cover image THE WAY OF GO: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Success in Business and Life

THE WAY OF GO: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Success in Business and Life

Troy Anderson, . . Free Press, $23 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-7432-5814-2

Anderson, a consultant and managing director of Knowledge Initiatives at the Fannie Mae Foundation, is an accomplished player of Go—an ancient and popular Japanese game gaining fans around the world. Requiring strategic moves like chess, the game is more complex and can teach players how to handle situations in business and life, Anderson argues; "Most strategies resource allocation decisions are—at their roots—classic Go strategy problems," he writes. Experienced players will have less difficulty than novices handling key problems such as when to expand into a competitor's territory, how to allocate scarce resources and how to create strategies in a time of rapid change because of their knowledge of Go. Anderson is an adept writer and conveys his enthusiasm for the game, particularly when he recalls devoting an inordinate amount of time to it during his college days. He arrives in Tokyo without even a hotel room but simply the names of a few players and an eagerness to learn from the masters of Go. Anderson does offer some real business scenarios to support his thesis. However, readers unfamiliar with Go may find the book tedious; without an understanding of the game's strategies, they're unlikely to be persuaded that the game's lessons are critical to business success. Agent, Rafe Sagalyn. (Aug.)