15 ms·

Seizing the Middle: Chess Strategy in Business

80 points by feross 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
j4yav 5y ago
Somehow all I can think of here is Business Secrets of the Pharoahs, from the comedy Peep Show, which begins: > The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong. > So then, as the critics and the nay sayers and the tall-poppy-chopper-downers ask with their probing questions and their knowing sneers and unfriendly voices: "Why use the Pharaohs as the basis for a business manual?" > "Well," I would answer, "I think any 'business' that lasted for more than three thousand years, as did that of ancient Egypt, is probably worth studying!" (Even if in a strict, or indeed even vague sense, it wasn't really a business at all but a civilization, with no comparable notion of "business".)
- WJW 5y ago
  There are some strategic elements that are important for both chess and business but they are so incredibly high-level (like "think ahead" and "control vital resources") that it becomes almost a joke. I am reminded of [this article](https://nongaap.substack.com/p/shopify-a-starcraft-inspired-business https://nongaap.substack.com/p/shopify-a-starcraft-inspired-...) which tries to claim a link between starcraft and shopify strategy. Any links presented in the article are present between any two activities involving strategic thinking and so both SC2 and Shopify are completely incidental.
  - LanceH 5y ago
    While nothing to do with chess strategy, learning the game does provide lessons. Relying on yourself and your analysis. Playing the board and not the player. Playing the player when the board doesn't favor you. Playing solid principles that may not pay off now, but leave open the possibility later. Controlling your thoughts, ego and fear in tense situations.
    - beaconstudios 5y ago
      Games are just bounded microcosms of reality, so it would make sense that learning a strategy game would teach you about areas where strategy applies in reality.
    - jerf 5y ago
      I think the big lesson chess in particular teaches is the duality of offense and defense. A naive player sees them as different things, a skilled player sees them as a unified whole. This insight applies to plenty of things in real life as well. It is also something that demonstrably many people don't understand and don't even see as something they should understand, in contrast to "plan ahead" which of course everyone will agree is important, even if they don't do it.
      - LanceH 5y ago
        I guess the other big lesson beginners get is that the other person has a plan, too. Since everyone has all the information available, it lends itself to what you describe -- attack without weakening yourself. Or eventually allow weakness if it reaches victory conditions. Generally the chess strats/tactics relating to business are more metaphor. "go for their king" may be fine as a metaphor to imply "win it outright". As a strategy, though, it's not possible to just castle in response. Unless you create another metaphor for castling. Keep repeating that and you're just describing your own domain coded into chess terms, with any cross-domain applications being by definition or coincidental.
  - jsjsbdkj 5y ago
    IME the success of shopify is less tobi being some kind of genius than luck, timing and protectionism from the canadian government. He's very eager to point to specific things he thinks make him successful, but it's all post-hoc. Ultimately being profitable forgives all manner of sins, just like how google has Ads and consequently can fail 99% of the time but still print money.
- maest 5y ago
  Also, the hypermodern chess style actually involves letting the opponent occupy the centre and then applying pressure from long range with pieces, looking for weaknesses in the opponent's defence. https://www.chess.com/terms/hypermodern-chess https://www.chess.com/terms/hypermodern-chess
  - llimllib 5y ago
    (where "hypermodern" means "early 20th century")
  - zsmi 5y ago
    And it's way harder to pull off than just good old fashioned, cease the center and bludgeon the opponent. Especially against a competent opponent.
erehweb 5y ago
Tangentially related, see "The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch'I Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy", which argues that Mao was using Go principles (control the edges) while the Nationalists were playing Chess (aim for the center).
- mechEpleb 5y ago
  I would argue that this is ridiculously reductionist and probably has nothing to do with the actual decision making process on either side.
  - andrewzah 5y ago
    I would argue that games like go and chess are so vastly different from real life that it's not useful to make comparisons like this. Sometimes similar high-level strategies can be employed, but I'm certainly not thinking in terms of "controlling the middle" as that doesn't really make sense in real life. One can make that phrase as vague as possible to make it apply to real life, but what benefit does that bring?
    - sdenton4 5y ago
      Well, call me when you're two months into dealing a deal and realize you didn't place a ladder breaker and end up in a completely untenable position.
      - andrewzah 5y ago
        I'm not saying that strategy shouldn't be used. Obviously one should have a goal to not act in a way such that in the future their positions will be untenable. What I'm saying is I don't find it useful to reduce complex real life positions or strategies into specific game terms like "ladder" or "ladder breaker" or "outpost" or whatever.
        sdenton4 5y ago
        (yeah, totally agree; was quipping about ladder breakers precisely because they're completely irrelevant to any real world scenario.)
GreedCtrl 5y ago
A bit off topic, but I'd caution against using business tactics in chess. > While the opportunities Rockefeller capitalized on are unlikely to come about again, they show how chess strategies can translate into business acumen. India's youngest billionaire Nikhil Kamath played chess when he was younger, and he used his chess background much as this article does to promote his business acumen. Just yesterday, he played in a charity simul against 5-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. He was the only player to defeat Anand, an obvious sign of computer assistance. That's what can happen now that computers are better than humans at chess. Maybe one day they will outclass us at business too?
- xwolfi 5y ago
  The difference is that business has no particular win condiion or let's say "end" - the goal of it is in the name itself: to keep busy. What do you want a computer to do: to sell as many apple as the trees can grow ? To change the way people consume so they start eating berries instead because they're cheaper to grow ? To diversify into building the collection machine and not just the apple sales infrastructure ? To sell to far away outsiders ? To cultivate in more and more places ? It seems just so arbitrary and tied to human interest that a computer would have to have its own desires to satisfy to start doing "business" and then be so isolated from human desires that we d have no interest in keeping them online. Or we d have to imagine very clever yet obedient machines that would stick and readapt to our changing desire and assist us, but then are they doing business or we are ?
  - kyshoc 5y ago
    James Carse has a theory[0] about this: “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989
- sudhirj 5y ago
  > He was the only player to defeat Anand, an obvious sign of computer assistance. Ok this is a bit much. This was a celebrities simultaneously against the grandmaster match, and this guy is a serious player who competed when he was young, and likely plays regularly for fun and practice. Given this was an exhibition fundraiser, and the guy had nothing to prove (already runs a very successful brokerage and hedge fund, India’s youngest billionaire and all) why make an accusation of cheating?
andrewzah 5y ago
Chess is a great game for learning strategical thinking, but I don't think it's really useful to try and reduce real life / business strategies into chess terms. Real life is fundamentally different and more complex than the rigid rules of chess. Chess is also not really special here other than it being a very old, culturally important game. You could swap it out for go and nothing would really change except some strategy metaphors/comparisons. With all strategy games there are general, high-level strategies that players employ. But is it useful to anyone to make empty comparisons like "forward thinking"? Actually rather than chess, I think it's better to learn strategy through more modern fighting games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike or Super Smash Bros. Melee. These kinds of games are much more reactive; one can see and intuitively understand their mistakes much more easily than through chess position analysis. These games still have very complex strategies going on, but they combine it with mechanical execution skills. No matter what strategy game it is, I think everyone should experience that in their life; particularly business people. It really is incredible how much these games can teach us.
kyshoc 5y ago
While I appreciate the “middle” metaphor, I think it’s unwise to generalize business (and real life situations, more broadly) as a chess game — life doesn’t often come with symmetric information and zero-sum stakes. Annie Duke says it better than I can, in her book[0]: > “Chess is not a game [in a game theory sense]. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position […] If you lose at a game of chess, it must be because there were better moves that you didn’t make or didn’t see.” > “The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of ‘real games.’ They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception […] Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.” [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157
- dharmaturtle 5y ago
  As with any metaphor, one can take it too far. I agree with you that life doesn't come with symmetric information, but to argue that "Chess is a well-defined form of computation" is a bit much. Go/Weiqi is also a computation problem given this argument. What precludes asymmetric info games like poker from being "computation" problems, if one takes a wide enough view (to include the unknowns as the modeled state)? Quantum computing inherently probabilistic. Your second argument is about zero sum stakes, and I think this criticism applies to virtually all "toy" games we play. > They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception As do decisions in chess, because the players aren't perfect computers.
  - csa 5y ago
    > Go/Weiqi is also a computation problem given this argument. I agree with the assessment that it is a computation problem. As a go player for 25 years, I never thought that I would see a computer consistently beat a strong amateur in my lifetime (with many decades still theoretically left to live). Not only did I see it much sooner than I expected, but AI beats the best pros at an almost 100% win rate. Within the Go community, there is consternation that a computer can make some moves that humans probably shouldn’t make due to the ability of the computer to follow up properly where humans cannot (yet). This may change over time, but right now the computation part of the go world is much closer to expressing perfect play in a complete information game than humans are. > What precludes asymmetric info games like poker from being "computation" problems, if one takes a wide enough view (to include the unknowns as the modeled state)? Also as an avid poker player, I think many aspects of poker are rapidly leaning this direction, even though poker does not have complete information. I’m not sure how much you know about the current poker scene, but GTO solvers have opened the poker world’s collective mind about what “good” play looks like, and the players are riding the tails of the computers in terms of strategic and tactical evolution. In some formats, like heads up limit hold em, the game has been effectively solved. Bringing it back to the original topic, I would love to see a GTO version of life. Even if it is hard to implement, it could provide a guide that informs decision making. I personally don’t think I will see it in my lifetime. That said, like Go AI, I hope I’m wrong.
Tycho 5y ago
Hmm, control the middle. What does it mean in chess? Set your pieces out in the middle of the board so as to starve your opponent of opportunities, without knowing or caring what exactly those opportunities are. How does one do this in business? Hiring all the smart people, even if they spend their time unproductively, springs to mind. Sponsoring regulation, so that companies not in your unique position will struggle to establish themselves, is another way, perhaps. Cutting across multiple consumer categories, so that you can move in any direction where a competitor may try to outflank you (eg. Microsoft launching Xbox to compete with Sony), maybe? Or what about pricing - dominate the mid-priced products, avoiding the perils of thin margins at the low end and excessive R&D costs at the top. Or the supply chain - good old fashioned vertical integration, leaving only the broadest, most fungible activities to outside firms. In venture capital, thinking about the power of networks, the ability to connect innovation to expertise to capital, because you have the contacts and the credibility. It would be useful to think of counter-examples of successful businesses that clearly did not seize the middle. Hard to build analysis on top of abstract interpretation though.
its_nikita 5y ago
> Unsurprisingly, other oil companies had no hope of offering lower or even equivalent rates and still making a profit. If any of them seemed like they might pose a threat, Rockefeller could use his influence over the shipping companies to restrict their ability to transport oil. The chess analogy is interesting, but I'm not sure it applies to Rockefeller. If anything, his strategy is closer to cheating than actually being good at the game.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
e2e4 5y ago
Looks like the mobile strategy of Apple and Google.
fedreserved 5y ago
Texas Holdem translates better for business strategy. Poker tournaments structure of blinds progressively increasing, mimics inflation and how the value of resource changes over time. Making decisions based off varying forms of imperfect information that changes over time is a very valuable skill that is the core of poker and business imo.
helloplanets 5y ago
Don’t agree with this writeup at all. It seems like writeups comparing life and chess are heavily biased towards the strategic concepts, when in reality playing the game well is heavily based on grasping tactical concepts, recognizing a certain amount patterns and being able to apply them under pressure. Strategy starts mattering only way later, and is still completely dependent on you not letting the other player catch you with your pants down because of a pattern that slipped your mind. I’d go as far as to say that applying the opposite of what the writer is implying is more beneficial in most circumstances. Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc. Although, even that sells the challenges of running a good business short. The better you get at chess, the more it can feel like you’re trying to grind water out of stone, but persisting until you notice you’ve progressed after a year. I think that comes closer to the day-to-day experience of running a business. P.S. This is the best article I've read about chess and life: https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-lesson-in-concentration https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-le...
- indigochill 5y ago
  > Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc. Advocates of Go (the game, not necessarily the language) see the first view as problematic as well. In Go, attacking is much harder than it is in chess. The game is more like a negotiation, where every "take" is necessarily accompanied by a "give". As in negotiation, the more skilled player can subtly shift things their way, but from the Go mindset, each defeat is a lesson. You may have lost the immediate "negotiation", but what you were given in return was a lesson in how to improve for the next time. Applied to business, competitors can be negotiated with and perhaps at times even cooperated with when it's in both party's interest (in software, you see this in things like conferences where people swap best practices and "war stories"), and competitors who have an advantage over you can be learned from.
bsder 5y ago
People talk about Chess as if they all play like Grandmasters. In reality, Chess below Master is a series of okay moves punctuated by complete blunders that your opponent may or may not notice or be smart enough to take advantage of. The real lesson from Chess for anybody below Master is "He who makes the next to last mistake wins. And this can happen no matter how good you've been the rest of the game." And while that is also a good business lesson, it is far less comforting.
cjohnson318 5y ago
> John D. Rockefeller infamously used the strategy of seizing the middle to control the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century. Rockefeller put a premium producing a quality product. At the time, other refiners were sloppy, and sometimes sold kerosene that still had gasoline in it. Because of this, people sometimes accidentally blew their hands off, or worse. Rockefeller promised a safe, standardized product. Yes he was unscrupulous businessman, but he saved a lot of consumers from getting blown up, too. In this regard, it's not so much about seizing the middle as it is about a talented player carefully mopping up the board once they have a slight advantage.

80 points by feross 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Somehow all I can think of here is Business Secrets of the Pharoahs, from the comedy Peep Show, which begins: > The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong. > So then, as the critics and the nay sayers and the tall-poppy-chopper-downers ask with their probing questions and their knowing sneers and unfriendly voices: "Why use the Pharaohs as the basis for a business manual?" > "Well," I would answer, "I think any 'business' that lasted for more than three thousand years, as did that of ancient Egypt, is probably worth studying!" (Even if in a strict, or indeed even vague sense, it wasn't really a business at all but a civilization, with no comparable notion of "business".)

WJW 5y ago
There are some strategic elements that are important for both chess and business but they are so incredibly high-level (like "think ahead" and "control vital resources") that it becomes almost a joke. I am reminded of [this article](https://nongaap.substack.com/p/shopify-a-starcraft-inspired-business https://nongaap.substack.com/p/shopify-a-starcraft-inspired-...) which tries to claim a link between starcraft and shopify strategy. Any links presented in the article are present between any two activities involving strategic thinking and so both SC2 and Shopify are completely incidental.
- LanceH 5y ago
  While nothing to do with chess strategy, learning the game does provide lessons. Relying on yourself and your analysis. Playing the board and not the player. Playing the player when the board doesn't favor you. Playing solid principles that may not pay off now, but leave open the possibility later. Controlling your thoughts, ego and fear in tense situations.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Games are just bounded microcosms of reality, so it would make sense that learning a strategy game would teach you about areas where strategy applies in reality.
  - jerf 5y ago
    I think the big lesson chess in particular teaches is the duality of offense and defense. A naive player sees them as different things, a skilled player sees them as a unified whole. This insight applies to plenty of things in real life as well. It is also something that demonstrably many people don't understand and don't even see as something they should understand, in contrast to "plan ahead" which of course everyone will agree is important, even if they don't do it.
    - LanceH 5y ago
      I guess the other big lesson beginners get is that the other person has a plan, too. Since everyone has all the information available, it lends itself to what you describe -- attack without weakening yourself. Or eventually allow weakness if it reaches victory conditions. Generally the chess strats/tactics relating to business are more metaphor. "go for their king" may be fine as a metaphor to imply "win it outright". As a strategy, though, it's not possible to just castle in response. Unless you create another metaphor for castling. Keep repeating that and you're just describing your own domain coded into chess terms, with any cross-domain applications being by definition or coincidental.
- jsjsbdkj 5y ago
  IME the success of shopify is less tobi being some kind of genius than luck, timing and protectionism from the canadian government. He's very eager to point to specific things he thinks make him successful, but it's all post-hoc. Ultimately being profitable forgives all manner of sins, just like how google has Ads and consequently can fail 99% of the time but still print money.
maest 5y ago
Also, the hypermodern chess style actually involves letting the opponent occupy the centre and then applying pressure from long range with pieces, looking for weaknesses in the opponent's defence. https://www.chess.com/terms/hypermodern-chess https://www.chess.com/terms/hypermodern-chess
- llimllib 5y ago
  (where "hypermodern" means "early 20th century")
- zsmi 5y ago
  And it's way harder to pull off than just good old fashioned, cease the center and bludgeon the opponent. Especially against a competent opponent.

erehweb 5y ago

Tangentially related, see "The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch'I Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy", which argues that Mao was using Go principles (control the edges) while the Nationalists were playing Chess (aim for the center).

mechEpleb 5y ago
I would argue that this is ridiculously reductionist and probably has nothing to do with the actual decision making process on either side.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  I would argue that games like go and chess are so vastly different from real life that it's not useful to make comparisons like this. Sometimes similar high-level strategies can be employed, but I'm certainly not thinking in terms of "controlling the middle" as that doesn't really make sense in real life. One can make that phrase as vague as possible to make it apply to real life, but what benefit does that bring?
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    Well, call me when you're two months into dealing a deal and realize you didn't place a ladder breaker and end up in a completely untenable position.
    - andrewzah 5y ago
      I'm not saying that strategy shouldn't be used. Obviously one should have a goal to not act in a way such that in the future their positions will be untenable. What I'm saying is I don't find it useful to reduce complex real life positions or strategies into specific game terms like "ladder" or "ladder breaker" or "outpost" or whatever.
      - sdenton4 5y ago
        (yeah, totally agree; was quipping about ladder breakers precisely because they're completely irrelevant to any real world scenario.)

GreedCtrl 5y ago

A bit off topic, but I'd caution against using business tactics in chess. > While the opportunities Rockefeller capitalized on are unlikely to come about again, they show how chess strategies can translate into business acumen. India's youngest billionaire Nikhil Kamath played chess when he was younger, and he used his chess background much as this article does to promote his business acumen. Just yesterday, he played in a charity simul against 5-time world champion Viswanathan Anand. He was the only player to defeat Anand, an obvious sign of computer assistance. That's what can happen now that computers are better than humans at chess. Maybe one day they will outclass us at business too?

xwolfi 5y ago
The difference is that business has no particular win condiion or let's say "end" - the goal of it is in the name itself: to keep busy. What do you want a computer to do: to sell as many apple as the trees can grow ? To change the way people consume so they start eating berries instead because they're cheaper to grow ? To diversify into building the collection machine and not just the apple sales infrastructure ? To sell to far away outsiders ? To cultivate in more and more places ? It seems just so arbitrary and tied to human interest that a computer would have to have its own desires to satisfy to start doing "business" and then be so isolated from human desires that we d have no interest in keeping them online. Or we d have to imagine very clever yet obedient machines that would stick and readapt to our changing desire and assist us, but then are they doing business or we are ?
- kyshoc 5y ago
  James Carse has a theory[0] about this: “There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989
sudhirj 5y ago
> He was the only player to defeat Anand, an obvious sign of computer assistance. Ok this is a bit much. This was a celebrities simultaneously against the grandmaster match, and this guy is a serious player who competed when he was young, and likely plays regularly for fun and practice. Given this was an exhibition fundraiser, and the guy had nothing to prove (already runs a very successful brokerage and hedge fund, India’s youngest billionaire and all) why make an accusation of cheating?

andrewzah 5y ago

Chess is a great game for learning strategical thinking, but I don't think it's really useful to try and reduce real life / business strategies into chess terms. Real life is fundamentally different and more complex than the rigid rules of chess. Chess is also not really special here other than it being a very old, culturally important game. You could swap it out for go and nothing would really change except some strategy metaphors/comparisons. With all strategy games there are general, high-level strategies that players employ. But is it useful to anyone to make empty comparisons like "forward thinking"? Actually rather than chess, I think it's better to learn strategy through more modern fighting games like Street Fighter III: Third Strike or Super Smash Bros. Melee. These kinds of games are much more reactive; one can see and intuitively understand their mistakes much more easily than through chess position analysis. These games still have very complex strategies going on, but they combine it with mechanical execution skills. No matter what strategy game it is, I think everyone should experience that in their life; particularly business people. It really is incredible how much these games can teach us.

kyshoc 5y ago

While I appreciate the “middle” metaphor, I think it’s unwise to generalize business (and real life situations, more broadly) as a chess game — life doesn’t often come with symmetric information and zero-sum stakes. Annie Duke says it better than I can, in her book[0]: > “Chess is not a game [in a game theory sense]. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position […] If you lose at a game of chess, it must be because there were better moves that you didn’t make or didn’t see.” > “The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of ‘real games.’ They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception […] Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.” [0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35957157

dharmaturtle 5y ago
As with any metaphor, one can take it too far. I agree with you that life doesn't come with symmetric information, but to argue that "Chess is a well-defined form of computation" is a bit much. Go/Weiqi is also a computation problem given this argument. What precludes asymmetric info games like poker from being "computation" problems, if one takes a wide enough view (to include the unknowns as the modeled state)? Quantum computing inherently probabilistic. Your second argument is about zero sum stakes, and I think this criticism applies to virtually all "toy" games we play. > They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception As do decisions in chess, because the players aren't perfect computers.
- csa 5y ago
  > Go/Weiqi is also a computation problem given this argument. I agree with the assessment that it is a computation problem. As a go player for 25 years, I never thought that I would see a computer consistently beat a strong amateur in my lifetime (with many decades still theoretically left to live). Not only did I see it much sooner than I expected, but AI beats the best pros at an almost 100% win rate. Within the Go community, there is consternation that a computer can make some moves that humans probably shouldn’t make due to the ability of the computer to follow up properly where humans cannot (yet). This may change over time, but right now the computation part of the go world is much closer to expressing perfect play in a complete information game than humans are. > What precludes asymmetric info games like poker from being "computation" problems, if one takes a wide enough view (to include the unknowns as the modeled state)? Also as an avid poker player, I think many aspects of poker are rapidly leaning this direction, even though poker does not have complete information. I’m not sure how much you know about the current poker scene, but GTO solvers have opened the poker world’s collective mind about what “good” play looks like, and the players are riding the tails of the computers in terms of strategic and tactical evolution. In some formats, like heads up limit hold em, the game has been effectively solved. Bringing it back to the original topic, I would love to see a GTO version of life. Even if it is hard to implement, it could provide a guide that informs decision making. I personally don’t think I will see it in my lifetime. That said, like Go AI, I hope I’m wrong.

Tycho 5y ago

Hmm, control the middle. What does it mean in chess? Set your pieces out in the middle of the board so as to starve your opponent of opportunities, without knowing or caring what exactly those opportunities are. How does one do this in business? Hiring all the smart people, even if they spend their time unproductively, springs to mind. Sponsoring regulation, so that companies not in your unique position will struggle to establish themselves, is another way, perhaps. Cutting across multiple consumer categories, so that you can move in any direction where a competitor may try to outflank you (eg. Microsoft launching Xbox to compete with Sony), maybe? Or what about pricing - dominate the mid-priced products, avoiding the perils of thin margins at the low end and excessive R&D costs at the top. Or the supply chain - good old fashioned vertical integration, leaving only the broadest, most fungible activities to outside firms. In venture capital, thinking about the power of networks, the ability to connect innovation to expertise to capital, because you have the contacts and the credibility. It would be useful to think of counter-examples of successful businesses that clearly did not seize the middle. Hard to build analysis on top of abstract interpretation though.

its_nikita 5y ago

> Unsurprisingly, other oil companies had no hope of offering lower or even equivalent rates and still making a profit. If any of them seemed like they might pose a threat, Rockefeller could use his influence over the shipping companies to restrict their ability to transport oil. The chess analogy is interesting, but I'm not sure it applies to Rockefeller. If anything, his strategy is closer to cheating than actually being good at the game.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

e2e4 5y ago

Looks like the mobile strategy of Apple and Google.

fedreserved 5y ago

Texas Holdem translates better for business strategy. Poker tournaments structure of blinds progressively increasing, mimics inflation and how the value of resource changes over time. Making decisions based off varying forms of imperfect information that changes over time is a very valuable skill that is the core of poker and business imo.

helloplanets 5y ago

Don’t agree with this writeup at all. It seems like writeups comparing life and chess are heavily biased towards the strategic concepts, when in reality playing the game well is heavily based on grasping tactical concepts, recognizing a certain amount patterns and being able to apply them under pressure. Strategy starts mattering only way later, and is still completely dependent on you not letting the other player catch you with your pants down because of a pattern that slipped your mind. I’d go as far as to say that applying the opposite of what the writer is implying is more beneficial in most circumstances. Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc. Although, even that sells the challenges of running a good business short. The better you get at chess, the more it can feel like you’re trying to grind water out of stone, but persisting until you notice you’ve progressed after a year. I think that comes closer to the day-to-day experience of running a business. P.S. This is the best article I've read about chess and life: https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-lesson-in-concentration https://aeon.co/essays/playing-chess-is-an-essential-life-le...

indigochill 5y ago
> Instead of viewing running a business as a contest between businesses for Scarce Resource X and Y, it’s probably better to view running a business as a contest of managing the scarce resources within the company itself: Capital, time, amount of great people working with you, etc. Advocates of Go (the game, not necessarily the language) see the first view as problematic as well. In Go, attacking is much harder than it is in chess. The game is more like a negotiation, where every "take" is necessarily accompanied by a "give". As in negotiation, the more skilled player can subtly shift things their way, but from the Go mindset, each defeat is a lesson. You may have lost the immediate "negotiation", but what you were given in return was a lesson in how to improve for the next time. Applied to business, competitors can be negotiated with and perhaps at times even cooperated with when it's in both party's interest (in software, you see this in things like conferences where people swap best practices and "war stories"), and competitors who have an advantage over you can be learned from.

bsder 5y ago

People talk about Chess as if they all play like Grandmasters. In reality, Chess below Master is a series of okay moves punctuated by complete blunders that your opponent may or may not notice or be smart enough to take advantage of. The real lesson from Chess for anybody below Master is "He who makes the next to last mistake wins. And this can happen no matter how good you've been the rest of the game." And while that is also a good business lesson, it is far less comforting.

cjohnson318 5y ago

> John D. Rockefeller infamously used the strategy of seizing the middle to control the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century. Rockefeller put a premium producing a quality product. At the time, other refiners were sloppy, and sometimes sold kerosene that still had gasoline in it. Because of this, people sometimes accidentally blew their hands off, or worse. Rockefeller promised a safe, standardized product. Yes he was unscrupulous businessman, but he saved a lot of consumers from getting blown up, too. In this regard, it's not so much about seizing the middle as it is about a talented player carefully mopping up the board once they have a slight advantage.