Chessmaster Biz Secrets

INTRODUCTION

Chess is life. -- Bobby Fischer

Wealth, power and success. Is there any among us who has not, at some point, wished for these things? I know I have – yet relatively few of us have achieved them.

Maybe we lacked some key characteristic, or maybe we misjudged our capabilities or the capabilities of our adversaries, whether they were individuals or institutions or just the particular time and place in which we found ourselves living and striving. Maybe we didn't have enough confidence in ourselves when we should have, or too much confidence when we shouldn't have. Or possibly we failed to devise a workable strategy to reach our goals, or let our guard down at a critical moment, or failed to seize an advantage in time, or gave up just a little bit too soon. Maybe all it was was getting dealt a bad hand or running smack into an unlucky break.

Whatever our individual travails, they've all been experienced before by others in that almost perfect model of the world of business and the great canvas of life – the game of chess. What's more, over the course of many centuries, the greatest masters of this infinitely challenging game have developed a huge body of wisdom as to how to succeed at it.

Smart business leaders have learned to pay heed to this fertile trove of insight and common sense. Bankers Trust, for example, one of the country's most highly respected financial institutions, thought so much of the applicability of chess smarts to commerce that, in 1990, they ran their help wanted ads not in places like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but in Chess Life magazine.

The response was much to their liking. They received over 1000 resumes, interviewed 100 people, and hired five. Two of these five were Grandmaster players and the other three were International Masters.

The executive behind this idea was himself an international chess master by the name of Norman Weinstein, who later took his foreign exchange skills to another company, Odyssey Partners. Regarding the importance of strategy to business, he said in a 1994 interview with Forbes magazine, In chess you learn to plan variations of play, to make a decision tree. One thing I find myself better in than most people is developing a strategy and implementing it. I'll say, 'If he does this, we'll do that,' whereas many very, very bright people will talk in generalities.

Weinstein is far from alone in his approach. American Stock Exchange trader Michael Becker also looks for skilled chess players when hiring, and notes that their rigorous mental training in chess results in their routinely outperforming their associates.

Likewise Gerald Quirke, European Operations Director of the international banking and investment company LGT. We now have a thriving LGT International Chess Group, said Quirke, whose firm routinely conducts an intensive three-week training course for its managers which includes daily chess instruction, with people playing every day, even on electronic mail, with colleagues from all over the world. Learning to play chess as part of the course acted like an aerobic exercise, but on the mind. It was like a personal fitness regime for the brain.

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg notes the imperative of strategy in making a movie, and expresses it as a chess analogy. Directing is about seeing twenty moves ahead while you're working on the next five. I'm deciding whether to use my castle or my second bishop. How am I being threatened here? How can I advance?

Indeed, the parallels between the game of chess and one's vocation and daily affairs are striking: each demands intelligence and foresight, logic and imagination, tactical and strategic thinking, perseverance and courage, and above all a will to win.

Writing in Chess Life, Gabriel Schwartzman observed that the unique strategic characteristics of chess are certainly applicable to both military science and business dynamics allowing the implementation of its principles. In chess, it is important to understand the terrain, or position, and adapt to both gradual and abrupt changes. It is also just as important to understand the opponent and his characteristics and tendencies. And so it is in business. Before devising the strategy of how to compete in the marketplace, it is absolutely vital to understand that marketplace perfectly. This involves realizing what the strengths and weaknesses of the company are, who the competition happens to be, what its strengths and weaknesses are, what marked characteristics stand out, and many other pieces of information that the business review process is meant to reveal.

In the year 1972 chess underwent a dramatic upheaval that was to catapult it from a low-profile intellectual pursuit into a big-time, big-money spectator sport. The dynamo behind that change, of course, was Bobby Fischer. Fischer was rude, ill-spoken, and uncouth, but he was also the most spectacular chess talent the world had seen in a century – some consider Fischer, now in retirement, to have been the best chess player in history. The occasion was his championship match against world champion Boris Spassky in Iceland, and the publicity leading up to it was unprecedented in the world of chess.

When I learned of the upcoming match, the businessman in me recognized that this might be a good time to bring out a book of quotations from famous chessmasters. Accordingly, I spent one of the most enjoyable summers of my life sitting in my favorite chair in a sunny room with an ever-replenished pile of chess books on a table by my side, along with an oft- replenished cup of coffee, and scoured dozens of these volumes for pithy quotations by the great masters of chess. The quotes went back as far as Aristotle, who observed, When you are lonely, when you feel yourself an alien in the world, play chess. This will raise your spirits and be your counselor in war.

By the end of the summer, I had accumulated several hundred quotes and sent them out into the publishing firmament. Shortly thereafter the book, Chess Quotations of the Masters, was published by Peter Pauper Press. Recently, some three decades later, while perusing my old book of chess quotes, along with the hundreds more now readily available on the Internet, I realized that a good many of these kernels of wisdom advising on how to excel in the game of chess applied just as profoundly to business, and, indeed, to life itself.

That is how this book you are now reading was born. Its purpose is to cull those centuries of wisdom and adapt the principles of chess to the pursuit of success in your business today – and not least, to your enjoyment of that success. I invite you to examine with me the insightful secrets of the highest practitioners of this unique and infinite game. It is my hope that, by applying the accumulated wisdom of a millennium of chessmasters to your business and personal life, you will rise to unprecedented heights of success in each.

secret #1

LOVE WHAT YOU DO

You can only get good at chess if you love the game. – Bobby Fischer

Robert James Fischer, regarded by many as the greatest chess player of all time, was born in Chicago in 1943 and brought up in Brooklyn, where he learned to play chess at the age of 6. His devotion to the game was immediate and absolute. All I want to do, ever, is play chess, he said.

With such unabashed reverence for the game, it is not surprising that, at the age of 13, he became the youngest national junior chess champion in the USA and in 1958, at the age of 15, the youngest Grandmaster in the history of chess.

Totally loving what you do is one of life's most fundamental secrets of success. It underlies all the other requisites for success, such as dedication, determination, hard work, and the indomitable will to win no matter what the odds. Loving what you do – whether it's a sport, a business, or participating in a relationship – is also irresistible to others. All the world loves a lover, as the saying goes, and having such an attitude will attract into your sphere a multitude of people who will want to be around you and help you achieve your goals.

I can give you a perfect example from my own experience. In Boston, in the early 80's, I founded the city's only all-night secretarial service, Typing 24. Why typing? Strange as it may seem to some people, I loved to type! In those pre-computer days, the queen of typewriters was the IBM Selectric, and for me, typing on that machine was like riding a high-performance motorcycle – zipping along at 100 words a minute as I took in the scenery on the copy before me. It was my love of my job that came across to clients and rapidly made the business a great success.

I soon had to hire typists to handle all the additional work, and I had a key question that I asked when I interviewed them: Do you like to type? Some would indicate that it was okay, just a job like any other. But others would say enthusiastically, "I love to type!" Those were the ones I hired.

Whatever the endeavor, one's passionate involvement with it is what makes all the difference. The greatest chessmasters were the ones who could wax as eloquent as lovers about their feelings for the game. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make one happy, wrote Siegbert Tarrasch, the German physician who was considered one of the best four players in the world for over 20 years. And a master named Assiac observed that surely of all the drugs in the world, Chess must be the most permanently pleasurable. Grandmaster Tevis proclaimed, When in doubt, play chess. Bent Larsen, Denmark's best chess player, enthused, Chess is a beautiful mistress. And Wilhelm Steinitz, one of the great masters and chess theorists of the 19th century, wrote that Chess is so inspiring that I do not believe a good player is capable of having an evil thought during the game.

To be candid, after a strenuous match with Emanuel Lasker, which he lost by a wide margin, Steinitz died crazy and penniless in 1900, but that's beside the point! Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Without passion, nothing great can be accomplished. The lesson here is simple: find something you love to do and do it. Then success is assured, even if your business or other enterprise (marriage, academia, whatever) fails. Because success is in the doing – not that winning isn't nice, too.

As for Mr. Fischer, who loved chess above all else from the age of six, he did go on to win, and win big. In 1972, he defeated Boris Spassky of the USSR in Reykjavik, Iceland, breaking the long Soviet domination of the World Championship and becoming the first American to win the world title.

secret #2

DEDICATION

Chess is not a matter of life or death – it's more important than that. – Anonymous Chessmaster

"If you're too busy to play chess, you're too busy. – Anonymous

Just the other day I had lunch with an acquaintance of mine, Tyler Thornstein, who had been struggling for several years to make a go of a small donut shop not far from my own office.

Now, donuts are pretty much a no-brainer, in my opinion. They cost almost nothing to make, the profit margin is out of sight, everyone likes them, and all you need to spend on advertising is the effort to open the door of your shop and let the aroma of freshly baked calories waft across your neighborhood. If you can't make a go of a donut shop I'd have to seriously wonder if you could make a go of tying your own shoelaces.

But Tyler was on the verge of failing.

I don't know what it is, he said dejectedly. I get up in the morning, I bake the goods, I greet the customers. I get through the day. I close up, go home, and do the same thing the next day. I know the drill. But business is dropping off, it's stagnating. I'm stagnating.

As gently as I could, I told him what I thought the problem was. He just didn't want it badly enough anymore. Maybe he never did. To succeed, you have to be totally dedicated to what you're doing. It has to be important to you.

That may sound like I'm splitting hairs. Doing it is doing it, right? What's the difference how you feel about it as long as it gets done?

But no, it does matter. Bobby Fischer didn't become the greatest chess player of the century entirely because he had a knack for chess. It was because All I want to do, ever, is to play chess. Alexander Alekine didn't achieve greatness because chess was a pastime to him but because, as Reuben Fine observed, He lived for chess and chess alone. And then there's the anonymous master who stated simply, If you're too busy to play chess, you're too busy.

There's no substitute for really caring. As the chess writer Nick de Firmian has pointed out, A lot of the difference between an International Master and a Grandmaster is a seriousness to the game. The Grandmaster is willing to go through all this. He's willing to put up with anything. This shows his dedication.

Mikhail Tal, the Latvian Grandmaster and world champion in 1960, exemplified this attitude. Though in ill health for much of his life, he pursued chess with a single-mindedness that might have put a healthy man in the hospital. Indeed, when Tal did go into the hospital for an operation, he talked about chess until he lost consciousness, and while recuperating he escaped from the