Book review on Financial Times Business Life page

How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves – From the Board to the Boardroom
By Garry Kasparov

Amazon US; Amazon UK

The notion that business is like war is not new. Sun Tzu’s Art of War pops up on many a corporate leader’s bookshelf, with its gnomic lessons on how to defeat an enemy.

Garry Kasparov, former world chess champion, has a similar rationale in this book. His point is that a game of battle, strategy and tactics aimed at defeating a single opponent can teach us about business and politics.

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Every now and then, a business professor breaks cover to criticise Masters in Business Administration programmes in US universities. The latest is Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School, whose criticisms are noted this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

George Anders describes it as "unthinkable" for professors to talk down MBA programmes but actually it happens every so often. Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Montreal is a regular scourge.

Khurana’s argument in his new book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands is that business schools have gone from trying to educate a future generation of leaders to giving their students sufficient grounding in corporate finance for them to rush into banks, hedge funds and private equity firms.

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Various people are unhappy about the way that GlaxoSmithKline is conducting the race to take over from Jean-Pierre Garnier.

The company is holding an open competition to succeed him among Chris Viehbacher, head of its US pharmaceuticals arm, David Stoute, president of pharmaceutical operations and Andrew Witty, president of European pharmaceuticals.

It is reminiscent of the bake-off among Jeff Immelt, Bob Nardelli and Jim McNerney to succeed Jack Welch as chairman and chief executive of General Electric in 2001. That tussle ended with Mr Immelt getting the job and Mr Nardelli and Mr McNerney in effect having to leave.

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