The man who knows how will always have a job.
The man who also knows why will always be his boss.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Imagine learning how to play chess from a primer that’s missing a few pages. The pages you have teach you how to set up the board, how to move and capture the enemy pieces, but say nothing about checkmate, nothing about the end of the game. Learning from such a book, you could become competent at calculation and proficient at maneuvering, but you’d have no higher objectives. Without a goal your play would be aimless. You might be a master tactician, but you’ll have no sense of strategy.
The distinction between tactics and strategy will be important to us throughout this section. Whereas strategy is abstract and based on long-term goals, tactics are concrete and based on finding the best move right now. Tactics are conditional and opportunistic, all about threat and defense. No matter what pursuit you’re engaged in—chess, business, the military, managing a sports team—it takes both good tactics and wise strategy to be successful. As Sun Tzu wrote centuries ago, “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
Let us begin with the big picture, with strategy. The old chess saying “A bad plan is better than no plan at all” is more clever than true. Every step, every reaction, every decision you make, must be done with a clear objective. Otherwise you can’t make anything but the most obvious decisions with the confidence that the decision is really to your advantage.
In the second round of the 2001 Corus tournament in the Netherlands, I faced one of the tournament underdogs, Alexei Fedorov of Belarus. This was the strongest tournament he had ever played in, and the first time we had ever met at the board. He quickly made it clear that he did not intend to show too much respect for the august surroundings, or for his opponent.
Fedorov quickly abandoned standard opening play. If what he played against me had a name, it might be called the Kitchen Sink Attack. Ignoring the rest of the board, he launched all of his available pawns and pieces at my king right from the start. I knew that such a wild, ill-prepared attack could only succeed if I blundered. I kept an eye on my king and countered on the other side, or wing, and in the center of the board, a critical area where he had completely ignored his development, the term we use in chess to describe the deployment of your pieces for battle. It was soon apparent that his attack was entirely superficial, and he resigned the game after only twenty-five moves.
I admit I didn’t have to do anything special to score this easy victory. My opponent had played without a sound strategy and eventually reached a dead end. What Fedorov failed to do was to ask himself early on what conditions would need to be fulfilled for his attack to succeed. He decided he wanted to cross the river and walked right into the water instead of looking for a bridge.
The lesson here is that if you play without long-term goals your decisions will become purely reactive and you’ll be playing your opponent’s game, not your own. As you jump from one new thing to the next, you will be pulled off course, caught up in what’s right in front of you instead of what you need to achieve.
Take the 1992 American presidential campaign, the one that took Bill Clinton to the White House. During the Democratic primaries it seemed as if every day brought a new scandal that was sure to destroy Clinton’s candidacy. His campaign team reacted instantly to each new disaster, but they weren’t only reacting. They made sure each press release also hammered home their candidate’s message.
The general election against President Bush followed a similar pattern. Against each attack the Clinton team responded with a defense that also refocused the debate on their own message—the now famous “It’s the economy, stupid”—constantly reinforcing their own strategy. Four years earlier by contrast, the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, had become completely distracted by his opponent’s aggressive tactics. People only heard him defending himself, not presenting his own message. The 1992 Clinton team knew that it wasn’t only about how quickly they responded, but how well their responses fit in with their overall strategy. Before you can follow a strategy, however, you have to develop one.
“Why?” Turns Tacticians into Strategists
The strategist starts with a goal in the distant future and works backward to the present. A Grandmaster makes the best moves because they are based on what he wants the board to look like ten or twenty moves in the future. This doesn’t require the calculation of countless twenty-move variations. He evaluates where his fortunes lie in the position and establishes objectives. Then he works out the step-by-step moves to accomplish those aims.
Imagine doing that regularly at work, or even in your private activities. We all have hundreds of personal and professional objectives, but they are usually vague, unformed wish lists instead of goals that can form the basis of a strategy. “I want to make more money” is like saying “I want to find true love” or “I want to win this game.” A wish isn’t a goal.
To take a practical example, almost everyone at some point desires to find a better job. Only when you have a thorough understanding of why you want to change should you begin. Maybe it’s not just the job, maybe you need an entirely new career. Or perhaps you can make changes at your current workplace. You won’t know what you are looking for until you are aware what conditions will satisfy you.
When you do begin your search, your guide is that list of intermediate objectives that add up to your goal of “better job.” For example, if money isn’t your biggest issue in your current position, you shouldn’t be tempted by a job that offers more cash but won’t change the things that are really driving you crazy where you are now. So for every move always ask “Why?” and continue to ask it every time you come up with an answer or a new idea. It’s an essential part of the chess player’s discipline that can be applied to just about every pursuit in life.
These intermediate objectives are essential if we are to create conditions favorable to our strategy. Without them we’re trying to build a house starting with the roof. Too often we set a goal and head straight for it without considering all the steps required to achieve it. What conditions are necessary for our strategy to succeed? What sacrifices will be required? What must change and what can we do to induce or enable those changes? And most important, why are we doing what we’re doing?
In his book on Japanese business, Kenichi Ohmae summed up the role of the strategist this way: “The strategist’s method is to challenge the prevailing assumptions with a single question: Why?”
“Why?” is the question that separates visionaries from functionaries, great strategists from mere tacticians. You must ask this question constantly if you are to understand and develop and follow your strategy. When I watch novice students play chess, I’ll see a terrible move and ask the student why he played it. Often he’ll have no answer at all. Obviously something in his brain pushed that move forward as the best choice, but it goes without saying that it wasn’t part of a deeper plan with strategic goals. Everyone would greatly benefit from stopping before each move, each decision, and asking, “Why this move? What am I trying to achieve and how does this move help me achieve it?”
Chess clearly shows us the power of “Why?” Every move has a consequence; every move either fits into your strategy or it doesn’t. If you aren’t questioning your moves consistently, you will lose to the player who is playing with a coherent plan.
Let us now turn our attention to tactics, the method of carrying out your strategy. Imagine a day trader who must decide “Buy or sell?” a dozen times a day. He looks at the numbers, analyzes as much as he can, and makes the best decision possible in the limited time available. The more time he spends, the better his decision will be, but while he is thinking, the opportunity to decide is passing. It’s a difficult position. But his concern is mainly tactical, not strategic. Effective tactics result from alertness and speed, this is obvious, but they also require an understanding of all the possibilities at hand. Experience allows us to instantly apply the patterns we have successfully used in the past.
Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy. Think of tactics as forced, planned responses, basically a series of “if—then” statements that would make a computer programmer feel right at home. “If he captures my pawn, I will play my knight, to e5. Then if he attacks my knight, I’ll sacrifice my bishop. Then if . . .” Of course, by the time you get to the fifth or sixth “if,” your calculations have become incredibly complex because of the sheer number of possible moves. The chance of making a mistake increases the further ahead you look.
A tactician feels at home reacting to threats and seizing opportunities on the battlefield. When your opponent has blundered, a winning tactic can suddenly appear and serve as both means and end. Imagine a soccer game where the coaches have spent months training their players in complex strategies and set plays. But if the opposing goalkeeper slips on the grass, you toss strategy to the side and shoot for the goal without hesitation, a purely tactical reaction.
Every time you make a move, you must consider your opponent’s response, your answer to that response, and so on. A tactic ignites an explosive chain reaction, a forceful sequence of moves that carries the players along on a wild ride. You analyze the position as deeply as you can, compute the dozens of variations, the hundreds of positions. If you don’t immediately exploit a tactical opportunity, the game will almost certainly turn against you; one slip and you are wiped out. But if you seize the opportunities that your strategy creates, you’ll play your game like a Grandmaster.
In March 2004, not long after the hundredth anniversary of the Wright brothers’ famous first flight at Kitty Hawk, I gave a lecture titled “Achieving Your Potential” to an audience of executives in Interlaken, the Swiss mountain resort. To illustrate the danger of a lack of strategic vision, I chose the example of the Wright brothers and their famous invention. Hundreds of engineers had died attempting to invent a flying machine, and Orville and Wilbur succeeded, going down—or up—in history for all time.
And yet they never believed the airplane would amount to much beyond novelty and sport. The American scientific community shared that view, and soon the USA fell way behind in the aircraft business. The Wright brothers failed to envision the potential of their creation, and it was left to others to exploit the power of flight for commercial and military purposes. To this cautionary tale I added that we don’t fly on Wright airplanes today. America needed someone who combined entrepreneurial vision with engineering prowess, and that man was William Boeing. More than just a strategist, Boeing was also a creative tactician.
In 1910, American Scientific Magazine wrote that the idea that the plane could revolutionize the world is “the wildest exaggeration.” Back then, William Boeing didn’t even know how to fly and was living in Seattle, Washington, far from the East Coast where most aeronautic research was going on. Boeing, who dropped out of engineering classes at Yale, didn’t have the technical knowledge of the Wright brothers. What he had was a vision and the ability to develop a strategy to achieve it.
Boeing saw the commercial potential of airplanes and understood that technological excellence was the required foundation for a company that wanted to excel in—and even dominate—this new field. But to fulfill his vision several major obstacles—distance limitations and safety issues in particular—had to be overcome. Boeing bet his life savings that the technology would catch up with his vision before he went broke. But he didn’t just wait around for this to happen. His strategy: better technology. His tactic: Boeing financed construction of a wind tunnel at a local university to attract the engineers he needed.
In 1917 the American military was getting ready to enter World War I. They needed planes and Boeing had a new design he thought they could use. The problem was that the navy was testing new planes three thousand miles away in Florida, too far to fly the little planes. Boeing knew that this was his crucial opportunity, so his team figured out how to take the planes apart, box them up like pizzas, and ship them across the country. It was a brilliant tactical maneuver.
That modest success allowed Boeing to continue for a few more years, during which time his struggling airplane factory also produced boats and, believe it or not, furniture. Boeing backed up his intuition about the future of commercial flight by employing countless clever tactics and maneuvers in the service of his long-term plan. He continued to hire the most talented engineers and invest in research. When mail delivery and passenger travel, plus Charles Lindbergh’s sensational New York to Paris flight, created a real boom, Boeing and his superior technology were ready and waiting to dominate the industry.
A key to developing successful strategies is to be aware of your strengths and weaknesses, to know what you do well. Two strong chess players can have very different strategies in the same position and they might be equally effective—leaving aside those positions in which a single forced winning line is available. Each player has his own style, his own way of solving problems and making decisions.
Two Soviet leading lights of opposing schools of chess thought became world champions. Mikhail Botvinnik, who first became world champion in 1948 and who would later become my teacher, trusted in immense self-discipline, hard work, and scientific rigor. His rival Mikhail Tal cultivated his wild creativity and fantasy, caring little for methodical preparation. Thomas Edison famously claimed that “genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This formula certainly worked for Edison and Botvinnik, but would never have worked for Tal—or for Aleksandr Pushkin, the founder of modern Russian literature. Pushkin’s love of the fast life, of gambling and romance, fed his creation of some of the greatest works in the Russian language.
Tigran Petrosian, another former world champion, perfected what we chess players call prophylaxis: the art of preventative play, strengthening your position and eliminating threats. Petrosian defended so well that his opponent’s attack was over before it started, perhaps even before he’d thought of it himself. His perfect defenses would leave opponents frustrated and prone to making errors, and Petrosian, alert to every small opportunity, exploited these mistakes with ruthless precision.
When I played Petrosian in the Netherlands in 1981, I was eighteen and Petrosian fifty-two. I was eager to avenge losing to him earlier in the year in Moscow, where I had developed an impressive attacking position that exploded in my face. At the time I thought it was an accident, but then it happened again. Every time it looked as if my offensive were crashing through, he would calmly make a little adjustment. All my pieces were swarming around his king and I was sure it was only a matter of time before I would land the decisive blow. But where was it? I started to feel like a bull chasing a toreador around the ring. Exhausted and frustrated, I made one mistake, then another, and lost the game. (Incidentally, something similar occurred a year later at the World Cup in Spain, when the defensive catenaccio style of the Italians triumphed over the attacking jogo bonito of the Brazilians. Sometimes the best defense is the best defense.)
I had to change my approach, and I did, inspired by an extraordinary piece of advice from the man who took the world title from Petrosian in 1969, Boris Spassky.
Spassky’s own experiences against Petrosian had followed a pattern similar to mine. He first fought the defensive master for the world championship in 1966 and was turned back in a tight contest. He went into their match believing—wrongly—that Petrosian didn’t play sharp, attacking chess because he lacked the skills to do so. Spassky complicated at all costs only to find his attacks brilliantly repelled by the wily world champion. Three years later, Spassky demonstrated much more respect for Petrosian’s skill. In their 1969 match he played a more balanced game and triumphed.
So before I played Petrosian again, less than a year after the defeats described above, I spoke with Spassky, who was playing in the same tournament in Yugoslavia. He counseled me that the key was to apply pressure, but just a little, steadily. “Squeeze his balls,” he told me in an unforgettable turn of phrase. “But just squeeze one, not both!” Over the next two years I evened the score by twice beating Petrosian with a quiet positional style, almost the style of Petrosian himself.
Those two losses had given me a deep respect both for Petrosian’s abilities and for the art of defense in chess. But I also realized that such a style wasn’t for me. I always wanted to be on the attacking side and my game strategies reflected that. The lesson? You must always be aware of your limitations and also of your best qualities. This knowledge allows you to both play your own game and adapt when it is required.
My aggressive, dynamic style of play fits my strengths and my personality. Even when I am forced on the defensive, I am constantly looking for a chance to turn the tables and counterattack. And when I am on the offensive, I’m not content to seek modest gains. I prefer sharp, energetic chess with pieces flying all over the board and where the player who makes the first mistake loses. Other players, including the man I defeated for the world championship, Anatoly Karpov, specialize in the accumulation of small advantages. They risk little and are content to slowly improve their position until their opponent cracks. But all of these strategies—defensive, dynamic, maneuvering—can be highly effective in the hands of someone who understands them well.
Nor is there a single best type of strategy in business. Risk-takers coexist with conservative managers at the top of Fortune 500 companies. Perhaps fifty percent of a CEO’s decisions would be made in identical fashion by any competent businessperson, just as many chess moves are obvious to any strong player regardless of his style. It’s that other fifty percent, or even the most complicated ten percent, where the difference is made. The best leaders appreciate the particular imbalances and key factors of each situation and can devise a strategy informed by that understanding. And they trust in what they know to be their best qualities.
Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila turned the Finnish company into the mobile phone leader with an unorthodox, even chaotic style that turned convention on its head at every opportunity. Top managers were asked to swap jobs, research and development staff met directly with customers, and the company’s chief phone designer once compared its management to the way a jazz band improvises together. This flexible, dynamic approach was ideal for the fast-paced world of mobile technology.
Such a loose and energetic style might not be so successful in another industry, or another country, or with another CEO. For decades IBM built its business on a conservative, even stodgy, reputation. In the world of office machinery and mainframes that stood for reliability, which was far more important to IBM’s business customers than image. New mobile phone models come out every month, while IBM was selling and servicing machines over five-year and even ten-year periods. In the eyes of their customers this very conservatism was a virtue. Rapid changes would have panicked IBM’s clients.
You Cannot Always Determine the Battlefield
Of course you don’t become a world champion without being able to play in different styles when necessary. Sometimes you are forced to fight on unfamiliar terrain; you can’t run away when conditions aren’t to your liking. The ability to adapt is critical to success.
I was forced to adapt during my advance on the road to the world championship in 1983. I was a twenty-year-old upstart taking on the fifty-two-year-old Viktor Korchnoi, a two-time world championship finalist who is still playing strong chess today at the age of seventy-five. Unsurprisingly, the veteran controlled the tempo in the early stages of our twelve-game qualification match. He won the first game and consistently prevented me from getting into the sort of open attacking positions I enjoyed.
Instead of continuing to be frustrated in my attempts to change the character of the games, I decided my best chance was to go with the flow. Instead of making sharp moves that I thought were more in my style, I played the best solid moves available even if they led to quiet positions. Freed from the psychological difficulty of trying to force the issue in each game, I could just play chess. Korchnoi forced me to fight on his terrain, but once I was conscious of it, I was able to adapt, fight, and win.
I won games six and seven to take the lead when Korchnoi decided to try to turn the tables. In game nine he switched to a tactical style, trying to surprise me with aggressive play. But having lost the battle on his territory, he wasn’t able to make a successful transition to fighting on mine, and he suffered a devastating loss. This experience of adapting under fire was most helpful when I had to do the same under even less favorable conditions against Karpov in our world championship match a year later.
As any reader of Darwin knows, the failure to adapt almost always brings dire consequences. A classic example comes from American history in 1755, when George Washington was a volunteer aide-de-camp fighting in the British army against French and Indian forces. The British made almost no effort to adapt to the frontier warfare practiced by their enemies. Their general Edward Braddock was a tragically typical case. He would line up his British redcoats in orderly rows out in the open to fire well-organized volleys into the forest as the French and Indian snipers picked them off from cover. Only when Braddock himself was finally killed in a disastrous battle could his few remaining men retreat, led by none other than Washington.
Fast-forward a couple hundred years to a less calamitous story: the Encyclopaedia Britannica as it encountered the computer age. Perhaps the best-known brand name in reference books, their first blunder was to be late in releasing their products on CD-ROM. After all, they thought, who would want to replace all those beautiful books with a digitized version? Everybody, as we now know. From 1990 to 1996, sales of printed encyclopedias dropped to a tiny fraction of the reference market, and Microsoft’s Encarta and others grabbed a huge market share.
Next came the Internet and its promise of almost unlimited customers around the world. Britannica charged for access at a time when everyone else was learning the market and building a customer base by giving content away for free. Britannica’s business was predictably poor. A few years later the dot-com boom was busting—something I remember only too well, from my firsthand experience with my own chess Internet portal. The online advertising market collapsed entirely just as Britannica finally decided to give away their content for free. No matter what they did, they were on the wrong side of change.
What was responsible for Britannica’s series of debacles? They were clearly well behind the curve when it came to moving from print to digital media. The failure of their Internet strategies is more complex. Being too far ahead of your environment can be just as bad as lagging behind your competitors. Instead of relying on their huge brand advantage they tried to outthink a new and unpredictable market and ended up fighting on a losing battlefield each time.
A Frequently Changed Strategy Is the Same as No Strategy
Change can be essential, but it should only be made with careful consideration and just cause. Losing can persuade you to change what doesn’t need to be changed, and winning can convince you everything is fine even if you are on the brink of disaster. If you are quick to blame faulty strategy and change it all the time, you don’t really have any strategy at all. Only when the environment shifts radically should you consider a change in fundamentals.
We all must walk a fine line between flexibility and consistency. A strategist must have faith in his strategy and the courage to follow it through and still be open-minded enough to realize when a change of course is required.
One of the tensest games of my life saw my opponent fail to have faith in his own plans. In 1985 I was locked in yet another battle with my longtime foe, Anatoly Karpov. It was the final game of our second world championship match, and I was in the lead by a single point. He had the advantage of the white pieces, and if he won, he would draw the match and retain the title for three more years.
He played aggressively right from the start and built up an impressive attacking position against my king. Then came the critical decision, whether to completely commit to his attack by pushing his pawn forward against my king side or to continue with more circumspect preparations. I think we both knew that this was the critical moment in the game.
Karpov decided against the push, and the opportunity was gone. After spending the first twenty moves of the game preparing a direct assault, he got cold feet and missed his chance. Suddenly I was in my element, counterattacking instead of defending. The game entered complications on my terms, not my opponent’s, and I brought home the victory that made me the world champion.
When it came time to play for the kill, Karpov played a move that fit his prudent style but not the win-at-all-costs situation that he himself had created. His personal style was in conflict with the game strategy that was required in order to win, and he veered off course.
But Karpov is a cunning strategist and learned from his mistakes. The lesson he took away from this critical game was to almost entirely stop opening with his king’s pawn. Karpov recognized that at key moments his style wouldn’t fit the sharp positions it created. He learned and adapted and stayed near the top for many, many years because he was quick to recognize that he needed to change.
Again, we return to the power of “Why?” You must know what questions to ask and ask them frequently. Have conditions changed in a way that necessitates a change in strategy or is a small adjustment all that is required? Have fundamental goals changed for some reason? Why have the conditions changed? Why are my results not as good as they once were? Avoid change for the sake of change.
Military history is full of examples of commanders who got carried away by the action on the battlefield and forgot about strategy. The French forces were routed by the English at Agincourt in 1415 when the French cavalry allowed a long-distance volley of arrows to provoke them into a disorderly charge. The French knights, out of formation and charging across muddy terrain, were repeatedly cut down. It was a downfall of arrogance. When your opponent complicates things, there is a strong temptation to look for a refutation of his idea, to pick up the gauntlet, to rise to the challenge. Of course this is exactly what he wants and why such distractions must be resisted. If you have already decided on a good strategy, why drop it for something that suits your opponent? Avoiding this trap requires extraordinarily strong self-control.
Sticking with a plan when you are winning sounds simple, but it’s easy to become overconfident and get caught up in events. Long-term success is impossible if you let your heat-of-the-moment reactions trump careful planning.
An interesting side effect of my years of success was that some of my opponents chose to employ unorthodox variations to take our games into original channels. Here, they felt, my long experience would be nullified and they would be better prepared for the unusual positions. The problem, as many of these players discovered, is that most of their “original” concepts were rare for good reason. The virtue of innovation only rarely compensates for the vice of inadequacy.
Don’t Watch the Competition More Than You Watch Yourself
We must also avoid being distracted from our strategic path by the competition. If you are employing a powerful and successful strategy, whether gaining space on the chessboard or market share in global commerce, the competition will try to trip you up by getting you to abandon it. If your plans are sound and your tactical awareness is good, your competitor can only succeed with your help.
Against solid strategy, diversionary tactics will either be insufficient, or flawed. If they are insufficient, you can and should ignore them, continuing along your path. If they are radical enough to force you from your path, they are likely flawed in some way—unless you have blundered. Often an opponent is so eager to get you to change your course that he fatally weakens his own position in the attempt.
Even if the competition isn’t interfering directly, we can divert ourselves. When I’m playing in a head-to-head event such as a world championship match, I only have one guy to watch and he’s sitting right across the board from me. It’s a zero-sum situation: I win, he loses, or vice versa. But in a tournament with a dozen players, what goes on in the other games can have an impact on my own success. It’s like any business with multiple partners and competitors; if United and American airlines start talks, Continental has to pay attention.
In 2000 I was playing in a strong tournament in Sarajevo. Entering the final round, I was in the lead by the slimmest of margins, a half point. (In chess, wins are worth a point, draws half a point, losses no points.) Two of the world’s top players were right behind me, Alexei Shirov and Michael Adams. It would have been nice to face one of them for all the marbles in the final round, but we were all playing different opponents. If I drew my game and Adams or Shirov won, they would tie with me for first place. If I lost, I could drop as far as third.
So before my game I had to decide whether to play cautiously or go all out for a win. It would be heroic to enter every battle with “Victory or death” on our lips, but few situations in chess or life are as dire as when those words were written from the Alamo.
First off, I had the disadvantage of the black pieces. Next there was my opponent, an outsider in this elite event. Sergei Movsesian, representing the Czech Republic, had done poorly in the tournament but had defeated two of the highest-rated participants in the previous two rounds. I confess that our contest also had a minor personal element. The year before, writing about a tournament in Las Vegas, I had dismissed Mov-sesian and a few other players as “tourists,” and he had taken his displeasure over my characterization to the press. Now this tourist surely wanted my scalp as a souvenir.
Then I had to consider the day’s other matchups. Shirov’s opponent, the Frenchman Bacrot, had already lost five games and was at the bottom of the standings. I couldn’t count on him gaining a draw when his opponent had everything to play for.
Incorporating that information into my game strategy, I went on the attack from the start against Movsesian. The game was turning my way when I got up to check on my pursuers. I knew that if I won my game, how they did would be irrelevant, but it was hard not to watch. If they both drew or lost, it would be folly for me to take undue risks in my own game. In that case, I could draw and still win the tournament. Admittedly, thoughts like that made it hard to focus on my own game. There is a precarious balance between knowing what your competition is up to and becoming distracted from the factors you control directly.
Thus it was almost a relief to see that both Shirov and Adams were on the way to victory. I knew for sure that I had to ignore them and focus on my own game, and that it was now a matter of winning at all costs. As soon as I sat back down in my chair, any cautious strategies were tossed out the window. In the end, all three of us won so I kept my slim lead and took first place. Lesson: don’t spend so much time worrying about the other guy that you lose sight of your own goals and your own performance.
Once You Have a Strategy, Employing It Is a Matter of Desire
Finally we come to the hardest part of developing and employing strategic thinking: the confidence to use it and the ability to stick to it consistently. Once you have your strategy down on paper, the real work begins. How do you stay on track, and how do you know when you have slipped away from thinking strategically?
We stay on track with rigorous questioning of our results, both good and bad, and our ongoing decisions. During a game I question my moves, and after the game I question how accurate my evaluations were in the heat of battle. Were my decisions good ones? Was my strategy sound? If I won, was it due to luck or skill? When this system fails, or fails to operate quickly enough, disaster can strike.
In 2000 I met a former pupil of mine, Vladimir Kramnik, in a sixteen-game match for the world chess championship, my sixth title defense. I had won the title back in 1985, and headed into this match, I had been playing some of the best chess of my life. In other words, I was ripe for defeat.
Years of success had made it difficult for me to imagine I could lose. Going into that match, I had won seven consecutive grand slam tournaments in a row and I wasn’t aware of my own weaknesses. I felt I was in great form and unbeatable. After all, hadn’t I beaten everyone else? With each success the ability to change is reduced. My longtime friend and coach, Grandmaster Yuri Dokhoian, aptly compared it to being dipped in bronze. Each victory added another coat.
When he played black in our match, Kramnik shrewdly chose a defense—the Berlin variation of the Ruy Lopez—in which the powerful queens quickly came off the board. The game became one of long-range maneuvering rather than dynamic, hand-to-hand combat. Kramnik had evaluated my style and had rightly assessed that I would find this kind of tranquil play boring and that I would unwittingly let down my guard. I had prepared intensely and was ready to fight on perhaps ninety percent of the chess battleground, but he forced me to play on the ten percent he knew better and that he knew I would least prefer. This brilliant strategy worked to perfection.
Instead of trying to wrest the games back to positions where I would be more comfortable, I took up his challenge and tried to beat him at his own game. This played right into Kramnik’s hands. I was unable to adapt, unable to make the necessary strategic changes quickly enough, and I lost the match and my title. Sometimes the teacher must learn from the student.
In the long run I learned that I needed to be more flexible about the kinds of chess positions I enjoy. But I could have avoided this painful lesson through greater vigilance, by working harder to find and repair my weaknesses before Kramnik could exploit them.
Every leader in every field, every successful company or individual, got to the top by working harder and focusing better than someone else. The top achievers believe in themselves and their plans, and they work constantly to ensure those plans are worthy of their belief. It becomes a positive cycle, work reinforcing desire that spurs more work. Questioning yourself must become a habit, one strong enough to surmount the obstacles of overconfidence and dejection. It is a muscle that can be developed only with constant practice.
In chess we see many cases of good strategy failing due to bad tactics and vice versa. A single oversight can undo the most brilliant concepts. Even more dangerous in the long run are cases of bad strategy succeeding due to good tactics, or due to sheer good fortune. This may work once, but rarely twice. This is why it is so important to question success as vigorously as you question failure.
Pablo Picasso nailed it when he said that “computers are useless. They can only give you answers.” Questions are what matter. Questions, and discovering the right ones, are the key to staying on course. Are our tactics, our day-to-day decisions, based on our long-term goals? The wave of information threatens to obscure strategy, to drown it in details and numbers, calculation and analysis, reaction and tactics. To have strong tactics we must have strong strategy on one side and accurate calculation on the other. Both require seeing into the future.