Entrepreneurs require downtime like anyone else. You may have a great leadership mind on your shoulders, after all, but even you are susceptible to burnout that stops you from seeing business problems clearly. Unfortunately, with so much on your plate so often, you may find it difficult to justify out-of-work hobbies that can ultimately feel like a waste of time.
But what if we were to tell you that it’s possible to put even unrelated skills to use in a business sense? By this, we don’t mean simply reading business books and calling it relaxation. Rather, we’re referring to enhancing your business standing through literal play.
Analytical games like chess, and also a lot of card games, can prove invaluable for both taking your mind off work and making you better at what you do in the long run. Don’t believe us? Keep reading to find out how your skills in games like chess could ultimately help to leave your business competitors in checkmate.
# 1 – The Importance of Preparation
Champion chess players don’t stumble into high-stakes games and fluke a win. Rather, chess is as much about preparation as it is about actual gameplay. Chess champions like Ding Liren will spend months practicing in the leadup to any game. This means going over past games, observing their competitor’s moves, and generally making sure they’re as prepared as they can be for any unexpected events on the big day.
This can be an invaluable outlook in a business sense, too, where preparation is key to the handling of things like tech setbacks, data breaches, and simple yearly profit fluctuations. Think of these variables as your competitor’s moves. What do you need to do right now to ensure you can easily handle whatever comes your way, just like the most accomplished chess player?
In truth, preparation in business is a multi-faceted focus. After all, unlike chess players with one clear goal of winning, you’re constantly juggling different plates within your company. To be truly prepared, you’ll need to consider –
- Growth potential: Failing to prepare for growth is one of the most fatal business mistakes you can make. Overcome this risk by implementing preparations that include considering your current resources, technology, and partnerships, as well as predictions about how those things need to change as your business grows from strength to strength.Â
- Disaster planning: Ideally, you want to avoid disaster. Failing that, you need to be prepared to handle the worst if it happens. Disaster planning, which should typically involve four factors (mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery), is key for ensuring fast resolutions and limiting damage. Aim to apply disaster planning to things like your business premises (alarm systems, designated evacuation points, insurance), and to your data stores (data protection, loss minimization, and communication).Â
- Competitive advantage: If you’re unprepared in business, even one unexpected move from your competitors could unravel your efforts and sales figures. Instead, you need to be one step ahead with planning that includes competitive observations, past performance, and informed predictions moving forward. It’s also vital to ground your campaigns and products in viable metrics, ensuring solid foundations for sales, regardless of what other people on the market are doing.Â
# 2 – Strategy to Succeed
The higher rungs of the chess world are all about strategy. One wrong move even early in the game could reveal an inpoint for a competitor. Hence why champion chess players will always begin their games with strategic plays that might include the Italian Game, the French Defense, or the Queen’s Gambit. Each of these has the potential to give a player the upper hand. During a game, strategic players will also pay continual attention to information such as their competitor’s pawn structure, or the material count of the board. In other words, they never drop a ball, and will always consider every angle before making a move.
In the same way, a solid strategy in business can make a huge difference in ensuring your success and overcoming any risks posed by your competitors. Only, rather than considering the safety of chess pieces, your business strategy should serve to create market value and develop a competitive advantage. Within your business strategy, you’ll want to consider variables such as –
- Price
- Suppliers
- RecruitmentÂ
- Resource allocation
- And more
Continual monitoring and the development of informed key performance indicators (KPIs) are the best chess moves you can make in the business world, ensuring a solid fool-proof strategy at all times. Unlike in chess, many companies also benefit from forming strategic partnerships with other non-competing brands. This way, it’s easier to tap into existing audiences, develop new opportunities, and build your business reputation. All of which can still leave your closest competitors stuck in checkmate when they don’t benefit from the same advantages.
# 3 – Forward Thinking
When considering a game, chess players will typically operate a few moves ahead to ensure their strategies come to fruition. In some instances, top players will even consider every possible move, and the results of that move, before they play ahead. All the better to avoid careless mistakes.
Forward thinking is just as important in business, and ultimately begins with the preparation stages we’ve already discussed. After all, considering future setbacks is key to putting solid foundations in place. But the benefits of looking ahead don’t end there. Businesses also continually need to look forward to things like seasonal events, promotions during quieter periods and even increases in production. Marketing teams also typically work a few steps ahead, planning long-term marketing strategies sometimes months in advance to ensure adequate preparations, targeting, and development.
To get these focuses right, companies need to constantly foresee market trends based on metrics like sales figures in previous years and engagement levels on different pieces of content. Market research is also invaluable, and should include keeping an eye on things like any competitor advancements in the pipeline, as well as planned competitor improvements such as office relocation, growth, or new partnerships. By knowing about these things in advance, it’s far easier to develop a counterattack that will stop opponent pieces from taking charge of the playing field.
# 4 – The Importance of Analysis
Analysis is a key part of any chess game, where players will analyze everything from the pieces on the board and their potential moves to the body language and gameplay style of their competitors. They’ll then use this information to their advantage, leaning on tactics they know will work based on their informed understanding.
Business owners should approach challenges with much the same analytic outlook, which they must develop by considering solid evidence like data-led metrics. These figures can then inform everything from your in-house recruitment drives to your product development, your business strategy, and even your forward thinking.
But you can’t only consider what’s going on in your business and still expect to win. Like a chess champion, you also need to analyze competitor moves, which can be slightly more difficult. After all, you don’t have access to their data. Still, in the same way a chess player might look at a competitor’s past gameplay, it’s possible to develop in-depth competitor profiles by analyzing –
- Known competitor metrics like pricing, product, and promotions
- Competitor marketing channels
- Product Features
- Promotional campaignsÂ
Once you know this information, it can be useful to conduct a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis on both your performance and what you know of your competitors. That way, you can strengthen your strategies based on known weaknesses within your competitor’s play.
# 5 – Adaptability
A chess player can have the best game plan in the world, but they won’t win by blindly moving forward with it no matter what happens. Instead, a good chess player will continually adapt their strategy and plan based on competitor moves. Only then can they ensure reactive play that gets results.
Adaptability is just as important in business. This might seem contradictory considering we’ve just stressed how vital it is to prepare and analyze based on what you know. But markets aren’t linear, and unexpected changes or setbacks can inevitably crop up. Admittedly, if your analytics are reliable, you can minimize the unexpected through informed preparations. Still, you can’t avoid surprises altogether.
Hence why, instead of sticking too rigidly to initial plans, you should always be willing to adapt your products or processes depending on things like new competitor advancements or changes to industry-based tech. By adapting to these things quickly and with ease, you can then remain ahead of the game regardless. Of course, this doesn’t mean entirely abandoning what you’ve worked on. Rather, you should find ways to introduce new tech to, say, a planned product development, or push promotions forward in place of unexpected competitor moves. Then, you can ensure a checkmate no matter what happens outside of your company lines.
Conclusion
Chess, like business, is a game of strategic skill, and it holds some valuable lessons we could all benefit from implementing into our business outlooks. Are you ready to put those lessons to the best possible use within your company?
