A well-known Grandmaster once said, “If I lose a game, my opponents have to beat me three times: they have to beat me in the opening, then they have to beat me in the middlegame, and finally they have to play a perfect endgame.”—Jeremy Silman, Complete Book of Chess Strategy
Like Sun Tzu’s Age of the Warring States, today’s business world is one of continual conflict between companies as they strive for survival and success across the globe. Faced with scarce and expensive resources and an ever-changing environment, competitors seek even the slightest advantage.—Mark R. McNeilly, Sun Tzu and the Art of Business: Six Strategic Principles for Managers
In war and business, opponents compete for supremacy in a defined space using rules everyone understands, disguising their own intentions while striving to discern their opponent’s, maneuvering their forces to gain advantage, and acting decisively when presented with an opportunity. Numerous authors have drawn parallels between war and business. In the last decade alone, more than a dozen books have been published that examine how Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old principles in The Art of War can be applied to modern business strategies and tactics. As Donald G. Krause notes in The Art of War for Executives, “Warfare is one of the more common events in the history of man. Because of its importance to survival, warfare has been studied carefully. The factors that contribute to success in war are fairly well understood. Fundamentally, success in war, as well as in business, is based on leadership.”¹ Moreover, as we said earlier, leadership drives the values and processes that individuals in an organization use to accomplish their aims. In its own way, this is also true of chess.
In its earliest incarnations, chess was a game of warfare, invented, some historians believe, to teach the principles of warfare to rulers. Though its precise origins are lost in the fog of time, chess was apparently invented in northern India in the sixth century A.D. Its precursor was a game called Chaturanga, which featured four players, each controlling one army. Pairs of players worked together to defeat the opposing alliance, and victory or defeat depended on protecting the rajah and capturing the opposing armies’ combatants. The other pieces in each army consisted of infantry, cavalry, elephants, chariots, and a counselor. Chaturanga used dice to determine which pieces were moved in each turn, so success depended as much on luck as skill. By around 600 A.D., however, Hindu law forbade gambling, so the dice were eliminated, the allied armies were combined, and a two-player form of the game emerged.
The game’s migration—first to Persia, Greece, and Egypt; then east to China, Korea, and Japan; then west to Iberia and the rest of Europe—followed the paths of traders and the conquests of armies. As chess spread throughout medieval Europe, some pieces changed: The rajah became a king; elephants became bishops (symbolizing the church); chariots became castles (rooks); and the counselor, which had limited power, became the queen, which was imbued with the greatest mobility and power of all the pieces. Today, chess remains humankind’s most venerable and challenging game of war. The thousands of varieties of chess pieces still symbolize opposing armies with their foot soldiers, cavalry, battlements, ministers, and heads of state (see Figure 4-1).
In chess and war, as well as in business, success derives from the astute application of both strategy and tactics. As Russian grand master Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky said, “Chess is not played move by move, but in well-considered series of moves, which should meet all requirements, namely, freedom for the player, constraint for the adversary; proper timing of each individual move; use of the maximum power of each piece at all times.”² That should sound familiar to strategic account managers who have ever spent months (or years) pursuing major contracts with important customers, marshalling their company’s resources, and directing teams in the development of proposals and presentations.
FIGURE 4-1. Chess pieces. Chess piece design often symbolizes the game’s origins in war.