HU dean finds chess, business make a smart match
By MATTHEW BOWERS, The Virginian-Pilot © February 27, 2007
HAMPTON – Sid Howard Credle, dean of Hampton University’s business school, pulled chess boards and boxes of playing pieces from a classroom cabinet.
“You know how to set them up? You remember?” he asked the half-dozen or so students in sweatshirts and jeans. “White will go first. And you’ll use the Bird’s Opening.”
Pawn to F4. An attack from the side, rather than down the middle. Chatter faded, replaced by the clicks of moving pieces and groans from gambits gone wrong. Ten minutes into the class, Credle doffed his suit jacket and cracked a window.
Chess is more than fun to first-year students in Hampton’s five-year MBA program. It’s part of the curriculum. A third of the course Critical Analysis and Strategy is devoted to learning and playing it.
After experimenting with chess in business administration classes for more than a decade, Credle formally incorporated it in 2000 into the new MBA program, whose graduates finish with both bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
The game is a way to teach critical thinking and strategic skills in a dynamic environment.
Just as in, well, the business world.
“Think and move” is the slogan for the program’s 230 students.
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I should have gotten my MBA at that school. It would have been an easy A.
I have an MBA from Babson. I could teach a combination of Chess applied to business thinking and decision making. I have most of my life practicing that. LOL.
Glad to see someone is smart enough to apply chess. So much of the business decisions are similar to chess. However, business also requires ethics. Over the board technically ethics do not come into play. Except of course in not cheating. But I mean there are sort of no non ethical but legal moves.
In business one can move legally but it might still not be ethical.
In chess I guess all legal moves are ethical.
Great story Susan. You are really on top of the news. I dont know how you do it. I do it by coming here. LOL.
I have the same story on my blog too, but I noticed that you flipped the original image in the story so that the board is oriented correctly. I left it as a puzzle about the image to my (admittedly few) readers.