Three Moves Ahead

What Chess Can Teach You about Business (Even If You've Never Played)

By: Bob Rice

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

In today's fast-moving Information Age, traditional business-planning tools are rapidly becoming obsolete. Yet the competitive, ever-changing marketplace demands that executives move quickly or risk becoming relics.

In Three Moves Ahead, business leader and chess expert Bob Rice offers an entertaining, practical response to this modern dilemma. He shows how the world's top executives use chess tactics to thrive in the face of incalculable complexities and unexpected change.

Written for nonplayers, this witty, smart guide is filled with real-world examples of how to win the game of business by applying chess strategies honed from over 1,000 years of competition. With incisive prose, Rice clearly shows how to use these principles to attack competitors, defend turf, and crack new markets. He demonstrates how a "Strong Square" strategy drove Adobe's rise from niche player to industry powerhouse, how Kodak is reviving its fortunes with an "Exchange Sacrifice", and how Google is creating holes in Microsoft's position with a "Minority Attack".

Most importantly, Three Moves Ahead also shows how to "Stay Ahead On the Clock" and avoid the fate of companies like Polaroid, Gateway, and our dearly departed Ma Bell.

©2008 Bob Rice (P)2008 Brilliance Audio

Three Moves Ahead

I guess this book is okay if it's your first book on business development, but somewhat boring if you've already read a few good books on the subject. The narrator's monotone voice is not helping either. At times you'd feel like somebody's literally going down a bullet point list of a power point presentation. The relationship between chess and business is weak at best and perhaps non-existent. Who knew a classic "support from behind" in chess means you let a group of engineers loose in an organization to be creative and come up with the next big idea. This kind of vague links can be made with just about any sport. The overall high rating by other readers is baffling to me. Maybe they saw something in the book that I didn't. Ultimately, this book isn't either enlightening or entertaining. It failed to provide a new way of looking at the marketplace and the business world as the title suggested it might.