The Way of Go

8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Success in Business and Life

Troy Anderson

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780743258142
• eBook ISBN: 9780743270748
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

For centuries, business, political, and military leaders throughout Asia have had a secret weapon for success -- the philosophies and strategies found in an ancient game called Go.
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.

Part I

The Way of Go

Master Pieces

Across a board hewn from an eight-hundred-year-old kaya tree of finest yellow wood and even grain, two gladiators of mind and strategy—one armed with lens-shaped white stones carved from thick, white, evenly lined clamshells, the other armed with like-shaped black stones carved from a famed black mountain of slate—meditate and sweat over the formations before them.

Before this game ever started, the two competitors had trained for decades in the various known forms and patterns of the game. Each had experimented and tried out the latest fads and research, but each had now come to fashion a style unique unto himself. Surpassing their former contemporaries who did not give themselves to the mystery, structure, and nature of the game—a prerequisite to achieving the status of master—the two are equally matched and equally determined to win.

With Black’s next play, the direction of the fight will be decided. Along the lines of the board, etched centuries before by an artisan who specialized in lining boards with a samurai sword dipped in black ink, the next move will either split White’s position in two or defend against White’s last move, an assault on Black’s massive territory now encompassing almost a quarter of the claimable territory of the board. The scenarios branching even ten moves out from this next choice number in the millions of possibilities, each aiming at the singular goal of the game—to control just one more intersection than the opponent does of this 19 × 19-line cosmos of 361 intersections. These masters compute, partly by analysis and partly by intuition, magnitudes better than even the best computer program in the world.

Armed with the human perception of shape and patterns and an ability to apply analogy and metaphor to experiences forged through thousands of games and years of expert tutelage, the players find that a move appears, a path shows, a way can be envisioned. While weaker players profess their control and mastery, these masters know that only when they’ve quieted these naïve thoughts will they be able to hear the faint truth that the juxtaposition of stone, line, and wood reveals.

The players compete to enforce their will on each other, but the board is the only provider. If they could see beyond the pat forms, the years of experience, and the rhythm of their competition, the secret might be revealed—kami no itte, the hand of God, the one true move out of more than a trillion possible ways the game could go.

Reaching into a cherrywood bowl, Black takes one of the remaining stones and strikes it down on an unoccupied intersection, a move of a master who realizes that mastery is a path, not a destination.

In this single strike, Black counterattacks White’s onslaught. From here on out, the course will be violent and chaotic, and with each move the two stone sages will exchange the lead multiple times as each move keeps a tight finger on the ebb and flow of this game’s natural order. With each move, a masterpiece of Black advantage and then White advantage dances across the board, leaving fractals of White and Black territory spotted with empty intersections unplayed.

While onlookers gawk at the reversal of fortune, an entire sea change coming after each seemingly impossible creative outburst, they say, “How could Black possibly come back after that?” “How can White survive that assault?” “It’s all over for Black.” “White’s defeat is assured now.” For the players, balance, tantamount to proper play, dictates that if their prior moves were sound, then there will be a way out. Without mistake, you need not fear the darkest situation; you can trust the nature of the game, there will be a way through.

A Shared Nature

This is Go at its ultimate—two players fighting, struggling, yet respecting that the game comes from the moves and opportunities before them. Games like these truly are works of art to those who can appreciate their depth, soundness, and rhythm. But what does this art, this competition, have to do with you? Everything.

Go is the simplest of games, but it can be terribly complex. It is a most beautiful game, but I cannot train your eyes quickly enough to see this beauty, unless you’re already well in the know. Indeed, if you are looking to learn how to play because you want to see this beautiful art form etched through competition, skip the next eight chapters, read the primer in the Appendix, get yourself a Go board and stones, or get your fill virtually at thewayofgo.com. But for everything I cannot tell you about the mechanics of the game of Go, there’s a trove of information about strategy, decision-making, and reality that stronger Go players have been drawing on for millennia that is applicable to about anything one might do.

The parallels between Go and other fields—business, politics, war, sports, relationships, or life in general—are uncanny and, until now, largely unwritten. Yet, whether used by an emperor instructing his child how to rule an empire, by Mao planning to take over China, or by CEOs thinking of their businesses, Go has proven to be a worthwhile metaphor. While I cannot make you fluent in Go, I can share rules of thumb that will apply to whatever endeavor you pursue and can show how these rules’ underlying structure can be invoked to give you a leg up on those who just know the rule without knowing the structure.¹

Exploring this branch of reality called Go, and what I’ll refer to as the universal rules of thumb—the shared underpinnings of Go and most any field where rules of thumb are in use—you will see when and how to best use a rule of thumb and that there are two sides to most every maxim. No matter your art or practice, no matter your level, the physics, nature, and rhythm of what you do is similar, at its roots, to the game of Go. While there are areas of strategy, decision-making, and competition that are better described outside Go (for example, game theory), the lion’s share of what top Go players use to solve their problems in Go can be, has been, and is applied elsewhere, and with great success.

The Parallels

Many of the issues a Go player faces on the Go board parallel challenges experts across fields face regularly. In Go, you are constantly struggling to know:

• How to make use of limited resources and time to achieve your goals
• Which initiatives to continue and which to pull the plug on
• How to maximize flexibility but keep focus
• How to weigh competing interests, tradeoffs, or options
• When to attack and when to wait to attack
• When to lead and when to follow

Face-to-face across the Go board, without chance or other intrinsic advantages common to most strategic duels, there’s no way to hide poor resource allocation decisions or poorly timed attacks; you either commit to win or give the opponent an opportunity to do so. While it is possible to recover from mistakes, should the opponent make some, at all times you are on the razor’s edge of strategic decision-making. One hair’s-breadth off strategically and the game can turn. This is the battleground on which Go’s strategic understanding is forged and what makes Go such a natural metaphor for other realms.

Most strategic resource allocation decisions are—at their roots—classic Go strategy problems:

• How do we enter a situation where an opponent is well established?
• If a competitor enters our area, what should we do?
• If we have six weak areas and two strong areas, how do we allocate resources appropriately?
• When do we sacrifice and when do we build?
• When should we do preventative maintenance and when should we go after the bigger fish?
• How do we create a strategic plan of operations when things change so quickly?

These are classic Go questions that many leaders have addressed with their understanding of Go. But instead of keeping the applicable bits the exclusive province of strong Go players who can see the parallels, you will get the boiled-down essence of their knowledge so that you can just add your experience and expertise and perhaps think of things in a new way.

An Indirect Map

Note that you cannot just transfer the rules of Go directly to whatever you do. You cannot say that because the Go board has four quadrants, you should think of your situation as having four quadrants. This is paying attention to surface structures that have no meaning beyond the medium. A better concept to take away is that Go has many potential battlefronts that often need to be addressed despite limited resources, just as your particular situation has many potential battlefronts where you will be forced to decide what resources get allocated where.

This higher-level mapping requires that you be somewhat of an expert in your field. Because you are human, you’re very good at distilling the general from the specific. This is key to applying rules and strategies metaphorically. The more expertise you have in a field, the more you will get out of the metaphor of Go. That said, neither Go, nor this book, nor anything else, for that matter, will substitute for experience.

Experience is gained only through blood and guts. The experience needed to learn Go’s strategies, rules, patterns, tactics, shapes, rhythms, and philosophy and to formulate this book was the result of blood and guts spent over the Go board and in thinking about the rules system. Experience in other realms is gained the same way. There are no shortcuts to gaining experience. This system of rules and ways may appear natural, but without experience from somewhere, it’s an empty system, perhaps a dangerous system. But, once you have achieved a certain level of expertise, and if you can drag yourself out of your expertise’s superficial context, Go can show you new ways to wield your craft.

What’s Special about Go

Part of why Go is such a useful parallel is that Go brings to the table thousands of years, billions and billions of games, and eons of trial and error, all homing in on how to win when you don’t have any advantage aside from the strategic allocation of resources. This is strategy and decision-making naked. Without chance, without advantage, without hidden information, Go players must win without any of the customary benefits of life’s usual victors. Sure, Go players will make use of another player’s faults, predilections, and style, but the bulk of the work in Go is pure strategy.

The other advantage Go has over other fields is that each game is a complete story. The major difference between Go and war, or Go and most any other field, is that you can play thousands of games of Go in a year, but you cannot marshal the type of simple resources Go uses (361 stones, 181 black, 180 white, over a 19 × 19 line grid) in war, or in other fields, that you need to get at the strategic lessons.

That said, the majority of the rules of thumb that come out of Go were probably discovered long before Go existed. Likewise, much of what you read today about strategy from business, sports, politics, and elsewhere is not some new wonder candy. The universal rules of thumb of Go, philosophy, art, science, religion, or business have always been there for those who look for them. To benefit, you need to get out of your field-specific, surface-level understanding.

Moreover, if everything you know is embedded in the context in which you learned it, your skill is not transferable, even though it could be. To derive the rules of what you do, to get at the very nature of what you do now, you have to move from specifics to generalities.

If you can make this leap, you will receive something even many stronger Go players do not get—a host of rules and ways that are portable from branch to branch, a passport to use (or abuse) knowledge from one field and apply it to another. What can be seen in the game you play are the things that transcend the particulars, a system of organization and categorization that works in Go and that will work elsewhere.

Go and Chess

But what about chess? Certainly, chess, the game of kings, is Go’s equal. Why not just boil down the rules of chess and do the Way of Chess? There are important differences between the two games (aside from the author’s not being sufficiently strong at chess):

• Chess has 64 squares and 32 are occupied at the beginning of the game; Go has 361 intersections and none are occupied at the beginning of the game. Chess pieces move in interesting ways; a Go stone does not move around.
• Chess is largely a tactical game that requires stringent analysis and a focused analytical brain. Go can be just as tactical as chess, but is more strategic, and those relying purely on intuition, shape, and aesthetics can play at the higher levels. A famous chess grandmaster once said that chess is 99 percent tactical. No top Go player will ever say that.
• If you were to add up all the possible chess games two people could play, you’d have about 10¹²⁰ possible chess games; the number of possible Go games is somewhere between 10¹⁷⁰ and infinite, depending on nuances of the rules. (Note: The number of atoms in the universe is approximately 10⁸⁸.) Indeed, if every atom in the universe housed the entire Earth’s computer computing capacity, you still would not be able to calculate all the possible Go games without letting those computers run for years on end. The effect is that Go will not succumb to a brute-force approach.
• In chess, the battlefield is the chessboard, and if one side gains an advantage it is very difficult to make it up; Go can support more than five chessboards’ worth of battlefields, and even if you lose multiple battles, you can still win the game.
• The best chess-playing computer program can challenge the best human player and win; the best Go-playing computer programs can barely beat middle-level amateurs, and many artificial intelligence programmers equate the challenge of programming Go with that of programming human intelligence.
• Chess has six different kinds of pieces, each with special moves, and there are a variety of rules; Go has one kind of piece and the simplest of rules.
• Many chess masters have become Go converts, claiming that Go is the superior game; no Go masters have become chess converts, claiming chess to be the superior game. Noted Emanuel Lasker, world chess champion, “If there are sentient beings on other planets, they play Go.”
• Chess is often a game of attrition, with each side trying to thwart the other’s defenses and chip away at the opponent until only a single piece remains. In Go, while you can annihilate a much weaker opponent, most closely matched games testify to the give and take needed to win. The resulting picture at the end of a game of Go is a testament to a battle for share, not assassination, with each side corralling a sizable share of the board.

While chess is a wonderful, brilliant game, Go is the simpler, deeper, more strategically complex game, and more of a challenge for the computer programmer looking to program software to play at the top levels.

Why is Go so difficult to program? Aside from the astronomical number of possible scenarios that a computer would need to compute, the traits in which humans still dominate computers—pattern recognition, analogy, and aesthetics, to name a few—are the types of traits programmers would need to replicate in order for computers to compete effectively with humans. Computers are still far from doing this.

Despite numerous advances in science, analysis, data mining, and computer dating, it’s important to remember that even the lowly board game Go is not an area where people programming computers can compete with a five-year-old human’s intelligence. While science has really picked up the pace the last five centuries, there’s still a long way to go until you can manage well without a human providing the wetware input. Yes, science’s tools and applications can be fantastic, monstrous, efficient, or helpful, and do things humans cannot even come close to doing, but there’s still an art, an intuition, a homunculus in the machine that exposes their limitations. Go is particularly good at exposing this weakness in computers.

An Ancient Chinese Microcosm

While Go today serves as a souped-up back-of-a-
cocktail-napkin tool for strategic planning and other decision-making, the ancient Chinese found the Go board more than a mere analogue for life. It truly was a microcosm of their worldview. The board itself is composed of a 19 × 19 grid, with 72 edge points, a total of 361 intersections, and is split-able into four equal quadrants around one center point. The ancient Chinese lunar calendar was based on 72 five-day weeks for a total of 360 days revolving around a center, with four seasons breaking up the year. Coincidence?

The ancient Chinese philosophy of yin-yang, expanded more extensively in Taoism, is still prevalent today in various arts (tai chi and feng shui, among others). The col...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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