The Way of Go: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Success in Business and Life
256
The Way of Go: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Success in Business and Life
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Overview
Now, Troy Anderson, an entrepreneur, knowledge management expert, Fortune 500 management consultant, and one of only five Americans to train at the Japanese Professional Go Academy, brings these philosophies and strategies to the West.
Leaders and intellects such as Mao Tse-tung, Bill Gates, and John Nash (the game was featured in the movie A Beautiful Mind) as well as many CEOs and political leaders throughout Asia are among the 27 million people who have played this simple two-person board game known as the "game of geniuses."
In this unique book, Troy Anderson shares the essential elements of strategy and competition that define the game of Go and shows how these principles can be applied wherever strategy is called for:
- How to make use of limited resources and time to produce the largest gain
- Which initiatives to continue and which to abandon
- When to lead and when to follow your opponent
- How to weigh competing interests among different units
- How to enter a market where the competition is already well established
- How to proceed to ensure success if the competition enters your market
- How to create a strategic plan when the market changes quickly
- How to go global but think locally
Go provides experience and understanding regarding basic strategic problems that no other art, science, or field, other than war, can readily claim. In addition to an enriching account of how the game of Go has influenced Anderson's life, the valuable lessons imparted here add up to a powerful prescription for success -- whether you are seeking professional achievement, better competitive understanding, stronger personal relationships, or simply a more rewarding life.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780743270748 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Free Press |
| Publication date: | 08/31/2004 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One: Global Local
It is easy to get lost in local battles and not focus on the global position. The winner in Go is not the player who wins the most spectacular battle somewhere, but the player who wins the war. Having a global focus in Go gives you an edge on locally minded competitors, because there can be almost a dozen different battles going on at any one time, and you get only one move at a time. The more you put each battle into a global context, the more likely you will play the right move aligned with the overall objective -- winning the game. It's the same sort of thing you learn as a child. Would I rather have the piece of candy in front of me or get a whole pitcher of candy later? When you are a child, you always want that local, immediate win, no matter the bigger picture. As you get older, you realize that this local, immediate loss pales in comparison to the bigger win -- except when you forget that there is a bigger picture, which happens to everyone no matter the age.
At the same time, without an understanding of things on a local level, you really don't have a good grasp of which positions are strong and which are weak. Really understanding things at a local level can lead to wonderful opportunities that are not apparent from a global twenty-thousand-foot view. Getting down in the trenches and really understanding the inner workings of your positions not only gives you a better assessment of things but also can pay dividends when situations change and a different purpose is called for locally. The founding executives of Hewlett-Packard were big fans of managing by "walking around." Instead of being cooped up in an office, away from the people actually doing the work, at HP, executives were encouraged to walk around and see things locally. Getting the worker's perspective and seeing the problems at their root level was a local, instead of global, technique that was a large part of the "HP Way" and was a foundation for understanding their business.
The principles of Global Local are that you must change lenses as appropriate to the circumstances. Your perspective, your framing of the goal, and the stage of your work all matter in considering what side of the spectrum of the Global Local duality you need to be pulling from. Without the local understanding, you cannot have a right global understanding. Without knowing where you're going globally, a lot of work locally can have you going the wrong way. Appreciate the danger of applying a rule from the wrong side of the duality.
It is a good momentum-inspiring practice to celebrate small wins, the joys of doing something right as a person or an organization. However, when these small-win celebrations cloud global issues pertaining to strategy or direction in the bigger board or picture -- the one goal that has to define and measure the benefit of the small win -- you obscure the bigger-picture problems. Despite the euphoria they provide, small wins can't bandage what needs a tourniquet. Small wins can be evil successes when not in the context of the global perspective.
The other side of the coin is equally nefarious. Everyone knows you should not be obsessed with quarterly results at the expense of the longer-term view. It's a poor global business attitude that is not aligned with customers' best interests. If you work for such a company, you're bound to be in for a world of hurt. You ought to quit and find another job. However, if this is your only job prospect and you have to meet your quarterly goals to stay employed, you'd better care less about the global view until the quarter's up. If you care about your global prospects, you'd best try to remain employed while you look for other work and forget all about the global till then. You may be desperate to get the sales you need this quarter, but imagine the desperation you'll experience should you be uncushioning the couch looking for that last quarter that will get the rent paid if you're unemployed.
Keep the Global in the back of your head, but don't let it kill whatever enthusiasm you can muster to keep yourself employed and sold through the end of the quarter. As you'll discover in Chapter 2, Owe Save, you often have to pay for your mistakes. The rule in Go is "take your medicine." No matter how terrible, if you owe (like having a job with a company that thinks only quarter to quarter), you gotta pay (make your quarterly numbers or perish).
Different environments and stages of the game demand different perspectives on global and local, and we'll get to these soon, but there are also idiosyncratic pairings of global and local in other human endeavors that necessitate managing your Global Local lenses.
Short-term is the wrong time frame for a diet. If you want to be on a restrictive diet but have an unrestricted appetite and lack the discipline to see beyond the joy of eating that thing you crave, you must develop the long-term perspective first, or why start? In Go, the rule is "don't play chutto hampa," or don't play the lukewarm move. If you're just going to eat the way you want to eat, eat that way. Eating restrictively and then bingeing is the epitome of chutto hampa, suffering no-dressing McDonald's salads and later getting sick from eating éclairs like French fries. If you're going to start a diet, figure out how the long-term dominates the short-term, then proceed. Until the long-term diet view is bigger than the local view of the doughnut, your goal is full of holes.
Likewise, the long term is the wrong time frame for fighting fires and emergencies. A deeply religious man and his wife were at home while the kids were out and he was going about his usual thanking of the Lord for all his bounty as a fire started in another room. As the fire grew, the man prayed for direction and guidance. His wife, truly his polar complement, kicked him in the rear and told him, "Pray outside!" While the man clearly had a good sense for the bigger picture in his eternal goal time frame, he was a bit lacking in thinking about the short-term local needs of his wife, kids, and those who depended on him. His wife, ever the down-to-earth person, would later say, "He's not getting any express trip to heaven while I'm still alive." The rule in Go is "never hurt your own stones." While sacrifice is part of the game, you never do it without exhanging for something else. Fortunately, this man's wife was calling the shots.
Managing these two lenses is part of every strong Go player's repertoire. If you cannot change the lens to go macro and micro, you'll miss out on opportunities from the perspective you're missing. Moreover, if the two perspectives are not balanced, you likewise suffer. You can go only so far with an expert's view of global issues without the local view necessary to enforce your global vision. Likewise, you can fight and scratch locally better than anyone, but if what you're fighting for is not clear, if you just fight to fight and don't look at what you're gaining and losing as a result of each battle, you're bound to lose the war.
But how do you know when to be local and when to be global? What kind of rules are ascribed to the two polar opposites? How to reconcile? In Go, I learned these rules in the comfort and safety of thousands of Go matches; in life, I took my learning out of the Go context and experienced it without a safety net in the real world.
My first time serving as acting president of the Coquille Economic Development Corporation, a company of the Coquille Indian tribe of which I am a member, I certainly gained a new appreciation for Global Local rules, as I had only really thought through the concept Global Local in terms of Go before this time. This changed dramatically one cloudy day.
The Coquille Indian tribe had been "terminated" in 1954 through an act of Congress. This act was to be the final salvo from the U.S. government against the Coquille. The Coquille had already lost most of their treaty and promised rights, and most of their ancestry to tuberculosis, smallpox, and other introduced diseases and to massacres. Its languages (including Miluk), antiquities, cultures, and lands were already for the most part gone, assimilated or disseminated. If ever you wanted to kick a tribe when it was down, you could take away its shadow of sovereignty and think you'd be done with it. But, after decades of struggle by the terminated Coquilles to unterminate ourselves, Congress was compelled to right one wrong and asked the tribe as part of its restoration act of 1989 to become economically self-sufficient. Thus was granted a restoration of rights to operate as a sovereign nation and the license to set up and initiate work as the Coquille Economic Development Corporation (CEDCO).
Ask anyone how to encourage economic development for an Indian tribe and most will respond "casino." Unfortunately, when the largest metropolitan area is Eugene, Oregon, and even that's a two-hour drive on winding roads that would make even the most seaworthy nauseated, you'd better come up with more than that. Yeah, you could fly, but at the time, the planes flying into the North Bend International Airport sat only eighteen hunchbacks whose only in-flight meal would be their knees. Not to mention that when CEDCO started it had a scant three acres to work with, three employees, nominal dollars, and the various bureaucracies of a tribe, a local county commission, a pro no-change congressman, and the largest, most inefficiently run shop in the U.S. government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to help "guide" it.
Despite significant political battles internally with the tribal council and membership, the external battles with the local cities, counties, and state and congressional representatives, CEDCO's overall economic development effort propelled us to one of the most remarkable growth spurts in Native American community and economic development without the advantage of being able to locate a casino next to a major metropolis. Whether walking things through the U.S. government or tussling over sovereignty and other issues, CEDCO created five different businesses that would allow us to meet Congress's mandate to become economically self-sufficient. Yes, there was a casino, but in the long-term uncertainty of regulations and law changes, we had a diversified portfolio of businesses that would sustain us through almost any sea change in perception of tribes and their casinos.
Aside from starting a housing authority, managing our grant writing, and shepherding our agricultural initiatives, I knew little of how our day-to-day business worked. We had grown from three to five hundred plus employees, went from three acres to fifty-eight hundred plus, started with practically zero dollars and now were approaching a $25 million annual run rate in revenue, all between 1992 and 1996, but still I was more of a witness to the bigger picture than the instigator. While I had certainly been responsible for a large part of this development, I was not the president. As a vice-president, you are rather sheltered from bearing the brunt of responsibility, as the buck does not stop with you.
This ended one day when the big boss left the fog-laden Oregon coast for a vacation in sunny Hawaii. Now I would wear the mantle. As the acting prez, my perspective on global and local decision-making as a businessperson would forever change. Not only was the president gone, but everything tried to go awry that day.
As a Go player, I saw the game of business we were playing in analogue. I had a good sense for what needed to be done at the ground and localized level on the variety of initiatives on which we'd embarked. Since I knew of our overall mission, I knew from the global sense of things where things should be moving. This would be just like playing Go, I thought. Unfortunately, when you are watching a game, you can be at least three levels stronger than players caught up in the midst of the game. In Go, the number of handicap stones you place on the board for a weaker player before play begins signifies the difference in your levels. The applicable rule of Go in this situation was "kibitzers gain three stones." As kibitzer turned player, I remained oblivious to the rule, despite the rule's enforcing its truth on me throughout the day, and the rule was off by about three or four stones, unfortunately in the wrong direction.
In serious Japanese Go tournaments, the two competitors square off typically in a traditional tatami room with all the accoutrements and pageantry a simple traditional game like Go can muster. But high above the board is the reminder that the game has come into the modern era. A camera mounted above displays the moves of the two focused competitors on a viewing screen in an adjoining room for other professional Go players to watch as the events unfold. Usually, the gallery in the other room tries variations on plays, as the two players competing sweat and toil oblivious to their deliberations. What always struck me as interesting was that despite all the horsepower of brains and experience and detachment from the game in the viewing room, there'd still be the occasional surprise move from one of the competitors.
While you can put things on the board in these offshoot galleries and talk and research variations on the board -- a big advantage over being forced to do this work in your head as the two players in the midst of the competition are doing -- the players in the match are able to come up with a deeper play, something unexpected that gets the gallery chatting up a frenzy and actually proves out, through the throng's research, to be a bit of genius. I asked one day what this was. When you are the one in the game and the meaning of the game becomes your whole world, someone on the outside, even with the benefit of detachment, cannot feel every nuance, cadence, or tickle that you, in the element, can see. On the one side I was damned by my kibitzer's cockiness; on the other, I was damned for never being the person in the hot seat, the player.
My first day on the hot seat started off just rosy. Two of our contractors were in a heated battle over tearing down a shed at our old mill site. Knowing one of the contractors was the one more important to us politically, I intended to side with that contractor. Certainly, in the overall scheme of things, I had learned the value of politics. That's global thinking, I thought. Nonetheless, as I started to side with him, I found that the conversation was going in a direction we didn't want to go as a company. Where I was making good global moves with regard to politics, the pressing situation was a local one that, if not stopped, would have even more devastating ramifications than siding with the wrong contractor. I was botching my way through trying to fix the situation, pissing off the political ally whose support now certainly had a good chance to flag by making the numbskull contractor look like he'd convinced me, when the next situation broadsided me.
The EPA was investigating our housing development and cranberry farming sites about five miles down the road. Apparently, they were investigating claims, from one of our disgruntled former employees, that asbestos was buried on the reservation. Leaving the two contractors to work things out with my new, shoddily supplied fix, I raced a bit above the speed limit to go greet the EPA's investigators.
They were looking for our company president. I let them know that the president would be out on vacation for another week, but that they could discuss whatever they wanted with me. They let me know that they were starting an investigation on the basis of the claims from the former employee and wanted to know if they had our full and complete cooperation for conducting a search. Well, the badge and cards seemed real enough, but what were our rights in this regard? The employee's alleged claim was that asbestos from the building I had just left was deposited underground in this new development.
I assured them that the former building owners had found the building clean of asbestos, per an environmental review from a company I respected, but I started to wonder. What the heck is asbestos anyway? We weren't the ones to commission the environmental study -- the company from which we acquired the building did. Were they dumping this site because of the asbestos? Was this all some sort of setup? Investigators enforcing EPA laws pick up on such flags and start probing. Fortunately, I was still ruminating and not as tuned in to their grilling -- a good thing, in retrospect -- but then finally, the cobwebs lifting, I let them know that we had nothing to hide, but that we'd still need to contact our attorneys before I could help them further.
Just as I grew comfortable with this response, I got a call that the rains from the night before were flooding the basement of our new assisted-living facility and library another twenty miles south. Still reeling from the experience of getting the EPA officers to back off a bit, I told the EPA officers they could use the housing development office onsite to make phone calls, but that I needed to go deal with another situation elsewhere. In a bout of time-flying fun, I had not resolved the brouhaha between the contractors, nor was I terribly effectual on the start of a lengthy investigation -- ultimately favorably resolved -- by the EPA. The twenty-minute drive south had my mind, as well as my car, racing.
While this had all the elements of a game of Go -- deciding how to act in local situations, with each decision having bearing on the global goal -- I found that I was a much stronger Go player than executive at this stage of my business life. While experience in one thing can never stand in for experience in another thing, the rules from Go applied, but my experience was lacking and my ability to see into the local situations was far from perfect. Calming myself a bit, I arrived at the assisted-living facility and library more ready to be mindful of what strategy would be best to follow.
The library was indeed ankle deep in water. Yes, this would be a problem. And, yes, there was an opportunity to kick the contractor's butt over the mistakes, but instead, I asked our future GM of the building to help get someone to pump it out and did not speak with the contractor. I left soon after arriving, knowing full well that I was not dealing with this problem to the best of my abilities. And this was the start of better play on my part.
From the Global Local perspective, this was not where I needed to spend time. Yes, I could have spent hours finding and then beating up the contractor, I could have ensured that the water was removed and that evidence of cause and effect were fully documented, but in the global scheme of things, this local win would have been a loss globally.
In Go and in life, you have limited resources with which to get things done. In Go, it's a move. You get one opportunity per turn to affect as much of the board as you can in your favor. The more the board fills up, the less opportunity there is to affect things. Initial decisions and moves leave their legacy. You cannot read out all the possible situations on the board, or for that matter, what will happen in life. You can only do your best to follow rules that apply across Go or life and try to make the best decisions you can. By changing your lens, global or local, you can get either detailed or holistic, deep or shallow, short term or long term. Without the ability to move the perspective from global to local and vice-versa, if you are only good at looking at things from one perspective, you will lose out to the opponent who can do both. Not looking to lose to this day -- so far a most vigorous and staunch opponent -- I knew the most pressing problem was the EPA situation, then the bickering contractors, and then the flood.
The EPA had already convinced themselves that we were a worthy investigative target; no matter reality. Whatever discussions we had now would steer the investigation. Since I was not clear on anything, given my own suspicions, doubts, and ignorance, the best move from the long-term global perspective would be not to shape a direction for them or a foreseeable trajectory for us. This is the kind of global thinking that parallels well with the beginning stage of a game of Go.
At the beginning of a game of Go, the board is completely empty. It's as if a new state in the United States were to materialize suddenly with a population completely oblivious to soft drinks, and Coke and Pepsi were granted the coexclusive opportunity, in turn, to start making investments that would tie up stadiums, movie theaters, restaurants, and street corners to start vending their wares. Let's say for the sake of argument that the two companies are the same in the eyes of the consumers; that the consumers targeted will be convinced by and then loyal to whoever approaches them first; and, since this state government wants an even race, all aspects of operational excellence, prices, and so forth between the two companies are to be exactly the same (how doesn't matter, just play along). The winner of this new state race will be determined by who controls a larger share of the fixed number of venues, as opposed to the greatest sales, profits, and so forth. Whoever controls a larger share of the state venues, after all the venues have been accounted for, will be granted a monopoly for this state's entire soft drink needs. This is how a cola war would look if it were Go.
As you might imagine, at the outset of this cola war things are so wide-open that it's important not to fixate on any one area. Nonetheless, for every move you make, you are making a claim on whatever area you move on. While this early scaffolding does not the final areas make, it does assert rights and influence for whatever player enters an area first.
For example, let's say Coke's first investment in this fresh Go-board-like state was to go after movie theater companies, and for each investment in a movie theater, you gain insight, influence, and experience into the movie theater mindset and more probability of landing future deals there. Pepsi, coming in later and trying to bargain with these theaters, would be at a disadvantage, because Coke was there first. Likewise, if Pepsi first went after stadiums, Coke would be at a disadvantage if Coke went after stadiums later. In Go and life, there are first-mover advantages. Just as neither cola company can go after everything all at once in this fictional state cola war, you have to make choices at the beginning that are like listening posts on the future -- you cannot expect every initial investment to pan out, nor should you disregard your initial plays as unimportant. Look globally, act locally, but don't set anchor locally when things are just starting out.
In my situation with the EPA, the EPA made the first move in areas where it was at an advantage -- the former employee's claim, their superior information about what asbestos is and how much of it would make its presence illegal, and so forth. If I started down the path of questioning things and, quid pro quo, answering things, I would be at a disadvantage in this regard, because I was behind in the local understanding of that area.
At the beginning stage of a game of Go, the first moves on the virgin board are typically scattered in unplayed areas. The point is that you don't want to overconcentrate in just one area. Because each stone does have influence on adjacent unplayed areas and less so on already occupied areas, a stone can be a more effective influencer in a new open area.
In the cola war, if Coke really did not want Pepsi to enter its movie theater market, it could play all its initial moves to shore up contracts with the theaters and exert influence on the other theater owners due to its power of investing in movie theaters earlier. While Pepsi would not be able to take over those contracts from Coke, because Coke moved there first and because Coke continued to invest in that quadrant, for each of Coke's moves in theaters, Pepsi would be able to make initial investments elsewhere.
If Coke used its first twenty investments in movie theaters, it could really lock up the theater market. But, if Pepsi were to take its first twenty investments and make initial investments in stadiums, restaurants, grocery stores, vending machine placements, and airlines, among other opportunities, it would have a first-mover advantage in many markets. While none of them would be locked up the way Coke had locked up the theaters, Coke would have to respond to Pepsi's initial plays across all the other markets. In Go, if you were to do the same thing, you'd be far ahead in theaters, but far behind everywhere else.
As with most things, in Go initial investments or moves have more influence than later investments or moves. Why? It's like eating the first chip from the bag. Your first chip resonates like no subsequent chip. As you continue to munch, each subsequent chip, if uniform, has less and less effect on your taste buds, hunger, and desire to eat more chips. For parents teaching their kids, it's called getting full. For economists, it's the law of diminishing utilities. For Go, it means that your initial moves, while no particular one eternally damns you to recommit to that particular local area, your initial moves in one area need to be considered with respect to the global perspective of the entire board, because they do have influence, and therefore represent a bargainable value. Just as a sketch is a precursor to a drawing, and the plan needn't be the execution, one's initial moves can only be effective if they are seen for what they are -- options or probes of a potential future, which one can trade, use, or sacrifice later for something more strongly tied to a win.
With each move Coke makes in the movie theater market, its influence on that area has less effect. Because Pepsi is making moves in virgin territories, Pepsi's moves are having the biggest bang for the investment in each separate and unplayed venue. If Coke is smart, it will do as Pepsi does and will not focus exclusively on one area at the beginning, but instead scatter investments around. This is exactly the kind of thing good Go players do in the initial stages of the game. Neither committing too fully nor giving the opponent a disproportionate opportunity to go after unplayed areas, each side sketches investments around the board. The idea is not to ultimately own those areas, but to have their investments make the biggest possible impact on the goal. These are appropriate local moves toward a global goal -- set stones not set in stone.
For the EPA situation, I would want to do the same thing. Could I get into a local battle, which in this case would be going through the details of a particular site, what I knew of it, who's to blame? Sure. But what impact would my words have on the global situation? What if what they were really interested in was something else, but they wanted to start here? In Go, you never want to do this. You never want to hurt your other stones or opportunities. The rules in Go are "don't hurt your own stones" and "don't help your opponent play perfectly."
Talking with the EPA about any sort of general process that was instituted to prevent us from doing something stupid, as they claimed in the first place, might stimulate asking why there were even general processes like that in the first place. Admitting that we don't even know what asbestos is hurts our credibility as managers. Talking about how the former owners might be culpable, but we certainly wouldn't be, is sure to raise all sorts of issues that would not be wise at this stage of the game. These were all initial areas where the EPA agents already had plenty of moves. The beginning stage should not be devoted to addressing things locally. At the beginning stage, you have to stay global. The rules in Go are "play to the stage of the game you're in." "Don't play end game before middle game." "Don't play middle game before the beginning stage." "Don't play beginning stage moves in the middle game."
The other important thing to realize is that no matter the stage of the game, no matter the game you play, you don't decide what will happen. Neither you (singular) nor you (plural, your company, yourself, your kids, your investments, your government) decides. Oh sure, you can plan as if the environment won't change, the opponent won't change, all the little bits of chaos embedded in butterfly wings flapping won't affect you, but ignorance is not an excuse. You'll suffer thinking you can decide what will happen, so why do it? You can make informed, smart choices, but you have no right to the expectation that those choices will work out. Chance pervades.
In Go, one typically learns this rather late. You try to surround this area or that area, but in the end, something goes awry and you don't get either. As you improve, you find that some of your best plans never come to fruition. You never find the primrose path to an assured victory, because the opponent never walks into your well-laid trap. As you get stronger, you find you have less and less control over what the outcome of the game will be. Strange, but nonetheless, true.
With each game, you are making a unique imprint on the historical record of all games since Go's inception some four millennia ago, a unique expression of art, personality, desire, weakness, and strength between you and the opponent, between the two of you and the board itself. Sure, you can replay old games, but in the heat of real play, no two games will be alike. Of course you can ignore the heat of the real game you are playing and just wrangle a particular area to your own liking; manifest a local win.
In Go, in writing, in loving, in business, this kind of mistake assumes one's own power is greater than it is. True, you can do exactly what you'd like. You can follow the Coca-Cola example described above and just surround movie theaters, but that won't win you the game. To win, in a real game, fought by both sides, whether it's love, war, sports, business, or Go, you have to respect that you don't decide what happens when you can't know all the possibilities. Call it God, call it fate, call it unearthing a fossil, call it physics, but you don't decide what the winning way is, what the right way is. The winning way flows with and respects the uncertainty of the right path, and the winner is the one who best aligns with it. Every other way is a contrivance and not optimal play.
In the beginning stage of Go, you must respect that you do not know where the ultimate territory will be. Period. Any deviation in your mind from this understanding about territory will be a mistake. As a result, your initial plays must respect this uncertainty. You can try to influence as much of the board as you can, you can coordinate your moves to the greatest extent possible, but no matter what you do, you must not play as if the local areas where you play your stones will become your territory. Your opening moves should put you in position for whatever the board will call for, not vice-versa. There is a metaphorical hand that guides things and you'd best be prepared to go where it draws you.
It's an important lesson beginners need to hear. Oftentimes, I hear rank beginners say things like, "This is going to be my area." Such ideas are dispensed with early in a budding Go player's career. You don't know where your territory will come from ultimately. Yes, you can take a particular area, but then you're playing I-can-be-a-baby-about-this-and-do-what-I-want instead of Go. Throughout the entire beginning of the game, you should be putting yourself in position to win, not saying where you will be. Saying you know where you will be even forty moves out is practically heresy.
In our cola war, one side might hold the theater contract and the other an airline contract, but because of tussling over stadiums, the two sides, if playing optimally, may relinquish their initial holdings elsewhere to gain the appropriate advantage over stadiums. If stadiums are where the key battle will be that wins the war, each side had best exchange ownership over the now-inconsequential to affect as greatly as possible what needs to be fought to win the game.
For the EPA, the real question might not be asbestos on the reservation, but the cleanup of the old mill. Likewise, the real question might not be the old mill or the reservation, but whether their disgruntled informant might be perjuring himself. When the future is unknown and the game is just getting underway, don't squirm about local incursions and who has what. If there's a lot of game left to play, you have to stay focused on the ultimate goal in the beginning -- putting yourself in position to go where needed when the fighting of the middle game starts.
Smart startups do this by nature. They don't buy complex accounting systems as their first purchase. They don't make the chief administrative officer their second hire. Company logo statues, parking spaces, and mahogany placards with the founding principles don't make much sense when you don't even have a customer. Smart startups avoid all the institutional trappings until they evolve from startup to established company. At a time when a company is building and every moment is stacked against it as it tries to get to a critical mass and not run out of cash, the startup must focus on its primary mission, not the details and accoutrements of established businesses, which should come at a much later stage of the game, if at all.
Just as the trappings should not be the initial goal, you don't want your initial products to be too bogged down in your initial dreams for them. You don't need to look too far across the pantheon of world-leading companies to see the merits of not being tied to your initial moves. Intel did not start out as a microchip company. It started its game selling memory. Hewlett-Packard did not start out thinking about how to acquire Compaq or how to be a service company. Microsoft was a cool street traffic recording company before it moved into programming languages and operating systems. For these companies, great first investments were not anchors, but outposts to greater things. The rule in Go is "Don't get attached to your first moves or plans." There is a time for being attached to your moves, but the beginning stage is not that stage. This global rule isn't limited to Go and business.
In dating, a prevalent problem is the rebound. Even after the pain of separation has subsided and they are able to start going out again, people tend to think and behave as if there are still pieces on the Go board from the old relationship, the old game. This is not the case. If it's really over (and yes, those of you who have lost love, sorry, it's really over), you have to look at the world as a whole new Go board. Just as you finish one game and another starts, when one relationship is over, another starts. You don't have any rights to the territory of the previous game. The territory in that old relationship that you just loved and still crave is not yours anymore. You have to give it up. All the cool moves you made last time are in the past. They won't matter to anyone new.
Likewise, you haven't given away things that you lost in the last game. It's a new deal in both respects -- your old benefits are gone, but so are the old detriments. It's a completely fresh opportunity to rethink, and you must rethink. Just as the game of Go never repeats itself, life will not repeat itself, even if you want it to. So, as you start afresh, you sketch, you probe, you detach from the old relationship. If you don't, you're damned to the same fate any low-level Go player would be -- clinging to territory that has no record of your owning it and giving up on a whole board's worth of opportunity that's out there for the taking. While you can plan and dream, you cannot expect things to ever be the same. The rule in Go is "Every Go game is unique." That old love, that one that got away, that sale that was this close, that game that was yours for the taking ain't ever coming back. Move on.
As a consultant to and employee for a variety of companies, I have been hit over the head more times than I'd like to mention with the three-year plan or the five-year plan. While there is certainly something to be said for thinking forward into the future, it is something entirely different to say where you will be in that future. It's akin to an NFL coach saying at the beginning of the game that in the third quarter, twenty minutes into the quarter, we'll punt. Sound ridiculous?
In my first weeks on the job at one company, I witnessed this exercise going on. "Our plan for the following years is to do the following initiatives...by third quarter next year, we will have made investments in a, b, and c...in the fourth quarter, we'll employ X employees in this division and start Operation Y, which will show our customers that we're still number one." Could this really be a thinking person's way? It's OK to dislike uncertainty, it's another thing completely to disrespect it. This was not NASA. It would not take ten years to plan a launch, build the spacecraft, and shoot it to the moon and back, while a budget and plan needed to be presented to someone today. This was a service business. The customers moved, changed preferences, lied. While it's OK to think globally, it is another thing to insert local pinpoints in a long-term flow and call that global thinking.
When you plan for the future, things will move. Customers will move. Competitors will move. The environment of Go stays fixed, but in life, even the environment moves. While you want to think through things as much as possible, you must realize that there are too many variations to try and possibilities to consider. Your global goal and the global plan, therefore, need not to be rooted in local ideas. A plan that is respectful of the future does not try to predict the future to a T. A plan that is respectful of the future reevaluates situations continually, respects investments already made, and is a set of principles and evaluative means for seeing and acting on the global goal, howsoever it needs to change. The rule in Go is "Plan to discard the plan." More on this in Chapter 4, Reverse Forward.
Whether at the beginning stage of Go or the start of strategic planning in an enterprise, you must respect the invisible hand. Can you make staged commitments? Of course. But don't try to define where your ultimate territory will be. The rule in Go is "Stones become fixtures." While your stones are part of a friendly environment, they are fixtures -- dispassionate sunk costs stemming from the idea that occurred to the player at the time the move was made. While global stones played in the beginning stage of the game are like an option that can be traded, extinguished, or exercised, know that these options do not require follow-on purchases. The key is to be flexible, because the future is uncertain. In Go, if the opponent does something wacky or stupid, you will have to adjust quickly to take up the opportunity, which may not exist for long. The rule in Go, as in life is "Strike while the iron is hot."
As you'll see later in Chapter 7, Expand Focus, it's difficult to be focused on anything other than the one goal of the match you're playing; therefore, it's difficult to know what in the beginning is going to be right. You have to be ready to move, shift, be flexible. The rule in Go for this is "Don't anchor your stones." That is, while you cannot move a stone once it is played on the board, likewise, once you've done something, you cannot go back in time and change it. You don't have to treat that stone as an anchor on its local influence, power, or abilities. Looking at its global purpose, it might be best to ditch it, use it, or exchange it for something else. As the game unfolds, as the invisible hand moves, as the physics of the board melds every stone's relation to a near-infinite calculus, you must remain global, and ready for whatever is going to be right later. At the beginning of the game, far off from the ultimate implementation, you must be prepared to make changes when you can.
For the EPA, then, a better plan was for me not to make assumptions about where this game was going. I'd be better off making probes into what they were thinking if it didn't mean my committing to anything. Try not to hurt matters by making any assumptions about the future and keep as many possible scenarios unplayed locally as possible. Arriving back on the scene, they still wanted more details. "Who was doing digging here?" "What's in this area over here?" Do you know where the bodies are buried, essentially. Getting local with these guys would be a mistake at this beginning stage. There were other things to consider aside from whether we had defensible answers to all their local inquiries.
Was this part of a larger plot? While they said it was a particular former employee, was it possible there was another aim to what they were doing? Could evasive answers to these particular questions be the sort of misdirected answers that would help some other line of attack that wasn't obvious to us? Was the EPA teaming up with another group so that these answers would help their inquiry? Anything was possible, and without insight or preparation, it would be foolish to engage in answering anything. While it is true in general that you never want to answer inquiries of law enforcement officers without your attorney present, it was especially true when the tempting thing to do was to answer what seemed like harmless questions that could be answered and seemed good for the local situation.
Stonewalling worked. The investigators left. And yes, it is a simple lesson to clam up when you're under investigation and your attorney is not present. Yes, it is a simple lesson to think globally in the beginning and not make assumptions about the future. Yes, Go is a simple game that follows the same sort of commonsense rules that apply in life. But the practice and diligence of following common sense and the standard rules is something else entirely.
If they knew more of the why, if they knew more of where global strategies fit in relation to beginning stages of things, perhaps fewer people would fall under a noncommonsensical spell than if they had just heard the rule. Knowing the context of the rule, you can apply the rule more broadly by removing the surface-specific contexts. Will you still have people who read this and jump into a new relationship after a long relationship ends? Yes. Will you still have entrepreneurs who read this and fall for the ego-soothing trappings of more established businesses? Yes. You can know the rules, but knowing is not enough.
The rule has to be ingrained. To ingrain a rule, you often have to fail. Sometimes you have to fail so often, so completely, and so devastatingly that the silence at your grand failure is so complete, so wiping clean of former preconceptions, that all that is available to you is the rule crying out "Play globally in the beginning." The toll to get the rule can be pricy, but it allows you to cross over to other rules. If you've been burned at something, you're unlikely to forget. If you've succeeded without failure, nothing really gets burned in.
After the beginning stage of a game of Go -- the more global stage, in which each player is jockeying for position around the board -- comes war. The middle game starts as the two opponents develop differing opinions about who gets what. This stage taxes the frames and sketches developed in the opening through multiple skirmishes, all-out brawls, and chaos of the worst kind. Here, one's ability to read many moves ahead can make the difference. "Can I save areas one, two, and three and let four and five go and still win?" As if one were playing on multiple chessboards, but with only one move to play at a time, one's abilities, intuition, analysis, pattern recognition, and ingenuity are challenged for the one hundred or so moves that compose the middle game. This is the stage of the great dramas, the heart of the most famous games. This is the home to both global and local thinking.
In the opening, you typically do not butt heads with the opponent. There is a lot of open space, you can peacefully stake claims across the board. Uncertainty is so palpable that if you stick to your global guns, you really can't take yourself out of a match too much. That ends in the middle game.
When you and your opponent stop investing here and there, you start to wonder who has more. If you have more, you try to increase, defend. If the opponent has more, you try to decrease, attack. And, with potentially five or more things to look after at a time, and with only one move to do so, you have to be strategic globally and locally. Where's the most important area? What's the biggest move? Where am I strong? Where is the opponent strong? Where am I weak? Where is the opponent weak? Every move counts. The middle game is a razor-sharp tightrope. One slip to either side or just resting on the wire and you'll be either falling fast or cut in two. The middle game ends some 40 percent of all professional games.
This stage of the game is not the place for the flighty fantasy and open dreams of the beginning stage. In the middle game, you have to be honest. Is your stake there secure? Do you really have a way out if attacked? Did you make an overplay and need to fix things up? Brutal honesty wins more games than hope. "I hope my significant other doesn't abuse me." "I hope that our CEO really is the right person to run the company." "I hope my kids aren't doing drugs." "I hope that our sales are really going to be good next quarter." "I hope that our investment in the latest acronyms (CRM, ERP, Y2K) will pan out."
These sentences reek of desperation and are the kind of statements that cannot be made if you're looking to win in the middle game. By the time the middle game rolls around, the underlying path of the invisible hand is becoming clear. Things and territory that at first were mere potential may now be actually mapped to some extent. Brutal honesty. The Middle Game demands it, whether on the Go board or off.
Golf likewise oscillates from global to local. Off the tee, you can put the tee at whatever height you like, you can stand where you like with respect to the fairway beyond you. The distance to the pin is a known quantity. The fairway or the hole is the goal that drives you. That's beginning-stage golf, a lot more singular feeling than Go, but it's still how you want to put yourself in position for the next shot. It's global.
On the green, if the grass is cut relatively the same, the ball will roll as the contours of the hills and valleys dictate. It may be hard to read it all out, but this is not middle game, it is end game golf -- local. The hours on the putting green will pay dividends. You can err in your judgment of the physics that will apply or you can err in the mechanics of your stroke, but if you were a machine physically and physics-ly, your putts would be like so much putty in your hands. Putting is not a global panoply of options and opportunities, it's a tactical tenacity toward a subterrestrial target.
Middle game golf is the rest of golf and is betwixt global goals and local loci. In middle game golf or Go, you cannot know every lie your opponent may present you. You cannot practice shooting from every possible sand trap lip, from the multitude of various depths of a ball's embedding, from the different coarsenesses and consistencies of sand. Hitting out from every type of tree, every type of rough along the fairway, accounting for every variable of wind, rain, grass, and humidity is not part of even the most practiced golfer's routine. It's not practical to practice for every specific circumstance, just as it's not practical to think practice conditions will prevail in real games. The rule in Go is "There are no rules for the middle game." Don't think some rule is going to help you when there are so many situations that are new, not just to you, but to Go, with each game.
Moving from the beginning-stage-like conditions of the EPA episode, let's revisit in more detail the middle game frenzy of the contractors back at the mill. Contractor A, the political ally, the savvy business team, the connected and powerful player in the local community, was up in arms against Contractor B, the cheap, get-it-done-fast laborer who now was using his Cat (the colloquial term for a bulldozer, typically manufactured by Caterpillar, although this Cat was a Kubota) to knock down parts of the old buildings that were going to get rebuilt as part of our offices.
Contractor A knew that some of the old paneling and wood from this former shed scheduled for demolition was of value to the new construction. You can't get that kind of wood anywhere these days. Also, knowing part of the larger vision, the global view of things, Contractor A did not want to waste an opportunity to get some free rare raw material.
As with most middle games, things aren't always so simple. Extracting wood in a preserved, pristine way takes time, and time was a luxury at this point. Contractor B was acting on the vacationing president's order to remove this shed in time for the roads people, who could only come in the next day to pave a street to the new casino's back entrance. If they didn't start hauling this thing down by late today, there would be no way to finish clearing it so that the pavers could pave.
Contractor A had an excellent retort. What was the use of paving the way to the back entrance of a casino that wasn't even due to be open for the next five months? So what if it wasn't paved, it would still be traversable, albeit a bit rugged. The road pavers weren't going to cost more if they couldn't come tomorrow. Indeed, the pavers would have preferred to get a reprieve and not go out of their way to move from the project they were on to do this one-off paving.
Contractor B played twenty questions, twenty fear questions. "Didn't the president say do this today?" "Are you deliberately disobeying what he said?" "Isn't he expecting upon his return to have this done?" "Aren't you just filling in for him while he is gone or are you supposed to be making your own decisions?" And so on and so forth.
I asked out loud if the president had known this valuable wood was inside the shed. I got two different answers. Contractor A saw the opportunity and responded that if the president had known of the wood, he would have forestalled the tearing down of the shed and the paving. Contractor B, not to be outdone, said that the president wasn't an idiot. He'd been inside the building plenty of times and knew his wood. He'd obviously seen this wood in there and didn't think much of it because he told us to just "rip it down."
Making matters worse, I knew that Contractor A was also involved in building a health clinic elsewhere for the tribe. They were strongly allied with the tribal council, which held plenary authority over the economic development corporation, albeit its reign had never been tested to date. Would angering Contractor A compel Contractor A to go to the tribal council and establish more control? My paranoia was building as I realized that politically I'd better side with Contractor A. "Let's let them take the wood out. The pavers won't mind," I said.
This made Contractor B furious. Continuing the Socratic mode, the questions became more colorful. "You &#!@! punk. What the @&@ do you think you're @&*#64;! doing?" "Are you outta yer &$#@ mind?" "Ya think yer smart letting these pencil-necked &##%@ jerk you around?" Ah, relief. I got a certain joy out of watching Contractor B spew, Contractor A tallying up my brownie points, and...uh oh. "You &$#@ watch what happens when the #%@ electric company can't get in there!" End of Socratic mode, end of story. The rule in Go, for any local fight, is "Once you see a solution, look again." Completely disregarding any semblance of my Go tutelage, I had sided with Contractor A despite the admonition.
I'd forgotten about the building needing to be razed so that the power company could get in to remove some of the old transformer lines and other things that were part of the old mill. The shed abutted the whole works. Since the president had promised the power company people that the shed would be gone before they started work, the power company had moved up the appointment to remove it by a couple of months. This was a date fixed months ago, a far-distant memory for me, but not for Contractor B. The rule in Go is "Even the weakest opponent can play the right move." While I had sided with the stronger, more politically connected side, and certainly the less colorful, I would now need to switch sides.
"On second thought, we'd better clear it," I said. Contractor A, unaware of the power company promise, blinked hard. "What!" "I thought you just said that you agreed to postponing the shed's demolition so that we could get all this fine wood out of there?" "You gotta be kidding me...why are you doing this?" Before I could answer, I got the president's secretary running up to me with a very urgent phone call. Apparently, there were some federal investigators down at the reservation...
Since it was still early, I knew that this didn't have to be concluded right now. Contractor B could clear the shed in about five hours, after I spent some time figuring out what else was going wrong today. "Please, both of you, wait till I get back before we decide what we should do. I have to go see about some trouble down on the reservation. I'll be back soon."
These are typical middle game circumstances. Moving from the beginning, where you place some bets, the middle game is where you aren't just anteing in, you have to decide to throw good money after good, or after bad. Moreover, because the middle game is fraught with multiple skirmishes across the bigger board, you have to choose your battles wisely. While driving down to see the EPA, I was able to reflect a bit on the situation.
OK, so it seemed that razing the building was the best thing to do because of the power company's coming. If the president knew the power company hadn't done its job while he was away, there'd be hell to pay. But, what would the president have done if he knew the wood was still in there? Hold up the power company? Make Contractor B work through the night? Was the wood worth it and did he know about it?
What about Contractor A and the potential for convincing the tribal council to come out and help shepherd me while the president was gone? That was sure paranoid. Really, what was I thinking? But, that Contractor A didn't get the tribal council to go that far didn't mean that Contractor A couldn't cause a stink. With all this development, things were already brewing with the tribal government about who owned what and where the power was. There was no doubt about their ultimate reign, but what about public impression, the eyes of the tribal members? While things had been going well so far, there's hardly any development in Indian Country, or anywhere else for that matter, where a good deed goes unpunished. There were numerous local situations, all with global ramifications.
Comparing local situations and alternatives is not simple. There are millions of variations, and the rule in Go is "Stones don't move." That is, no matter how poorly you played before, you need to account for and respect the moves, however you played them. They've become either weaknesses or strengths, have helped toward the goal or not, but they are in the past and now are part of the environment. You cannot move them any more than you can move or alter your past. What you can do with them now depends on moves you make now. While some earlier decisions may be unalterable at this point, early on in the middle game, the game is like so much magma -- hot, gooey, pliable, and ready to coagulate to the goal of your choosing. Your old plays are sunk costs.
My moves this morning had had an effect. Momentum and feelings had changed. The effects, while reversible, could still have bearing later in the game. I might be able to spend time with both contractors and get them to see the more global picture, to see that we all win by following a particular direction. Or, more likely the case, I would be seen as wishy-washy and not to be trusted with a made decision. You can't continue play as if you haven't made a mistake. The Owe part of the book is coming up.
The evaluation is, of course, still the same as in the beginning. The goal is to win the game -- in Go, to control more intersections than the opponent does; in life, whatever that analogue is. For CEDCO, our goal was to make a 10 percent profit on $100 million in revenue so that the tribe could be self-sufficient. Through lengthy studies, someone came up with the tribe needing $10 million a year in order to survive without federal assistance. That was the overarching global goal.
How did knowing the goal help the middle game situation here? Well, if I had the local knowledge of the value of the wood, the detrimental cost of moving around the power company, and the probability they'd have to move the date, given that Contractor B might or might not be able to work past 6:00 P.M., the political values, the irritation of Contractor B in general, and so forth, I'd have all the background research done that would answer my question. When one is omniscient, even the most strategic considerations can become tactical. But when you don't even have the local facts straight, you cannot possibly align yourself to the global goal. In Go, detail determines the whole and the whole informs the details. The crux of Global Local analysis lies in this tension between knowing the local values between positions and how those local values pertain to the global goal. In Go, the way one does this is to ask the Four Questions.
In Go, you have to separate the local situations, evaluate the pieces, then tie it all back together. The Global Local combo rule in Go is to ask Four Questions -- Where am I strong? Where is the opponent strong? Where am I weak? Where is the opponent weak? -- and then play closer to weakness and farther from strength. In business, this is called SWOT analysis -- strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. In sports, it goes by a number of different names. It's the basic calculus of strategy and in most situations in Go and elsewhere, the answer to the Four Questions gives you the answer at least 50 percent of the time.
To do proper Four Question analysis, look at each particular battle distinctly. Am I ahead or behind in each battle? As a beginner, you cannot do this analysis well, but you can cheat to some extent by just comparing positions based on time, number, and space (for example, "I have ten pieces to the opponent's seven in this area; therefore, I am stronger here" is one simplistic analysis; see the Appendix for more examples). Whose turn is it? Do I have more resources in the area than the opponent does? Am I taking up more space than the opponent does? As you get stronger, you look at how things interconnect. You can tell at a glance their efficiencies and overall effectiveness and likewise look at the opponent the same way. The stronger you are, the finer the distinctions you can make between what is strong and what is weak.
Summing up all your positions relatively determines the positions from strongest to weakest. From this global perspective on multiple local ones, and with limited resources to commit, it's best, oftentimes, to play the move that is closer to your own weakness. Better yet, also be far from your own strength and far from the opponent's strength. In Go, the rule is "Play the multiple-meanings move." The more of the Four Questions you can address with one move, the better. This will be covered to a greater extent in Chapter 7, Expand Focus.
In my particular dilemma about what to do with the contractors at the mill, after leaving the flood to flood and after stonewalling the EPA, my initial analysis was a good read of the Four Questions. Where was I weak? Aside from all over, my particular weaknesses were, first, a coming power company visit that needed reinforcement in order to happen (namely, the razing of the shed); second, my paranoia, fear, or later-to-be-proved-correct premonition that the tribe was looking to take away the corporation's power, otherwise known as watch out for Contractor A; third, the dearth of fine woods that could complete the interior design; and fourth, not knowing what the president knew and did not know. Where were my strengths? Since I was the client, the contractors would need to bow to my direction, so I had, first, the ability to make a decision stick; second, the ability to get the contractor(s) to work extra hours or late; third, the resources to get the job done; and fourth, the mantle of the president.
My opponents' strengths were a bit more difficult to read. While in Go, you can see the whole board and know exactly what your opponent is doing at all times, outside Go you do not always know this. The equalizer is that in Go, as much as you do see, there's much that you likewise do not see. You cannot read the entire game out unless you are close to the end. Likewise, the opponent may be feinting, misplaying, ignoring, or baiting you with or without your knowing it. You are again hampered by your own strength or weakness, and whatever holes there are in your personality in your daily life will likewise blind you in Go. The rule in Go is "You cannot know the opponent's mind just by seeing the opponent's stones."
Nonetheless, in Go and in life, you make the best decision you can based on what you know. You can probe the opponent's intentions, do your best not to make your plans too obvious, monkey with the opponent so as to draw out hidden schemes, and so forth, but your information is only going to get so good. At some point, you still have to act on the basis of the information you have and the environment before you. To my knowledge, the contractors' strengths were many.
Each contractor could decide to walk; while unlikely, this was within their power. Each had information about his own projects that far exceeded my own; while I had the mantle, I did not have an extensive explicit, implicit, or tacit knowledge dump. Each contractor had ties to the rest of the community and, for Contractor A, ties to the tribal council. Each contractor had access to our plans and desires for building out the old mill site and therefore could help or hinder progress for it. These strengths and more were weighing in my mind.
The contractors' weaknesses, partially mentioned in my strengths, were that both needed the money, both were working for a sovereign government, which would be difficult to collect from in the event things really went sour, and both had been given strict direction to follow my orders by the president. The particular weakness for Contractor A was that despite his moniker of contractor, there was no contract. Couple this with our being ninety days in arrears already and his needing to fully believe in our good faith (we ultimately did make good) while he was paying his subcontractors on a seven-day or cash upfront basis, and you had the ultimate weakness. Contractor B was often hurt by his tendency to fly off the handle and do erratic things that tended to get him fired from different jobs. While it is one thing to be the low-price contractor in the region, it's quite another to be the most obnoxious.
In true Go fashion, I followed the Four Questions, and the answers led me squarely to the right thing to do under the circumstances. My greatest weakness was my uncertainty about many things, but it was a certainty that the shed needed to be removed. Not doing so would mean trouble when the president got back and trouble from the power company when it arrived. My opponents' weakness was my power in the relationship and their inability to marshal their strength against me, from the perspective of their connections outside our corporation, as long as I stayed clear of any external entanglements. My strength was that I held the pocketbook and the strategic vision of the entire corporation, with which they were in no position to argue. Staying away from my strengths and theirs (not holding the pocketbook threat over them, not driving them to external parties who might cause us problems) and playing closely to my weaknesses and theirs (fixing the power company obstacle and giving them more confidence we'd make good on the work they'd done thus far) made a lot of sense. My initial decision from the morning seemed sound. The plan was set. Unfortunately, Go and life are not so easy.
The situation changed after I had left them in the morning. While going with Contractor B was right from the whole-board perspective, taking into account global and local concerns and weighing them appropriately, there was a new move on the board. When you're walking the razor-thin tightrope of the middle game, you have to respect the rule that "every stone counts."
In Go, you can capture the opponent's stone by surrounding it and choking it off from its friendlies and/or unoccupied intersections. The particulars you can discover by reading the Appendix, but directly capturing a stone is not nearly as interesting as the various ways you can indirectly capture a stone. In most advanced games, players don't go around capturing stones, despite many stones being primed for capture. Since the game is about territory and not capture (à la chess), the two sides will clash and the de facto captured stones remain on the board. At the end, these stones are repatriated into their opposing territory, thereby reducing whatever the opponent had before. This is a civilized sort of Geneva-like convention for Go, where those captured or surrounded remain unharmed but are returned to the country of origin.
One particular method of indirect capture with interesting global ramifications is what is called a ladder. A ladder is a way to capture a stone by chasing it either into the side of the board or into your friendly pieces. The position, if played out, can spread all over the board, and some professional problem makers have these capture ladders form words and pictures the same way one might with dominoes. The point is that if you've done your local tactical analysis, you can see if the ladder can capture the stone or if it cannot. In fact, this is one thing computers can do faster than humans can in regard to Go. The particular rule that ladders rely on, more than any other aspect of the game, is that "every stone counts." Whether a ladder works or not is determined by the environment on the board.
Following the ladder pattern through to its final conclusion, a computer ignores strategic complications and can tell if the ladder will crash into the side of the board or into sides friendly with the other side, and thereby perish, or if it will crash into friendly stones and thereby live. Put an opposing stone in the path of a ladder and the ladder ceases to capture; that stone is thus called a ladder breaker. It doesn't matter if this stone is important at all in what it is doing in its particular place; if it happens to be in the way of the ladder, it can prevent the ladder from capturing the stone. When people talk about luck in Go, this is often what they mean. Sometimes you'll happen to have a stone in the right place so that a ladder works or breaks, sometimes you aren't so fortunate as to have a stone in the right place.
The ladder breaker for my decision at the mill wasn't part of any of the analysis I did regarding the Four Questions. The new move, the ladder breaker for the mill decision, occurred as many ladder breakers do, far away at the reservation -- the EPA visit. While the local analysis was sound and I thought I had captured the situation appropriately with my analysis, I had not captured the situation with my Four Questions analysis.
What if there was asbestos in this shed? What if even the small shack attached to the shed, used formerly to power the shed, was asbestos-laden? While I certainly was in the dark about what the president knew or did not know about the quality of the wood, I knew that the president had no idea about the EPA's visit and its investigation of the debris from the building that was allegedly showing up on the reservation. We'd had the previous owner's environmentally clean bill of health for the entire premises -- we had to in order to put this land into trust for the tribe -- but this wasn't stopping the EPA from investigating. While I had the proverbial stone to capture to make the old plans work, the local situation alone had to be looked at in light of the global reality. Neither plans, nor good decisions, nor enlightened insight can keep the bogeyman of reality from foiling your plans. Respecting reality, not looking at things just in their tempting, narrow, safe, local context, the real tactical situation can be affected by the global situation -- a global situation or move, in this case, that could care less about whatever you decided earlier.
So, ol' wishy-washy VP went back to Contractors A and B and said that the shed would not come down. Not just for the sake of the power company, not even for the removal of the fine wood products that made up its walls. The potential risk of asbestos removal, even if we were totally in the clear, at this point, was too great for us to do anything but get our ducks in a line and see where reality was. You can think you are in the clear, but the middle game demands brutal honesty, not honesty of intentions. If we weren't terribly clear about the materials that composed it, we dared not let it compromise us.
You can probe in Go to test your understanding of a situation. My quick probe into the situation bore out the ladder breaker. "Is this material asbestos," I asked Contractor B. "Uh, not sure, really. It looks like normal wallboard to me." "Well, what's the difference between the two?" "Not sure, really. I guess it could be asbestos, but I thought the former owner cleaned this building out." "Yep, that was my thinking too." This exchange was sure to become part of some exhibit before a grand jury, I thought, should we have continued to plow this old shed under. The original plans, schemes, and designs that led to a good decision in siding with Contractor B before were now ladder broken.
In the middle game you're forced to respect every move or you will suffer as a result. While the global goal has to be the direction and trajectory you follow, the power of localized situations is such that when something is wrong, no matter how small, your entire game can be thrown off if you pay attention only to the big picture. The small, local picture can be a cancer. If not stopped at first notice, it becomes a much bigger problem that may be unsolvable later. The rule in Go is that "small leaks can become a great river."
With the contractor and EPA situations concluded for the day, there was still a bit more work to do. I called to check on the flooding in the basement. The contractor had arrived onsite and had let the building manager know what had happened and how we had contributed to its flooding. The claim was that runoff from the incomplete landscaping around the assisted-living facility had plugged up drains that would otherwise have worked.
Should we expect to have the drainage system break down whenever enough foliage fell due to storm or otherwise? Would the building have no protection from exterior water or runoff? While the floors were still concrete and the Sheetrock was replaceable, the flooding was mostly an annoyance, but these claims about contributory factors seemed rather disingenuous. The nice thing about this particular battle was that as long as the discussion stayed on this issue and things didn't get too heated in the bickering, this problem was largely one of end game, where local rules rule.
For the person not steeped in bureaucracy or the love of administrative processes, the end game can prove to be a challenge on a personal level. It is attention to detail that makes or breaks someone in the end game phase. Miss a beat, time things incorrectly, and you'll suffer a point loss. You can play brilliantly in the middle game and create a masterpiece Go record against an equally matched opponent and still come into the end game and lose. Horribly.
With a typical Go game lasting 250-some moves, only 150 take up the beginning and middle games. With nearly 100 or more moves remaining, the situation is still critical. As the final boundaries between the opponents remain, each side jockeys to reduce the other's territory as much as possible while increasing its territory. But, unlike the globalness of the beginning and the Global-Local-ness of the middle game, the end game is almost strictly local. Toward the end of the end game the feeling is analytical, bureaucratic. The later stages of end game have no room for intuition, and in this, its final throes, a mathematical science of end games dictates the absolute best way to play. While not sexy, the end game is a critical part of winning.
What championship golfer is good at driving, fairway irons, chipping, but not putting? None. What great sales rep gets scores of potential clients to go to all the fancy sales events, generates all sorts of interest, but cannot get the deal closed? None. The end game is about sealing the deal. It's a nitty-gritty and oftentimes plainly administrative part of the game. Until it's complete, the game ain't over. Nearly all great Go professionals profess having a great end game. When you're moving from the razor-thin tightrope of the middle game, the tension and width of opportunity of that tightrope are pulled into even thinner opportunities in the end game.
If you are too far behind going into the end game and your opponent is strong, it's best to resign. While there's an entire art to resigning in Go, suffice it to say that the end game rarely swings the point tally by more than five points, if at all, in a professional match. By the time the end game starts, both sides have taken the big opportunities on the board and all that's left is to eke out the final border tangles before calling it a game. That said, there are still plenty of opportunities about which one can be pennywise.
Not one to be pound-foolish, I went into the negotiations with the contractor about the flooding. Every move he made had to be judged for its merit, its timing, and its relative value to other end-game-like moves. If I stayed on the defensive the entire time, answering his line of questioning, I would run out of time before this thing was all mopped up, and then the onus would be on me to foot the bill. In a global sense, there is still the comparison of local moves and deciding which is the more valuable, but still that's the only function at this ending state of global reasoning. The local moves and their timing and value were the main determiners of where to play. Do the calculations right and you can basically wrap it up. If buying into the contractor's stories about our culpability were sound, then what were the costs? Again, global perspective is not going to help at this point. You can wonder if your analysis is worth it, you can wonder if spending time on the problem is worth it, but in determining how to react, it is a matter of the probabilities of culpability, the costs of the various scenarios, and then doing your math. If settling the issue costs less than the analysis, don't bureaucracy your way to better decision-making by costing more than the benefit.
How much was the bill going to be for cleaning this up? Five hundred dollars. Oh, and the GM had already rented the equipment to clean it up and the job is basically done. OK, remove four hundred dollars from the cleanup and how valuable is my time talking to the contractor? If I get the contractor back to work and I get back to work, don't I make up the other one hundred dollars, at least? Sure, there are other utilities that come into play. You don't want to be a chump to the contractor and seem like you'll bend on stuff like this. "If we cover this cleanup cost, are you going to guarantee me there aren't going to be any more finishing-up-the-building SNAFUs?" If he agrees, you are netting in the positive for more than you paid in total. That's getting down to the nitty-gritty. That's end game. Besides, there was a certain value in reducing the probability of heart failure. Water on concrete wasn't the end of the world.
Heading home with a new appreciation for being the buck-stopper, the decision-maker on what battle to fight and when, I could see things more clearly. Would I still make the mistake of rushing into a decision based on a simplistic understanding of global rules? Probably. Would I still suffer the ignominy of being too local in the face of a diet, wanting to be too helpful to the long arm of the law, or accepting the placebos of small wins? For sure. But did I gain in strength and experience that reinforced and bridged learning I knew from Go, but had to transplant to management? Certainly. While I continue to make global mistakes and suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune from the tiniest of local perspectives, I at least can suffer knowing that the probability goes down with each trial.
If I was going to be a better player in management, I would need to build both my local and global perspectives and make sure they were in balance. That said, it was easier to come into a new situation and be a good globalist, because lack of experience doesn't take as much of a toll there, but if you are out of balance, with a weak local understanding, without the experience of multiple fights and losses tactically, a global perspective for the Four Questions is not well informed. If you're an expert at one thing, don't spout the obvious global issues before you get under the skin of something else. Look closely and get burned a few times locally. Your global perspective can be good in new contexts without local understanding, but you'll get burned hard without bringing your local knowledge up to snuff. Beware the contractor, consultant, salesperson -- kibitzer -- who promises otherwise.
But having interchangeable Global Local lenses and abilities is not enough to see you through to mastery. It's the first crucial element, but without an idea of risk, safety, urgent, or big, your analysis will be flawed, your steps toward the goal will be away from goodness. You need Owe Save to give you depth in your Global Local views.
Copyright © 2004 by Troy Anderson
Table of Contents
Contents
PART I THE WAY OF GO
PART II GO'S RULES
Chapter 1 Global Local
Chapter 2 Owe Save
Chapter 3 Slack Taut
Chapter 4 Reverse Forward
Chapter 5 Us Them
Chapter 6 Lead Follow
Chapter 7 Expand Focus
Chapter 8 Sorry
Appendix: How to Play Go
Acknowledgments