How I used the chess to win a bet in the office?

"A player who is surprised is half beaten" (Proverb)

   At this time I worked in the Strategic  marketing department of a large company Mobile.

    The situation came just after launching a new range of price plans that showed some aggressiveness within the schemes that existed in the market these days. In the "launch day", our director called us for a meeting and invited us to think about the answers that could give our main competitor.

   In the round of the interventions, my comrades talked about classical schemes managing  the price per minute, and the amounts of Mb or minutes to be included in the offer, respecting fringes morning-afternoon-evening-weekend

   When I had to speak, I thought as I do during a game of chess ... putting myself in the place of my opponent, trying to think in terms of what would be the best for him, trying to take advance avoiding his best options

   Using this scheme I thought: Right now we have a larger market share (which in chess could be assimilated with an advantage) Our offer is focused to maintain the same way consolidating the advantage, if I was "my opponent" try to break this dynamic, so I should not make a move conservatively to keep the situation (fight scheme price within the same ideas), try to find counterplay to see if they can find weakness in the position of the side that has the advantage ... this requires aggressive action, surprise, not without risks, but in the end you have to catch up.
 

  My answer, following this reasoning chess, was that a family would fare spread the "promoted" hours in different bands, ie, if the "traditional" was to provide 6-8 hours of morning / afternoon / evening would let something like take 3 morning and 3 in the afternoon .... I thought it could be,  without an analysis of returns, something he had not offered by anyone on the market until this time and could attract attention, and, above all, could baffle the competition .... By doing this, they'd get counterplay with which, taking risks, could return to the fight for customers.

   The reaction of all my colleagues was "you have no idea", "how it shows you do not know anything about pricing", "the business case would never profitable" "absurd"

   To settle the matter, I proposed to make a little bet to see who was closer to the type of response. All of them accepted.

   A month later, the business proposal from the competitor was based on the distribution of hours in 2 bands of 4 hours, with their restrictions, but gave the client a flexibility that no one else offered that time ..... I took a few coffees with money from the bet

    The other consequence was that competition began to get more customers, getting cut our market share, which led us to "copy" your offer ... using chess terms, we lost the lead and our lead was in danger

   In this anecdotal situation  I used schemes any chess player, no matter his level, has internalized:

• Situation analysis (what is on the market and what's not)
• DO NOT underestimate the opponent (always think about what would be your best guess, and it is assumed that you will make the best choice for him)
• The principle that when you have an advantage you have to play trying to limit the opponent's counterplay capacity, and is at a disadvantage when you have to play aggressively to try to generate weaknesses in the opposite
• NO complacency in a better position,  because all we play games that have been taking advantage and we've  lost due to "relax a moment" or by an badly-timed error letting recover our rival.

The original post was published in Spanish in my collaboration with the website Chesslive.com