Chess for Work

The hiring manager skims another polished resume. Perfect formatting. Impressive university. Three years at a Fortune 500 company. References available upon request. She places it in the “maybe” pile with seventeen others that look exactly the same. Then she notices something unusual at the bottom of the next application. FIDE Rating: 1850. She pauses. What […]

The conference room had gone silent for the third time that morning. Seven executives sat around the table, laptops open, coffee growing cold. The quarterly strategy presentation glowed on the screen. Someone needed to make a decision. Anyone. But the spreadsheets kept multiplying, the what-if scenarios kept branching, and lunch was approaching fast. This scene

The conference room buzzed with the familiar chaos of forced professional mingling. Sarah, a talented data analyst, stood near the refreshment table, pretending to be fascinated by the coffee selection. Around her, extroverts worked the room with practiced ease, collecting business cards like trading cards. She had prepared her elevator pitch, researched attendees, and worn

Every chess player remembers their first Scholar’s Mate. Either they fell for it, embarrassed and confused, or they tried it themselves, grinning at the thought of a four-move victory. The Scholar’s Mate is chess’s most famous cheap trick. It’s the equivalent of asking someone to marry you on the first date. Sometimes it works. Usually,

The conference room smells like stale coffee and desperation. A manager sits alone at 7 PM, staring at a spreadsheet that refuses to make sense. Three departments want different things. The deadline moved up. Again. Someone on the team just quit. This is when the chess masters speak loudest. Not because chess and management are

The executive sits in his corner office, staring at a chessboard on his phone. His assistant walks by and sees him studying a position from last night’s online game. She probably thinks he’s procrastinating. She doesn’t know he’s solving the exact problem that’s been plaguing the Q3 marketing campaign. This is the paradox of chess