Chess is a beautiful game, one that makes you think ahead in time and guess the moves of the opponent to gain an advantage and win a piece over.

Such is business, you predict markets, understand user needs and sentiments to build a product that can solve users’ problems.

Seems easy at first, but building businesses, or playing chess for that matter requires great decision-making skills to stay on top along with other skills we will learn through this essay.

Let’s take an example and understand how great businesses make decisions and how they stay on top of the food chain.

With the recent boom in Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft looks to be winning the market by positioning itself to capture the center stage and control the pieces in its arsenal with AI capabilities now available across it’s product suite.

Microsoft positioned itself right on the chess board to make the the most of its partnership with Open AI. Edge, Office 365 , Teams, Visual Studio, and GitHub now come with AI capabilities built-in to improve user productivity.

In hindsight, these decisions make a lot of sense, but can you imagine what might the discussion been like when Sayta and his team were decided on putting bets on the dark horse - Open AI? What made them interested in AI in the first place? Was it all planned? Were there just waiting for the right time to reveal their strategy unfold?

In chess you make incremental moves were the first rule it attack and build on the center, you then figure out your strategy from there but developing the center is key.

With Satya Nadella being appointed the CEO in 2014. Microsoft was not in it’s best shape culturally and had multiple failed launches with Lumia, Windows 8.1 and others.

Satya needed to provide this behemoth of a company with a reason to get back on innovating and leading like they did in the early days and to solve for that he focused on the center of it all - The people of Microsoft and it’s culture.

In his book, “Hit Refresh” he mentions how his early days of being appointed the CEO was just to align teams together and bring everyone in sync and build empathy towards their peers and users to build software that truly delivers values to Microsoft customers.

With the center pieces aligned and the intial part of the board developed he could now focus on defining the strategy and aligning teams to build for the users and for its culture.

It’s small chess moves like these that compound over time and do the trick to eventually make gains that give you and edge over the opponent.

In chess, it’s not always required to exchange pieces and move to the endgame just because you can, you can set the pace of the game by defending and attacking in different ways.

Microsft had multiple pieces on the board that they can use to beat their opponent’s. Satya goal now was to use these pieces effectively and bring them to their true potential. Starting of with cloud, which was a market dominated by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform.

To find it’s edge Microsoft introduced the Azure Active Directory tieing and made Azure Active Directoy the location for Micorsoft Office User Management. Microsoft then started collaborating with their customers and uniquely solving usecases for health-tech, real estate and other industries to make

The new refreshed Microsoft began from there on where he transformed the culture from within and made Microsoft to what it is today with its foray into acquisitions and product initiatives that generate great shareholder be it gaming, cloud computing or enterprise software for that matter. Satya’s unique leadership style of being a visionary and also being a great manager help him align internal teams together to build remarkable tooling which cohesively complement each other.

The art of playing chess and making better decisions than your opponent is similar to how great business take decisions that scale and gives them an edge. With chess, one needs to predict moves earlier that your opponent and position yourself to make the most of your opponent’s weakness.

With Satya’s ability to build a vision for the future and the unique style of operating the company, he can predict moves way longer in the future and make safe bets like the one he did with Artificial Intelligence.

Microsoft partnered with Open AI back in July 2019 which now allows Microsoft to use their technology and use it in their products.

This is how Microsoft is able to beat the market with its ability to look at the market and predict moves by aligning its pieces making for the best attack against the market and winning market share as a business while providing real value to the users.

The moves were decided well in advance of pursuing AI and when the time was right Microsoft started its attack on Google trying to make a dent in the already powerful king ruling the territory of search and Ads.