Strategic
Intensity
A few weeks ago Harvard Business Review senior editor Diane L. Coutu conducted
a discussion with the world's leading chess player Garry Kasparov in New York.
If chess is such a powerful form of competition, Coutu wanted to know, is there
anything that strategists can learn from chess players about what it takes
to win? In the course of a wide-ranging discussion with HBR, Kasparov explored
the power of chess as a model for business competition; the balance that chess
players have to strike between intuition and analysis; the significance of
his loss to IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue; and how his legendary
rivalry with Anatoly Karpov affected his own success. The following
are a few extracts from the interview which appeared in the April issue of
the Harvard Business Review.
- When businesspeople use chess as a metaphor, they may sometimes unintentionally
sentimentalize what’s involved in winning, because they see chess as
a kind of clean, intellectual engagement. That’s not the case at all.
There is nothing cute or charming about chess; it is a violent sport, and
when you confront your opponent you set out to crush his ego. Chess is a
battleground on which the enemy has to be vanquished. This is what it means
to be a chess player, and I cannot imagine that it is very different from
what it takes to be a top-ranked CEO.
-
If you can convince your enemy that you’re comfortable on their
ground, then you can often trick them into moving into your own territory.
That’s just what happened with Korchnoi and me. I put myself in his
shoes long enough to lure him into fighting the game on my territory, and
so I won.
-
Anatoly Karpov would be very good as a manager because he excels at operating
with small problems on the board; he would certainly maximize your resources.
But Karpov dislikes taking risks, which might make him less effective in
situations where the CEO has to take a gamble. Then you might want someone
like me, who loves risk.
-
Nothing made chess more popular than the match I won against Deep Blue
in 1996 and the match I lost in 1997. The official Web site got 72 million
hits during the six games of the second match in New York, which was a
higher daily rate than the Atlanta Olympic Games Web site got in 1996.
-
To my mind, IBM actually committed a crime against science. By claiming
victory so quickly in the man-versus-machine contest, the company dissuaded
other companies from funding such a complicated and valuable project again,
and that’s the real tragedy.
-
Playing against a computer means facing something that doesn’t have
any nerves; it’s like sitting across the table from an IRS agent
during a tax audit.
-
My mother was really the driving force behind me. She devoted her entire
life to helping me, she was always convinced that I had the potential to
become a powerful man. At the same time, she never felt that the chess
world championship should be my only goal. She insisted that I study humanities
in high school. To this day when I play chess I’m always trying to
find something unconventional, even poetic—something more than just
analytics.
- Here's
a more extensive version of the conversation in HBR Online.