Arthur Andreasyan is an entrepreneur, e-commerce marketing expert, and founder and CEO of the award-winning luxury mattress brand, Puffy.
The right approach to every business scenario isn’t black and white. Or is it?
Regardless of our industry, we all have interests outside our immediate day-to-day that make us who we are when we show up as leaders. Establishing boundaries between personal interests and the boardroom is tempting, but if you leverage your passions correctly, they can lead to surprising results. The passion I leverage every single day? Chess.
The world of e-commerce is like an intense, high-stakes game of chess. Within four months, 90% of e-commerce brands have already failed. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every move matters, and a single wrong one can spell disaster for your brand or business. So, when looking for guiding principles to steer you and your team through a highly competitive market, you might benefit, as I did, from reaching for the wisdom of Grandmasters before the usual CEO suspects. These are the three ways I apply lessons from the chessboard and world champions, not just to mitigate disaster but to achieve consistent results.
1. Instinct will only take you so far.
“We often make impulsive moves when careful analysis refutes our plans. We fall in love with our plans and refuse to admit new evidence against them.” – Garry Kasparov.
This principle remains true for newbies at a fourth-grade chess club or seasoned professionals like Grandmaster Garry Kasparov. The fact that players at that level are only running partially on instinct and are, in fact, constantly evaluating moves and plays that they have studied and memorized for years, can be surprising to those unfamiliar with the game. Your gut instinct will always be valuable, but it doesn’t substitute hard work and analysis.
Website optimization is the cornerstone of e-commerce, for instance. While there are so many ways I can optimize my business at any given moment, I have learned that if I don’t have actual data to support a proposed idea, I am moving pieces on the board blindly. Changing the text of a button on my landing page may seem like a small action I can take on a whim, but it can have a huge impact—it can mean 202% more customers buy a product (or don’t buy a product). Do not underestimate the power of the small pawns on your board. Understanding the finer details of how your business operates is time-consuming and requires research and patience, but it can be the difference between winning or losing the game. Leadership requires understanding how all of the pieces work, not just that the goal is to capture the King.
This is particularly important when we’re in crisis mode. When threatened, it can be tempting to react on instinct, but this is precisely when chess players and business leaders with longevity return to fundamentals. What is your core mission, for instance? In the late ’90s, this is precisely how Apple avoided bankruptcy (paywall) and became one of the world’s most influential tech companies. Steve Jobs focused on getting “back to the basics” and streamlined their product lineup accordingly. The rest is history. Know who you are, why you do it and how—and double down on those fundamentals when the going gets tough.
2. Have an endgame.
I have encountered too many leaders with a game plan that extended no further than their next move. You may have the data to support a business decision at the time, but what are the future implications? Chess players think several moves ahead—they have to. Train yourself to think similarly. That button on my website I mentioned earlier? It could seem like a good idea, but we might later see that we’re getting a lot of attention on one product but discouraging users from purchasing another. It pays to think a few moves ahead. If we zoom out to broader business decisions, there’s a Forbes article devoted to some significant examples of short-sighted business decisions from history that are particularly relevant right now. Over a century ago Western Union President William Orten turned down the telephone patent, but right now, I can see a similar situation brewing with some savvy business leaders embracing AI technology (like Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky), and those either refusing to adopt it or who are desperately trying to catch up. You need to be thinking several moves ahead, or you’re already behind.
3. Forget everything I just said. Sometimes.elpful, I know. But there’s a reason this is the third lesson. You can only do this once you apply my first and second points. The clock is always ticking in chess and e-commerce, demanding rapid, informed decisions. If you do your due diligence and regularly go back to basics, much like a world chess champion, being able to make those informed decisions will happen faster and faster. In my case, I could only start to do this once I had my fundamental A/B testing strategies in place. The other benefit to throwing caution to the wind occasionally after you’ve got a solid structure and plan in place? You’ve naturally set yourself up for some degree of success to fall back on—it’s statistically more likely that you’ve made a few right moves to counteract a risky one that doesn’t pan out.
The bottom line here is that it can be tempting to read listicles of risky business moves that paid off, like Elon Musk betting all his PayPal money on SpaceX, Twitter refusing to sell to Facebook, and so on, without paying attention to the fact that those risks were built on a foundation of prior strategy, experience and more minor calculated risks. It’s easy to overlook the study and experience it has taken for champions to become champions, but that’s why I love chess. It reminds me that we can all—myself included—learn to play to win.
Your move.
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