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What Learning Chess Reveals about Business Strategy

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Chess + Business Strategy

“Strong players can quickly evaluate many types of positions because they’ve seen similar positions before. Of course, most positions in chess have their own quirks or involve other variables that require specific calculations to truly understand them, but chess players start from a base of common knowledge about the Cozino game and work out the variations from there.  You can, therefore, zero in on a relatively few moves to study seriously, which greatly reduces the amount of actual calculation.

…Spatially oriented players build up their chess vocabularies more rapidly and become fluent in the language of chess much earlier than do their nonspatially oriented brethren. True pattern recognition skills, however, come mostly from experience with the game. After you see enough different positions on the chessboard, you begin to just know what kinds of moves you should consider, almost without conscious thought…” (emphasis added)

– James Eade, Chess Master, US Chess Federation

Is business strategy really any different?

Now substitue “business” for “chess” in Mr. Eade’s quote. See enough different business experiences and you begin to just know what kinds of moves you should consider with your organization.

One way to develop quickly as an amateur chess player is to learn the game’s notation and then study historically great matches of masters. That’s why I read the biographies and blogs since there are many now a days because  starting a blog is not difficult, so there you can learn of how other business leaders played the game.

Dear Spammers,

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Dear Thinnish Becker and Rudolph Propos,

I don’t want your lists of 120k finance professionals, 4.8 million new businesses, or 150k criminal attorneys. Unless something recently changed with the United States legal system and defense attorneys are now miraculously requesting online Magento ecommerce stores, then I’m not sure why you thought I would need your services. Please remove me from your list.

And Jerry (if that is your real name),

I’m not interested in your Chinese textile manufacturing offer. I believe you when you say the polar fleece blankets, 100% polyester curtains, and coral fleece bathrobes that are produced in your Jiangsu Province manufacturing facility are made by skilled workers at a competitively low price. It’s just that nothing about my business requires textile manufacturing at the moment. Have you tried the people who make snuggies yet? A snuggy seems like the perfect combination of your three specialties.

Now Mr. David Barnet Bradle,

You may send my swiss lotto winnings of 750k euros to the red cross relief program for Haiti. Please consider this my official approval to do so – no need to get any of my personal banking information.

Sincerely Yours,

Josh Colter

Virtual Work: 3 tips, 3 reasons, 3 pros, and 2 cons for NOT having an office

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When people ask me about Elias, it is our team’s virtual setup that usually generates the most interest. I realized the world is different one day while driving down US 135 in Greenwood, Indiana. I was using my iphone to chat on skype with a teammate in New Zealand and business partner in Uruguay about a client in New York.

Inc magazine is using the month of February to conduct an experiment whereby their staff abandons plush office space for the freedom of home workspaces and the occasional noisy coffee shop (sidenote: I am writing this post from a starbucks). The magazine’s blog asked for feedback from other virtual companies – tips, pro, cons, and reasons for working virtually. I posted the response below (hopefully we make the upcoming April article):

Tips for working virtually

Choose the Right People

Not everyone is cut out to work virtually. Hire people who are trustworthy and self-motivated. Use smaller test contract projects with potential candidates to determine how they perform with your team in a virtual work environment before you hire them.

Set Clear Objectives

Cultivate a ROWE (results oriented work environment). It shouldn’t matter when someone clocks in or out if they get their work done. Find a good project management tool like basecamp, activecollab, zoho, or redmine to assign tasks and measure performance.

Invest in Communication

Buy a good headset for sound quality on calls. Take some of the money saved from no office space and spend it on frequent in person team meetings (we meet quarterly for 3-5 days). And use your project and customer relationship management tools instead of email when possible so that everyone has access to the same information.

Why EliasInteractive.com operates virtually

  • Family: We all have strong commitments to our families and our families are rooted in different locations.
  • Access to talent: anyone can join our team without having to relocate, which dramatically increases the potential pool of talent
  • Cost savings: no office space and cheaper standard-of-living costs in our locations.

Virtual Company Pros

  • Focus: I don’t get interrupted by coworkers stopping by my desk.
  • Accountability: Too many managers measure performance based on employees arriving on time and staying late. Virtual work forces you to answer the question, “What did I really accomplish today?” And also see how to track employees working from home if you have staff working from home as they offer some great solutions.
  • Flexibility: You should work when you are most productive. For some this might be late at night rather than during “normal” business hours.

Virtual Company Cons

  • Boundaries: the lack of separation between home and work can open the door for interruptions from family while working or allow work to bleed over into family time. One of our teammates rents a cheap one room office because it is hard for him to be productive with 4 kids at home.
  • Miscommunication: email, IM, and even conference calls remove nonverbal cues like facial expression and vocal tone which we all use to lend context to our messages. Beware of assuming what a coworker meant and give them the benefit of the doubt.