Matt Crowe’s Blog
Before he founded one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S., Josh Manion was an experienced international chess master and was ranked as one of the top 80 players in the U.S.
Manion has attributed a large portion of his success with his company, digital-marketing platform Ensighten, to his involvement with chess. Mr. Manion has applied many of the lessons he has learned from the game to guide his business decisions.
“Chess was instrumental in establishing the right rigor for the way that you problem solve and approach business and life,” he says.
Here are three examples that Manion says have helped him become a better business owner.
1. If you see a good move, you should wait. There might be a better one coming soon.
Inexperienced chess players often jump at an opportunity to take an opponent’s pawn instantly, according to Manion. They’ll stop their search for their move because they’ve located one. In business, you need to make sure that you’re looking at the whole field and actually making your choices based on complete information.
2. Winning requires you to plan many moves ahead.
Too many entrepreneurs try to start businesses without having a very long-term way to create a viable company. They may get some traction or raise a first round of funding, but they don’t actually thought through the later steps of the plan, Manion says.
3. In chess, you have to manage your time or you can lose–even with the better position. The same can be said for cash in business.
In chess, you have a finite amount of time to make a moves. It doesn’t really matter what’s happening on the board. If you lose on time, you’re done. That has a strong correlation to cash in startups. It doesn’t matter if you have the best product. If you run out of cash along the way, you can’t go on.
from Matt Crowe http://ift.tt/14Rgr8a