Russian grand master Eugene A. Znosko-Borovsky is among the many chess figures who have argued that the game of chess has three elements—force, space, and time—and that advantages in one or more of these elements decide the outcome of the game.² The pieces on a chessboard have different point values depending on their mobility and the threat they pose to an opponent. Queens are worth 9 points; rooks, 5; knights and bishops, 3; and pawns, 1. Force refers to the number and value of pieces at your disposal at any point in the game. Both sides begin with equal force, but imbalances soon appear as pieces are captured. Lev Alburt and Larry Parr, authors of Secrets of the Russian Chess Masters, explain the strategy of using force: “If you have a Queen (9 points), two Rooks (10 points) and a Bishop (3 points), then measured in point value, you have 22 points of force. If you see a possibility to leave the opponent with only 17 points, then your strategy is directed toward gaining the equivalent of a Rook (5 points).”³ Clearly, having superior force is advantageous in chess because you can apply more pressure, launch more attacks on the enemy king, and sacrifice pieces when their loss weakens your opponent’s position.
Space refers to the number of board squares a player’s pieces occupy or influence and the location of those squares. A player with a significant space advantage limits an opponent’s mobility and constricts his pieces. Owning the center of the board is always advantageous because it reduces the opponent’s options while giving the player more degrees of freedom to launch attacks in any direction. Finally, time refers to movement advantages players gain through the efficiency and timing of their moves. A player who advances a piece and then later retracts it to a square it formerly occupied is normally said to have lost time. A player who positions the right piece on a critical square and thus forces the opponent to make several moves in response is said to have gained time.
In the chess metaphor we’ve been using to describe business development, the concept of force, space, and time is insightful. In business development, force is the amount of strength you can apply when contacting prospective customers and building your relationship with them. Strength includes the power of your brand, the quality of your products and services, the quality of your people, your reputation in the industry, and the degree to which you are positively differentiated—in short, strength refers first to the degree of opening game positioning you have been able to establish. We think it also refers to the breadth and scope of the resources you can bring to bear in early middle game, when you are trying to win the hearts and minds of the key people in the customer’s organization. If your senior leaders, experienced project managers, and key technical experts are willing to invest their time building relationships with new customers—and you have strength in brand, quality, and reputation—then you are applying substantial force to your business development effort. But this does not always happen. Frequently, the account manager who makes contact with a new prospective customer is on his or her own, perhaps with help from a sales manager but little else. Most companies don’t invest enough senior resource time during early middle game. They wait until specific business opportunities arise. Even then, the CEO may not meet with prospective customers’ CEOs unless the potential deals are large enough to warrant the CEO’s interest. The bottom line is that few companies invest enough during early middle game, so the opportunities for behavioral differentiation abound.
Metaphorically, space in business development could apply to the degree to which you penetrate a prospective customer’s organization and build strong, zippered networks. Typically, companies begin with a single point of contact in the customer’s organization and find it difficult to extend their reach much further—into higher levels of the organization, for instance, or into other buying units or regions—at least in the short term. However, if you can build your network through all levels of the organization, across business units and regions, and establish relationships with the senior or key people who will make or influence the customer’s buying decisions, then you will have gained a space advantage over your competitors with limited access. You will also have more information about what’s going on in the customer’s organization and better access to the right people when opportunities arise. Space is about access, depth of knowledge, and breadth of influence.
Time might refer to how well positioned you are to create or respond to opportunities. Clearly, you gain an advantage if you know about opportunities before they become public, if you can meet with the right people as they are discussing their problems or needs and formulating their plans to resolve them, and if you are engaged in trust-based discussions with key customers before your competitors are aware that an opportunity is about to surface. Applying the concepts of force, space, and time to business development is not a groundbreaking idea, but it is revolutionary in the sense that most companies do a very poor job of applying force when they establish contact with new prospective customers; most do not build networks of sufficient breadth, and most are not well ahead of their competitors as new business opportunities form and bubble to the surface. Why this is true is a mystery. As Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton note in their book The Knowing-Doing Gap, smart companies do turn knowledge into action, but many, many companies do not. Though they know what should be done, they don’t do it.
Companies should build force during opening game. That’s when they create the kind of market position that will give them a force advantage once they make initial contact with prospective customers. In early middle game, they continue to build strength as they apply space and time. Moreover, they start the long process, through behavioral differentiation, of creating preference for themselves when business opportunities do surface.