Routine without risk will stagnate: Viswanathan Anand

Five-time world champion and India’s first Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand Image: Madhu Kapparath

Five-time world champion and India’s first Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand shares his strategies and tactics to stay ahead of the curve

Your next business meeting could mirror the 64 squares on a chess board. How do you achieve a checkmate? “With a plan,” said five-time world champion and India’s first Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand. “When you play against someone, you always go with a base plan, which is a sequence of events you expect to happen.”

Among the processes that you do to get ready is to assess the things that can go wrong. “Most of these will be unknown, so you’ll have to imagine them. But, from your past experiences, you’ll know what has gone wrong, and you eliminate them by planning ahead,” said Anand during his keynote address at the 2022 Forbes India Leadership Awards.  

To plan is to visualise scenarios and examine each in detail. There could, of course, be a dream scenario, where all the pieces of a puzzle fall right into their place. “But you have to have a balance of optimistic and realistic scenarios,” said Anand.

“Realistic, unfortunately, is that you’ll probably miss the target and you won’t get the position you want,” he added. “I try to think that, in every situation that I find myself in, do I have enough to cope? Is there anything unexpected that can happen to me? Not too many scenarios turn up in those situations, but I see to it that I would bail out in each one so that I can get back to the base line, which is no plan at all and where I haven’t been ambushed.”