Go and the Art of Business Part III

Go and the Art of Business Part III - “Crisis, or Opportunity?”

Lisa: Look on the bright side, Dad. Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’?

Homer: Yes! Cris-atunity.

As mentioned last time (http://spgblog.solidcactus.com/2008/10/17/go-and-the-art-of-business-part-ii/) the etymological claim above is not technically true, although it remains a popular quotation. However, the sentiment that there is a connection of some sort between crisis and opportunity is a very useful one and has applications in both the world of Go and the world of businesses. Before we dive in though we will need to cover a more advanced concept from the world of Go, the notion of sente, and as always, readers are strongly encouraged to look into the topic further at their own discretion for purposes of clarification, personal edification, or in case I’m just flat out wrong.

Sente, which can be translated from the Japanese roughly as “before hand” or “to play first”, but for our purposes let us use the more general term “initiative”. When a player has sente it means they are free to place a stone wherever they choose. (I suppose in a way this is always true, but let’s assume you are trying your best to win.) Players keep sente by making moves that force their opponent to respond, typically in a way that is defensive in nature. So, if I have sente it means that, in a way, I am calling the shots, and my opponent is reacting to them. Sente is the freedom to be proactive, rather than reactive; sente is the freedom to play wherever one likes. If I use that freedom effectively, I might choose to make a move that attacked my opponents territory, or threatened to capture some of her stones. My opponent in turn will likely respond to my move by protecting her territory or saving her stones, and if she does so in a way that does not require a response from me, then I have successfully kept sente. The longer I can make this process repeat, the greater the advantage to me. As the players carve out territory on the board, the player with sente almost invariably gets the larger slice. However, if I make a move which my opponent does not have to respond to, then she takes sente from me, and it is now her turn to call the shots.

Last article I wrote about Go being a balance between offense and defense, where one does not want to be overly aggressive, but rather the aim is to be assertive. An excellent way to judge if you have found that balance is by seeing how long you can keep sente, or how quickly you can get it back if you lose it. But if your opponent is very skilled, it can often be difficult to take back sente, since the reason your opponent has initiative is that she is making plays that you must defend against. To ignore them is to ignore a threat that will most likely come back to haunt you later. So, how exactly is one to regain sente when it is lost?

This, I believe, is where the connection between crisis and opportunity comes into play. Your opponent keeps sente by making threats. Threats can be either to your territory as a whole, or to individual groups of stones. (Just as a side note, the two are intimately connected, of course, and one of the most wonderful and frustrating things about Go is the constant need to shift between the local perspective and the global perspective, but perhaps more on that some other day.) When your opponent threatens individual stones, they must naturally be defended. One can not simply lie down and let the opposition walk all over them. So, by and large, if a group of stones is in jeopardy, it is advisable to fight to keep them alive. Some battles have both winners and losers, and some only have losers. Sooner or later, you will lose a battle in Go and it can be a crushing feeling; a crisis, as it were. However, this is where perspective is vital. The fact that you are fighting for life presupposes that your opponent has sente. But, as she administers the killing stroke against your team, something marvelous has happened. There is no longer any threat to respond to! The worst has already happened, they have attacked, you have lost a battle, but the war goes on, and since you have nothing to respond to, you have regained sente! Opportunity arises from crisis, now it is your turn to call the shots.

From here the connection to business is obvious. We may face defeats in the marketplace, but as long as we have only lost individual skirmishes and not the war at large, the defeats can actually be beneficial. A setback in one area might free us up to focus in other areas where we can do better. An acceptable loss might be worth many times the initial value based on lessons learned. And looking at things from the opposite point of view is also helpful. In Go or business, we might lose sente by being overly aggressive. We might lose sight of the overall objective of the game (to make territory/to provide a quality product to customers) by become overly focused on side objectives (capturing stones/making a profit). As always, focus, perspective, and awareness are key.

One final lesson that can be learned is the art of knowing when to let go. Above I pointed out that once one player makes a killing stroke against their opponent’s stones they effectively yield sente. Sometimes, however, stones are dead long before they are scooped off of the board. Say my opponent has made a play that will doom a group I control a few moves from now, no matter what I do. If she realizes this, but I do not, then I may very well miss my opportunity to reclaim sente. I may flail about trying to save them when my time and efforts were better spent in more productive areas. If we do not know when we have lost a skirmish, then we may be making a crisis out of our crisis, rather than making an opportunity out of it.

Thanks for reading. Please join me next time when I talk about the value of the dual move.