More about parallels between chess and life

To my pleasant surprise I found that some people are actually reading my blog! So, in this post I will continue the topic touched in the last post, similarities and differences between chess and life (or chess and business, in that matter). Last time I was a little bit lame, I only scratched the surface of this topic, so now I will elaborate a little bit on this issue.

For me, as a chessplayer, it's always intriguing when I find some expert from some other field who uses chess analogy to illustrate his point. Good example is field of strategic management, in which words and concepts such as "strategy", "tactics", "resources", "planning" are abundant, and yet those same terminology is central to chess theory, especially concepts of strategy and planning. One nice little anecdote from chess world, I found many times in business litterature is story about renowned grandmaster who "played an exibition match against a New York amateur - and lost. The champion was renowned for his chessboard strategy . his ability to plan a dozen or more moves ahead as a game developed. At the post-match press conference the amateur was asked how many moves ahead he had planned in defeating the master. 'Only one,' he replied. 'The right one.'" And, many times the companies who were planning a lot in advance were beaten by those who saw only one move in advance - the right one.

Puting strategic management aside, the other discipline that uses chess as an interesting field of investigation is decision making. I have read several researches in this field that have used chess players in experiments regarding decision making process, making correlations and conclusions about decision making in time-pressure situations. It's quite logical, since in chess you have limited amount of time to make a lot of decision during one average game.

Psychologysts also took interest in chess, and vice versa. Nothing to surprise us, since it's one important aspect of the game, a lot was written about importance of talent in chess, cognitive process of thinking, personality of chess players and so on. And, I cannot resist to tell another joke about one famous grandmaster (not the same one as in the previous example) who "was playing a simul in the Mental institution in New York. He made pretty good result but some tall guy was playing absolutely brilliant and has demolished the Grandmaster. At the parting Grandmaster congratulated to the winner once again and this one said: 'Mister Evans. For one it's not indispensable to be crazy so he could play good, but it really helps alot.'"
And I can continue list with computer science, game theory, even philosophy etc...

Nevertheless, one should not go too far in drawing parallels between chess and live. One very important dimension is the social one. Chess is a zero-sum game, you win or lose, or you can share a point with your opponent, but you can take the whole point or share it, you cannot make it bigger and than distribute id. There is little space for cooperation, making consensus, making coallitions or lobbying, and this is one of the fundamental building blocks of social space. Chess is good in illustrating competitive situations when you are trying to outsmart your opponent, but sometimes you don't know who is your oppononent, and sometime you don't need to outsmart him, and most of the time it's more important who are your friends.

And, with those thoughts I will conclude this post. This was not intended to be chess-blog, but I'm glad that I have captured attention of some internet-dwellers, I hope you will follow me in the posts that will come.

Even an MBA can become a chess master

Yes, in this time of recession and crisis, I have realized the often-used adage "crisis is opportunity" and took the opportunity to accomplish my old ambitions by attaining a title of FIDE master in Chess. And this is the result of my victory in the strong chess tournament held in Zagreb last month and of my successful leadership of the local chess team "HRT Zagreb" named after the Croatian National Television. The picture above is taken at the closing ceremony of the tournament, while I was receiving cup and money prize. This easily describes a smile on my face :-)

For those of you more interested in chess, you can find final ranking in the torunament I won on this page and final standings of the team competition I won with my team on on this page. Also, description of chess titles could be found on this page.

It's not easy to achieve this level in chess, or to be first in the torunament, that's reason I'm bragging about it. Chess requires from you to put a lof of effort in playing and studying of the game to achieve a success, but after all it's still a game and no one guarantees that you will outplay your opponent and won a game, no matter how knowledgeable you are. You need a lot of knowledge, but also a lof of skill and the iron determination to achieve a success in it. Those characteristics compelled many people to draw parallels between chess and life, or between chess and business. Good examples could be famous world champion Garry Kasparov who wrote a book "How Life Imitates Chess", and good Grandmaster Lars Bo Hansen who wrote a book "Foundations of Chess Strategy".

I encourage the people who don't play chess to read Kasparov's book, it has many interesting points and you don't need to know how to play chess to read it. And those with chess and business background, like me, could find interesting ideas on the subject in Hansen's book.

Even an MBA can do IT

The above title is a little game of words taken from the famous FedEx ad shown at the beginning of this post. Since I have recently finished my MBA studies, and I'm working in the IT field for more than 5 years, I would like through this blog to overcome the gap between these two interconnected fields: Business and Information Technology.

The ad is basically reinforcing the common prejudice among technical people that managers (especially those with MBA title) are just a bunch of mediocre guys in fancy suits who are only competent in talking and making life tougher for the people who do the real work. On the other hand, the reality is that MBA is now on the height of its popularity, and more and more people with technical and engineering background are graduating from MBA studies and filling the ranks of managers and consultants.

The world is never black-and-white, and there are few businesspeople that are incompetent and arrogant as the guy in the above ad, as there are really few IT persons that are experts only in IT and dysfunctional in any other aspect of life - which is other misconception commonly held among businesspersons (and technical people too!) In modern world spheres of business and IT are so interconnected that good understanding between these two "worlds" is crucial for the progress of the many aspects of society. So, in the next few posts I will try to explain a difference in perception between these two groups of people that is causing a lot of misunderstanding in the work.

CRM in the real world!

A lot has been said and written about CRM in the last ten years, but unfortunately CRM projects in the south-east Europe are still hard to see, and even those that are formally started are still in the phase of planning. Therefore, it is great pleasure to see a CRM project that has delivered on its promises, and is successfully implemented. One such project is implementation of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 in the IEDC - Bled School of Management, the project that was finished just recently. Since I graduated from the same school one week ago, I got good insight into the status of the project.

Main motivation for the introducing the sophisticated CRM system was rigidity and static orientation of the old CRM software. It's better to call old software Contact management software, since it was basically big database of contacts, with lot of fields added to contact card that had a purpose to describe different interactions between school and clients. For example, apart from MBA courses, school organizes a lot of seminars and other events. To track attendance of these different types of seminars, contact card of the participant had a special field in which was written in what seminars and classes a student has participated. Since it was not uncommon for one person to attend several types of programs, and each program has its own code, this field soon became an unintelligible string of characters. Of course, computer could still decipher this string, but it was hard to assemble meaningful reports and sensitivity to errors was high.

School felt a need for modern, process-oriented, CRM software. Since the old software was hard to change and initial idea to use the CRM functionality of existing Navision implementation didn't hold off, choice fell on the newest version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM family - CRM 4.0. The project, during which CRM was installed on server and 36 client computers, was 10 month long, out of it 4 months went on planning and remaining 6 months on the actual implementation. It's interesting to note that project was based more on the "insourcing" than on the "outsorcing", meaning that majority of tasks were done by internal staff rather than external consultants, who were used usually only for migration of data. Customizations were avoided as much as was possible, using advantage of the already existing CRM functionalities and processes.

But, although transition was successfully done and old software is now defunct, there is still a lot to do in the field of change management. Change in the software needs some time to be fully accepted by the people who use it, and this is especially true for the long-time users of the old program. Nevertheless, a lot of improvements have been seen, from faster executing of everyday tasks like printing labels, to better introspection of different ways of interactions with customers. Being myself a customer of this school, I hope that new software will help school to further develop and nourish relationship with its former, present and future students.

Traditional Businesses in a Changing World

Coming from the Information Technology field, where changes are happening at the speed of light and where new paradigms are introduced almost annually, back in my mind I always had prejudice that, so called, traditional businesses are businesses that are waiting to be thrown into oblivion by some technologically more advanced product or new breakthrough in the field. While, this definitely has happened and may happen to some "traditional" businesses, many of them seem to thrive and even effectively use innovation in their production, for the benefit of all of us. A short trip to Trieste and Slovenian coast last weekend gave me some interesting examples of how "traditional" businesses can prove to be very vibrant and innovative.

First "station" on the trip was visit to the MIB School of management where our MBA group from Bled was guest of the faculty. During our visit we were present at the interesting lecture by Professor Stefano Pilotto: The Italian Economic System and the World Challenge. The main issue of the lecture was role of the Italy and its economy in the world that is changing rapidly. Without going much deeper in this complex issue, I can say that my impression is that Italian response is like this 20-years old MBA school that attracts students from all parts of the world in a beautiful 19th century palace that you can see on a picture above: integrating modern approaches and methods with a rich historical and cultural heritage.

After the visit to the school, we went to visit the company that is an example of a typical successful Italian business: Illycaffe S.p.A. Illycaffe, like most Italian companies, is family owned, has long tradition and is competing on the world market by focusing on what they are doing the best: producing premium brand of the coffee. On the IEDC we were using Illycaffe as example of a company that has integrated through value chain, from production of coffee beans through distribution and consumption of coffee, but I wasn't aware of how big and modern this enterprise is. I mean, how difficult this business can be? Process of making coffee is centuries old: you take coffee beans, roast them, grind them, boil them and you have a beverage that is so popular in western world! But, during visit to the factory, I saw that there are innovations happening in each stages of this process, in fact so many of them that two coffee universities (!?) have been established by Illy in Trieste and Sao Paolo! And classroom of the university in the Trieste, based on what I have seen, is technologically more advanced than any of the classrooms of IT companies that are specialized in technology education!

Next day, after a splendid dinner with students of MIB, we went to "Sečovlje", Slovenian Natural Park situated on the southwest border with Croatia, which is still used for salt production. If coffee making was for me traditional business, than salt making is ultra-traditional business. It is hard to imagine more basic product than salt, and the process of production of salt in Sečovlje remained basically the same from 14th century till now! Nevertheless, Sečovlje has managed to survive and to establish itself as a premium producer of several salt products, of which one of them: salt flower, I have bought for use in my kitchen.

After this short trip of one and a half of day, we have returned to Bled, where I summed my impressions and prepared myself for the last module and big discussions about International Political Economy this week. But, more about that in later posts.

If you think you can, or if you think you can't, either way, you're right

In these days, when election of Barack Obama for the next president of the USA is the hottest topic in the media around the world, I would like to draw attention to one of his famous speeches, delivered at the beginning of this year when he was still rather unknown outside of the USA. This is not political blog, so I'm not going to analyze his political views or his vision of America, but rather to talk about the way he delivered his speech. Standing in front of large group of people and delivering the speech is so daunting task that very few speakers can do this effectively and leave a strong impression on their audience. Mr. Obama is obviously such a speaker; he uses vivid language, excellent rhetoric and impressive diction. But, above all, what makes his appearance really outstanding, is the passion, devotion and sincerity you can feel while he is conveying his main message: that hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it and to work for it and to fight for it.

So, next time when you are going to settle for just another compromise and to justify to yourself whatever mediocre choice you are going to make, forgetting the dreams you once had, listen to this speech and remember the quote from Henry Ford: "If you think you can, or if you think you can't, either way, you're right"

Welcome to my first Blog!

Since this is my first step in the world of blogging, I feel obliged to explain a little bit why I started my own blog.

As an IT professional, I was aware of the blogging phenomena since its beginnings. Of course, I was considering joining the movement and starting my own blog several times in the last few years. But, starting a blog is easy, but keeping it interesting, relevant and updated is not that easy and it takes some time. So, only when I was pretty certain that I will commit time and energy to write an interesting blog and to update it, at average, once a week, I opened my personal blog at blogger.

Saying this, I would like to emphasize that my blog will be mainly business-oriented, with a few posts, from time to time, from my personal life. As I'm finishing my MBA at IEDC on Bled, and having more than 5 years of experience in the IT (information technology) field, I feel competent to write about one topic that is becoming very popular recently: aligning IT with business. This means that I would address mainly two types of readers: business people who would like to find how to use IT more effectively and IT people who would like to learn how to thrive in the business world. I will not be narrowly focused, I will include several topics of broad interest, but I will also not go too wide, keeping my posts short and focused mainly to business audience with interest, or background, in IT.

With your help, I hope I will keep this blog out of becoming just another short blimp in the blogosphere and instead make it a valuable addition to already large "library" of established blogs.