How Chess Applies to Business: CEO Tips

Chess blog for latest chess news and chess trivia (c) Alexandra Kosteniuk, 2013

Hello everyone, 

While everyone compares business to chess, only a few people can teach the game's most profound lessons. Here, Justin Moore, CEO of the cloud company Axcient, does just that: In conversation with David Zax.

Justin Moore is the CEO of Axcient, a rapidly growing cloud services provider. Moore, now 31, is also a former star of the youth chess circuit. At 10, he found a chess book in his mother’s cabinet; by his teenage years, he was one of the 20 top-ranked youth chess players in the United States. With the seriousness of an athlete, Moore played chess for several hours every day for half a decade.

Moore doesn’t play much competitively anymore; by his college years, he was “probably a bit burnt out,” he confesses. Even so, the kinds of thinking that his days as a chess prodigy taught him has deeply informed the way he runs a successful startup. In a sense, Moore does still play chess every day--by running Axcient.

"TOO MANY STARTUPS, SAYS MOORE, BEHAVE IN A WAY THAT’S “REACTIONARY TO THE MARKET, TO COMPETITORS, TO THE NEWEST SHINY OBJECT.”

We caught up with Moore to extract a few lessons about how to apply the grandmaster mindset to the world of business.
Seeing All Possible Futures
 

Of course, it’s a business commonplace to recommend forethought. But in chess, the metaphor is literalized. “You’re constantly looking two, three, four moves ahead,” explains Moore. “If you do this move, what’s the countermove? What are all the countermoves? And then for all of those, what are all of my potential countermoves? Chess is constantly teaching you to think about what comes next, and what comes after that, and what the repercussions could be.”

In a chess game, your mind is constantly running permutations of decision trees. In business, your mind should be doing the same.

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