Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Chess and Business

The Financial Times' John Kay writes:

Yet the rules of chess are well-defined and uncomplicated, there is a single opponent and rarely more than a handful of legal moves. Compared with fighting the war in Iraq, mapping the future of the telecommunications industry, or planning the economic development of China, chess is simple and predictable. But chess is still too subtle to be defined by a single narrative and too complex for models to be more than illustrative. People who hold to a single idea, or a fixed design, generally lose in chess, as they lose in battle, in business and in economics. Great chess players apply a variety of principles, they sense patterns, they hold a formidable range of models and analyses in their mind without being a slave to any of them.

From Business lessons from chess grand masters.

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