Is Chess Good for Management?

The game of chess has been applauded and taught in business school as a game that gingers creative intelligence.

Chess is a game involving kings, queens, bishops, knights, castles, and pawns like a real life. The pawns (also called soldiers) advance first, lead or supported by officers all to fight and protect the king. It is like fighting a real war similar indeed to fighting or capturing business competitors, employees, or customers. The only difference is that at the end it is only a game.

Chess like every other game is intellectually stimulating. Anything that has calculation, no matter how trivial, is good for management. That is why the Russian grandmaster Mickail Botvinnik declared, "The greatest pleasure is when one feels he is thinking and this is best accomplished with chess."

With all due respect to the grandmaster, good thinking (or the feeling) is not accomplished with chess. Good thinking is accomplished by an exchange of intellect not by circulating existing know how. Chess, like video games, are basically circulating know how-you learn the rules, then, try to arrange them into a winning pattern. People who play games like football, tennis, chess, and video games are among the dullest professionals. They are dull, mind you, not dumb. You don't become brilliant or intellectual sound for playing a game-it will not improve your speaking skills, or writing skills, or personal skills, or administrative skills, it only engages the mind and leaves it as it found it.

Many chess players have failed in business, in their jobs, in school, in personal relationships because they spent 5 to 7 hours daily playing chess. Alexander Kotov in his book Think like a Grandmaster rightly warned that if you are a student, don't play chess at the expense of your studies, if you work, don't play chess at the expense of your job, if you run a business, you cannot move people the way you move chess piece. But if you play as a profession then invest into it.

Playing chess will not make you a creative manager. What will? You have to be a student for life.

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Bright Johnson, a money writer and researcher, is the publisher of http://www.superriches.com