Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2015. Its description of the company as “one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States” refers to Inc. rankings around 2014.
Josh Manion was an international chess master ranked among the top 80 players in the United States before he founded one of the fastest-growing companies in the country, the digital marketing agency Ensighten.
According to an article on Inc.com, he attributes much of his business success to lessons he has learned over time from a few secrets of chess, which he applies in the business world.
In his view, chess is a tool for bringing the right rigour to the way we approach and solve problems, in business and in life.
Manion is not the first entrepreneur to draw a connection between chess and business: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has also said that many of these concepts helped him in business. In the same way, others draw their own parallels between poker and investing or business.
For Manion, the main difference between chess and business is that in chess everyone has access to exactly the same set of information. Here are three examples that, he says, helped him become a successful entrepreneur thanks to chess.
1. If you see a good move, wait. There may be a better one.
Inexperienced chess players will jump at the first chance to take an opponent’s pawn, almost instantly. Once they have spotted that opportunity, they stop looking for a better move.
In business, make sure you are taking a broad view and gathering the whole picture, not just the first thing that looks good and is close at hand, which could ruin your next move. In other words, sacrificing a good long-term business to grab an immediate profit that could cause you problems later is not a good move.
2. To win, you need to plan many moves ahead.
Many entrepreneurs start their business with no long-term idea of how to build a company in a growing market. They may get initial traction or raise a first funding round, but they haven’t thought through the later steps of the plan.
What comes after the first product? How will you respond as other competitors grow stronger in this market? How will you keep your competitive edge over the long term?
In chess, it is often said that some games are decided 15 moves before they end, because the player has already thought through all of the opponent’s possible moves and has a strategy ready to meet them.
3. In chess, you have to manage your time or you can lose, even from a better position. The same goes for business.
In chess tournaments, you have a limited amount of time to complete the game, no matter what is happening on the board. If you run out of time, it’s over. That correlates strongly with making a success of a new company: it doesn’t matter if you have the best product. If you run out of cash along the way, it’s over.
You need to make sure you are managing your cash properly as you go, that you are raising money appropriately and that you are not overspending. Some entrepreneurs believe that if their business gets into trouble, a bank or the venture capital community will rush to the rescue. That doesn’t usually happen.
Further reading
- David Einhorn: 5 poker lessons applied to stock market investing
- 7 business lessons from the founder of Alibaba
- 10 wise business lessons from the man considered the best executive of the 20th century
Featured image: Eric Koch for Anefo, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
