Category Archives: Strategy

17-iPos

Steve Jobs ability to foresee how the iPod could revolutionize the industry was largely driven by his early life experiences with the initial transportable music source that did so, the transistor radio.

DECINZO – September 12-18, 2007 METRO SILICON VALLEY

By traditional measures, the success of the iPod was one of the most unpredictable in retail product history.”

Three Moves Ahead – Bob Rice

Imagine your dream position, then work backwards.

BTW, just happened to come across a similar cartoon illustrating a mass of white men adorating an icon. Shows there’s a choice of who/what to worship.

God forgive ’em

12-Gage

Last night G stepped into a conversation between R and M. The problem R was expressing to M was exactly the same problem G was experiencing.

It seemed R and G might commiserate to find the one right solution for both because, although M and R were on the same team and G was leading a distinctly different team, any answers found would be to their mutual benefit.

But, G was outside R & M’s coupling and so easy to dismiss.

07-Move

Use chess tactics to thrive in the face of incalculable complexities and unexpected change. The basic principles of good play – get a big idea, use it to build an advantage, improve it, swap it out for a new one, move quickly, see what happens, make a new plan, and move again – works on a professional level just as they do in corporate warfare.

Three Moves Ahead – Bob Rice

Work Sequence

  1. Big Idea
  2. Build Advantage
  3. Improve It
  4. Swap For New
  5. Move Quickly
  6. What Happens?
  7. New Plan
  8. Move Again

Chess Strategies

  • Strong Square
  • Exchange Sacrifice
  • Stay Ahead On the Clock

chessmap.com

04-Nerg

Potential

Not only a matter of having time to get things done, it’s also a matter of having the energy.

More closely your schedule of rest & activity corresponds to your natural peaks & valleys throughout the day, the more productive your many efforts will be.

Karl Benjamin (1957)

27-Shor

Pathway

Adrian du Buisson for Quanta Magazine – March 12, 2019

Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.

Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.

Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)

All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.


Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”

-Leo Tolstoy

09-Taga

ChessMap

Anatoly Karpov vs Viktor Korchnoi (1974)
Yugoslav Attack vs Sicilian Dragon Defense

Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.

The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.

Feline Inscrutability vs Dogged Tenacity.
Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company

That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.

27-Dual

Transcontinental

Forge your own path, trust in the magic of individuality.

Though the methods vary, the mission is the same: to realize that we are all of us temporary & fragile beings.

Shot here from who knows where, bound for who can tell, we can love ourselves and each other while we’re here.

Elizabeth Berg