Strategy and chess

I frequently see references to chess when business strategy is discussed, or chess used as an analogy for strategy. Despite most people seeing beyond the game of chess I see how much corporate thinking is so similar to how chess is played that this post shares some insights and points out some of the obvious issues of comparing the game chess to business strategy.

Disclaimer: This in no way is intended to diminish the huge amount of tactical and strategical thinking required to play chess, a game I love.

The most important differences between chess and business strategy are:

1. Perfect information, in chess you know exactly which made you arrive at a certain position and you can view all of the details of the game and make well informed decisions. This is contrary to the business "fog of war" which hides most information from you making decisions a lot less informed. You might have a ton more information (too much to handle) but you still don't have even a hundredth of the information available and more importantly might miss or ignore critical pieces.
2. The rules of chess are fairly static and international, in business the rules change constantly on national level. Important external innovations may topple the rules in an instant without you even noticing before it's too late. Imagine having a player starting the game by converting all pawns to queens (much more powerful piece), the game would be lost in an instance.
3. In chess you try to defeat an adversary, this mindset is poisonous in business because you have multiple known and unknown competitors. And it's not really about beating others, it's about making customers happy.
4. In chess you alternate making one move each. In business you can hear people talking about making "a strategic move". But in business you are allowed making any number of moves at any time without waiting for others to do their move. This is why speed of execution is a huge factor in business, imaging playing chess and your player makes several moves for every move you make. While focus is a great thing for an individual or a small team, a company must be able to do many things at the same time.
5. The taking turns in chess to move also makes a move something that prevents other moves. In business you may not have to possibility to choose all options at once but you can for sure divide smaller amounts of resources to execute multiple options at the same time.
6. In chess the desired end state is known, however in business the end state is not known, sorry but "growth" is not a good target goal.
7. Chess is a limited time game, business is not. The goal is not to finish, the goal is to be long term relevant, so long term that generations to come can look at history and agree that you did a great thing.