, and products. The unpredictability is almost unimaginable.Īfter just three opening moves by a chess player, more than 9 million positions are possible. And that’s when only two players are involved in the game. Think about it: After just three opening moves by a chess player, more than 9 million positions are possible. There’s a massive amount of uncertainty and almost boundless variety in terms of the moves you can make in both chess and business. Might a president think of a small country as a pawn that could be sacrificed? Of course, that kind of concern doesn’t really apply in the business context, and chess is certainly a good metaphor for business competition. At one level, there’s something rather frightening about the idea that a powerful politician might think of countries and their leaders as pieces on a chessboard. What follows is an abridged and edited version of the conversation.Ĭhess has become a buzzword in everyday language. Great champions, Kasparov argues, need great enemies. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion with HBR, Kasparov explored the power of chess as a model for business competition the balance that chess players have to strike between intuition and analysis the significance of his loss to IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue and how his legendary rivalry with Anatoly Karpov, Kasparov’s predecessor as World Chess Champion, affected his own success. Success in both chess and business, Kasparov believes, is very much a question of psychological advantage the complexity of the game demands that players rely heavily on their instincts and on gamesmanship. A committed political activist, Kasparov today continues to support Russia’s struggling opposition.
Although Kasparov is a product of the Soviet Union’s formidable chess system, which has dominated the game since the Second World War, he has never played the limited, even passive role traditionally expected of Russian celebrities-far from it. The world’s number one player since 1984, Kasparov became the youngest world champion at the age of 22 and is considered today to be the most accomplished chess player of all time. Coutu talked with Garry Kasparov at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan. If chess is such a powerful form of competition, is there anything that strategists can learn from chess players about what it takes to win? To find out, HBR senior editor Diane L. Even people who have no personal knowledge of the game instinctively recognize that chess is unusual in terms of its intellectual complexity and the strategic demands it places on players. The image of two brilliant minds locked in a battle of skill and will-in which chance plays little or no apparent role-is compelling. But there is something peculiarly different about chess. Many leaders draw inspiration from poker and team sports, such as baseball and football.
Of course, chess is not the only game that businesspeople like to invoke. Chess has become part of the everyday language of many executives: we checkmate our opponents, we are just pawns in a game, or we think three moves ahead. The lawyer in the courtroom, the general on the battlefield, and the politician on the campaign trail have all at some point described their skirmishes in terms of the 64 black-and-white squares and 32 pieces that make up a chess game. It’s hard to find a better exemplar for competition than chess.