It’s hard to find a better exemplar for competition than chess. The lawyer in the courtroom, the general on the battlefield, and the politician on the campaign trail have all at some point described their skirmishes in terms of the 64 black-and-white squares and 32 pieces that make up a chess game. Chess has become part of the everyday language of many executives: we checkmate our opponents, we are just pawns in a game, or we think three moves ahead.
Of course, chess is not the only game that businesspeople like to invoke. Many leaders draw inspiration from poker and team sports, such as baseball and football. But there is something peculiarly different about chess. The image of two brilliant minds locked in a battle of skill and will—in which chance plays little or no apparent role—is compelling. Even people who have no personal knowledge of the game instinctively recognize that chess is unusual in terms of its intellectual complexity and the strategic demands it places on players.
If chess is such a powerful form of competition, is there anything that strategists can learn from chess players about what it takes to win? To find out, HBR senior editor Diane L. Coutu talked with Garry Kasparov at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan. The world’s number one player since 1984, Kasparov became the youngest world champion at the age of 22 and is considered today to be the most accomplished chess player of all time. Although Kasparov is a product of the Soviet Union’s formidable chess system, which has dominated the game since the Second World War, he has never played the limited, even passive role traditionally expected of Russian celebrities—far from it. A committed political activist, Kasparov today continues to support Russia’s struggling opposition.
Success in both chess and business, Kasparov believes, is very much a question of psychological advantage; the complexity of the game demands that players rely heavily on their instincts and on gamesmanship. 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, Kasparov’s predecessor as World Chess Champion, affected his own success. Great champions, Kasparov argues, need great enemies. What follows is an abridged and edited version of the conversation.
Chess has become a buzzword in everyday language.
It has. At one level, there’s something rather frightening about the idea that a powerful politician might think of countries and their leaders as pieces on a chessboard. Might a president think of a small country as a pawn that could be sacrificed? Of course, that kind of concern doesn’t really apply in the business context, and chess is certainly a good metaphor for business competition. There’s a massive amount of uncertainty and almost boundless variety in terms of the moves you can make in both chess and business. Think about it: After just three opening moves by a chess player, more than 9 million positions are possible. And that’s when only two players are involved in the game. Now imagine all the possibilities faced by companies with a whole host of corporations responding to their new strategies, pricing, and products. The unpredictability is almost unimaginable.
After just three opening moves by a chess player, more than 9 million positions are possible. Now imagine all the possibilities faced by companies with a whole host of corporations responding to their new strategies, pricing, and products.
My one caveat would be that 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. The world chess masters with whom I have competed over the years nearly all share my belief that 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.
What do you think businesspeople can learn about winning from chess?
The first rule is: Never, ever, underestimate your opponent. Whenever I am playing at grand master levels, I always, always assume that my competitor is going to see everything I do—even when I plan to make an unexpected move in order to confuse him.
It’s also critical to keep a psychological edge. I am not a big fan of pop psychology, but I do believe that getting the other guy off balance is a real skill. You have to go on fighting even if you are in a winning position—in fact, especially if you are in a winning position. In a long match of many games during which competitors regularly lose ten to 15 pounds, concentration is everything and it can be very easy to get off track. Your own body language, for example, can influence the way your challenger plays his game. Through your hesitations and pauses, you may communicate to your competitor that you are uncertain or just not ready. I lost a match to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000 because I was not psychologically prepared for his strategy and for his play, and he saw it. And I couldn’t regroup during the match, despite the fact that I had prepared myself excellently for the game. Of course, some people do go to silly extremes in search of advantage. I believe that Dr. Vladimir Zukhar, who was Anatoly Karpov’s psychologist, once tried to hypnotize an opponent of Karpov’s during a match.
You also have to make yourself comfortable in the enemy’s territory. I remember playing a match against Viktor Korchnoi in 1983. He tried everything to get me off-kilter. He played quiet positions, he traded pawns, and he did everything possible to prevent me from playing my bold, visionary game. I had no choice but to play like Korchnoi. I limited myself to small problems on the board and was able to hold on long enough to get Korchnoi to play the game my way. That can be a terrific tactic for CEOs as well. 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.
Would CEOs be better leaders if they played chess?
There are chess players and there are chess players. I don’t think that the fact that you are a chess player would be any indication of how well you would succeed in business. Some chess players are very concerned with detail. Other chess players, including myself, look at the big picture. I expect that my archrival, 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. The board positions that I try to build are both risky and complicated. I’m always ready to go into uncharted territories because I have full confidence in my ability to work out what people are going to do in response to my moves—maybe not better than a computer but certainly better than all my competitors.
Many people consider chess to be the ultimate in human logic, the height of human intellectual accomplishment. Is that the case?
People who see chess as a scientific pursuit played by some kind of human supercomputer may be surprised, but it takes more than logic to be a world-class chess player. Intuition is the defining quality of a great chess player. That’s because chess is a mathematically infinite game. The total number of possible different moves in a single game of chess is more than the number of seconds that have elapsed since the big bang created the universe. Many people don’t recognize that. They look at the chessboard and they see 64 squares and 32 pieces and they think that the game is limited. It’s not, and even at the highest levels it is impossible to calculate very far out. I can think maybe 15 moves in advance, and that’s about as far as any human has gone. Inevitably you reach a point when you’ve got to navigate by using your imagination and feelings rather than your intellect or logic. At that moment, you are playing with your gut.
Intuition is the defining quality of a great chess player. It’s often at the very toughest moments of their chess battles—when they had to rely on pure intuition—that great players came up with their best, most innovative moves.
Often, your gut will serve you better than your brains. I’ve been working now on a five-volume book called My Great Predecessors, which reviews the development of the game of chess by looking closely at the playing histories of the great players of the past 200 years. When analyzing their games together with a computer, I found something very interesting. It was often at the very toughest moments of their chess battles—when they had to rely on pure intuition—that these great players came up with their best, most innovative moves. Ironically, when the games were finished and the players had the luxury of replaying them at leisure and analyzing them for publication, they typically made many more mistakes than they did when actually competing. To me the implication is clear: What made these players great was not their analytic prowess but their intuition under pressure.
Speaking of analytic prowess, what was the significance of your famous matches with IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer, Deep Blue?
For a start, they were a huge promotion for the game. 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.
But the matches meant a lot more than that to me. Competing with a computer was first and foremost a scientific experiment for me. I thought it was very important for society to start communicating with computers, and I knew that chess was the only field where man and machine could meet. You can’t do it with mathematics or with literature. Chess, however, lies somewhere in between. I believed that it would be an ideal playing field for comparing human intuition with the brute force of a machine’s calculation.
The yardstick of victory, I think, should be this: If the best human player—on his best day, at his peak—can still beat the best machine, then we can say that the chess master is superior to the machine. And for now, I believe that chess masters like me still have the upper hand. I can beat the machine unless I make a fatal unforced error. But when the chess master can no longer defeat the machine on his best day, then we will have to take a cold, hard look at issues such as artificial intelligence and the relationship between man and machine.
Unfortunately, I don’t think everyone shared the same spirit of experiment. The day after the New York match against Deep Blue, the one I lost in 1997, IBM stock immediately jumped 2.5% to a ten-year high. It continued to rise dramatically for weeks. For some reason, Lou Gerstner did not invite me to the next IBM shareholders’ meeting to take a bow! But seriously, I wish that IBM had accepted my offer for a tiebreaker. 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.
Did it hurt your pride to be beaten by a computer?
No, not at all. Let me explain this by telling you a little anecdote. In 1769, the Hungarian engineer Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed a chess-playing machine for the amusement of the Austrian empress Maria Theresa. It looked like a purely mechanical device, shaped like a person. And it played chess very well. But the machine was a fake. There was a chess master cleverly hidden inside the device who decided all the moves.
In some ways, Deep Blue was also a fake. The machine I played with in 1996 and 1997 had no history. Records of its past games were better guarded than top-secret documents at the Pentagon. And since IBM refused to release printouts of earlier games, it was impossible to prepare for the match. I couldn’t feel badly about losing because I wasn’t playing on a level playing field.
What, if anything, did we learn from your contests with Deep Blue?
We learned, of course, that we are very slow compared with the machine, like ants compared with a jet. But it’s not just speed. Playing against a chess 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. Chess between humans and computers is very different from chess between only humans. For one thing, human players have to cope with a lot of external pressures and distractions: you have a family, you write books, you give lectures, you get headaches, you have to earn money. There’s a lot of stuff filling up your brain while you’re playing. A machine, on the other hand, is completely without distractions. This shows the weakness, the shortcomings of the mortal mind, which is a daunting lesson for human beings. We just can’t play with the same consistency as a computer. So it’s all the more fortunate that we have our intuition to help us play better.
People often comment about the dominance of Russian players. Given what you’ve said about intuition, is there something in your national culture that nurtures chess genius?
A lot of people say that. But I don’t think that there is anything mysterious about the way the Soviet Union dominated chess. I, for one, have always believed that talent is everywhere—wherever people live, whatever nationality they are. Essentially, the explanation lies in the system. The Soviet system offered very little opportunity for kids. Chess was one of the few pathways to big success—chess, ballet, music, some sports, maybe fundamental sciences. So parents pushed their kids in those directions. What’s more, Soviet officials liked to use the country’s success in chess as a tool to promote the intellectual superiority of the Communist regime over the decadent West. The result was that there were always millions of kids getting a good training in chess. And so they could easily find and develop people like Karpov, like me, like Spassky, like Botvinnik, like Petrosian, like Tal. In America, on the other hand, there were many other opportunities for advancement open to young people, and only a few chose to get deeply involved in chess—mostly on the East Coast, some in Chicago, and some in San Francisco. Essentially we are talking only about 50,000 to 100,000 kids. America was lucky to have one Bobby Fischer.
You were a child prodigy. What can you teach us about how to develop high performers?
You may be disappointed by my answer. I don’t believe that there was any organizational secret to my success that you can replicate in a business. The truth is that my mother was really the driving force behind me. My father died when I was seven, and she didn’t remarry. She devoted her entire life to helping me become a child prodigy. 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, and she was very creative in figuring out what would be important both for my career and for me as an individual. It was very important to her, for example, that I be a well-rounded person. So although the connection between chess and mathematics is very inviting, my mother recognized that fantasy and imagination were also essential, and she insisted that I study humanities in high school. To this day, I do not look for a mathematical solution when I play chess. I’m always trying to find something unconventional, even poetic—something more than just analytics.
You’re now 41. What’s the next challenge for you?
The greatest challenge for all successful people is to get past their own successes. It’s especially hard when that success is extraordinary. In 1985, after winning game 24 against Anatoly Karpov, I became the youngest world champion in the history of chess. There was a huge celebration. I was feeling on top of the world. Then, in a quiet moment, Rona Petrosian, the widow of Tigran Petrosian, the ninth world champion and one of my great predecessors, came up to me and said, “Garry, I am sorry for you.” I was incredulous. “I’m sorry for you,” she said, “because the happiest and best day of your life is over.” I was too young at the time to recognize the profundity of her words, but today I understand how wise she was. Where does a virtuoso go after he has accomplished everything that he’s ever wanted to accomplish, even beyond his wildest imagination? This is the question for all world masters, whether they’re in business, sports, or chess.
I call it the champion’s dilemma, and it’s a real problem for people and companies at the top of their game. In the end, I believe that there is only one answer: You must be lucky in your enemies. For me it was Karpov, Karpov, Karpov. If it were not for Karpov, I would probably be the victim of the same complacency that dooms most other people. But in Karpov I found my archenemy, whom I had to fight. He never gave me the time to enjoy my title. I was world champion at 22. For the first five years of my championship, I had to prove every year that I was still the best. And it set a pattern. I know that I can never stop competing. Competition is now in my blood. And as I look ahead, I see new enemies nipping at my heels, young people who are still too young to vote. And every day I am grateful for them because they push me to be passionate about staying at the top.
As someone who has faced the champion’s dilemma, which successful CEO do you most readily identify with?
That is difficult to answer because I do not like details, and to some extent all CEOs must concern themselves with detail. I’m a visionary in the way I play chess. As I wrote in my autobiography, Unlimited Challenge, I love complex combinations, and I’m ruthless in breaking my own fixed patterns. I almost always succeed in avoiding the temptation to solve problems by using purely technical means. That was true at 24 and it is still true today. So I guess you could say that Steve Jobs is probably the CEO who is most like me, a visionary who likes to break the mold and who doesn’t like to bury himself in the day-to-day tasks of management. He has also been lucky in his enemies. Without Bill Gates, Steve Jobs would surely not be the man he is today. If Karpov had not existed, you might not be talking to me today.
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This article was originally posted at https://hbr.org/2005/04/strategic-intensity
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