BUSINESS STRATEGY: GARRY KASPAROV
A chess champ’s advice: Attack and don’t relent
SINCLAIR STEWART
October 12, 2007
NEW YORK — As a teenage chess prodigy, Garry Kasparov quickly learned to deal with failure.
Twice he clashed with reigning champion Tigran Petrosian, and each time the upstart’s aggressive tactics were twisted against him, repelled by “Iron Tigran’s” notoriously impenetrable defence.
So on the eve of the their third meeting, the young Mr. Kasparov sought out some advice from the legendary Soviet grandmaster Boris Spassky.
“Squeeze his balls,” Mr. Spassky counselled, sidestepping the more delicate intricacies of strategy. “But don’t rush into it,” he cautioned.
“Squeeze one, not both.”
The message? Pressure is a good thing, but it must be applied steadily and with purpose.
“If you stay aggressive and things don’t work as planned, you at least learn something,” Mr. Kasparov told a gathering at the World Business Forum in Manhattan yesterday. “Mistakes of inaction, I believe, are psychologically harder to deal with. We always regret missed opportunities more than misplayed attacks.”
Mr. Kasparov, of course, blossomed into one of the chess world’s greatest competitors, among other things: consultant, political activist, presidential candidate (although this looks increasingly in doubt), and author, most recently, of How Life Imitates Chess, designed to translate his experiences as a player into a guidebook for decision making in the corporate arena.
It was this latter hat he ostensibly donned yesterday, ready to make what he described as “the case for the offence.” In Mr. Kasparov’s thinking, attacking is as integral to business or politics as it is to chess; those who win do so not only by forcing their opponents into a retreat, but using their newly held advantage to launch further “assaults.” A failure to do this can be fatal, he said, furnishing the Wright Brothers, Wang computers and AltaVista as examples of pioneers who ceded their positions to more aggressive rivals.
Source: The Globe and Mail
In the displayed chess set,
how does one know which is
a bishop, knight or rook?
uh, from the starting position…?
But I know what you mean… I remember years ago [at a USCF tournament] at the table next to me, a player INSISTED that they use his Civil War set (with cannons and generals on horses etc) and the TD (Goichberg!) patiently explained to him that the set was not a suitable set for tournaments…
Susan,
The European Chess Union is sued on October 3rd in Lausanne by Ali Nihat Yazici of Turkish Chess Federation. He is asking President Boris Kutin to resign. http://www.tsf.org.tr/ FIDE cut support to ECU Individual prize fund.
Intuitive resistance – that’s my feeling toward Kasparov’s philosophy.
That is without much reflection.
I think Kasparov’s way of thinking of how life imitates chess reduces life. Life is much more than chess. Much more intricate , though not meaning to reduce chess to simplicity. But with all due respect to chess, life is so much more than it.
Good one..thanks..