7 Signs You’re Playing the Corporate Mid-Game (And Don’t Even Know It)

This article was originally shared on LinkedIn Pulse and can be found at:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/7-signs-youre-playing-corporate-mid-game-dont-even-know-james-agnew/

If you’ve ever studied chess, you quickly discover that there is a game within the game. Three in fact! The Opening, The Mid-Game, and the Endgame. These strategic phases—and how the astute player moves through them—correlates with the path organizations take to face new challenges and grow. Rudolf Spielmann, an Austrian-Jewish chess player and chess writer, identified how to play each of the games: “Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” 

The Opening (Play Like a Book)

We structure books in predictable ways following grammatical, layout, and language rules. In chess, the first phase of the game amounts to specific moves (words), sequences (paragraphs), or groups of moves (pages). Most chess openings involve 10 or so structured openings and have names like “The Berlin Defense,” “The Sicilian Defense,” and “The Queen’s Gambit.” Many Grand Masters use just a half dozen or so openings when they play despite the millions of possible opening moves. The goals at this stage are to develop pieces, protect the king, and control the center. 

Organizations in the start-up phase follow predetermined “moves” as well. They include organizing the company, creating a product or service, and testing the market for viability. Like in chess, successful start-ups advance in a book-like way: focused, structured, linear, rule-governed, and narrow in concern. Here the goal of the organization is to not only exist but to survive.

The Mid-Game (Play Like a Magician)

In chess, the mid-game happens between the opening and the endgame. It’s not always easy to determine when the game enters this phase, but the player’s focus is now on defending, attacking, and gaining material and positional advantage. The mid-game is also the most challenging, the most unscripted, and the most forgiving if you stumble or stall early. 

A similar transition happens in business. Moving from surviving to thriving is no easy task as organizations struggle to gain traction and momentum. They are typically investing “in” the business with new hires, processes, and the expansion of sales and marketing. The magician metaphor makes sense as the mid-game requires systems, structures, and tools combined with human instinct, emotion, and charisma. The unscripted challenge of the middle forces the right blend of pieces on the board integrated with human intuition and talent. 

The Endgame (Play Like a Machine)

The endgame in chess is the final phase and moves of the game. Here the machine metaphor works as computers (the ultimate chess machine) have already solved all possible endgames with up to seven pieces on the board. The endgame is about a few, predictable, and repeatable moves that inch step by step toward victory. 

The successful endgame of a business might be a sale to a private equity firm, a sale or merger with a strategic partner, or successful public offering. They follow rigorous scientific and analytical plans that in part, calculate the evaluations founders would be happy to exit with. Here the book has been closed, the magician has left the stage, and the economic calculus and final moves can be handled with machine-like precision. 

Winning at the Mid-Game

To win at chess—as in business—requires recognizing the three definitive “games within the game” and responding with different talent, strategies, and execution methods. Playing the wrong game will lead to failure (or at the very least stalled performance). As the great world chess champion Alexander Alekhine remarked: “To win against me, you must beat me three times: in the opening, the middle game and the endgame.” The marketplace requires you to beat it three ways as well.

Surviving the mid-game is fraught with peril, however. Roughly 3 out of 4 businesses never transition. Half of business startups fail by year five and only 30% are still in existence by year ten. Of the roughly 5.68 million U.S. businesses that employ people, roughly 75% of them stay at 10 employees or fewer, generating only a million dollars or less in annual revenue. 

According to CB Insights, roughly 25% of startups fail because they had a product/market fit problem. Another 25% fail because of business model issues. The remaining 50% of startups fail for execution reasons (“having the wrong team” is cited as the top cause). Even if one assumes the first two categories (product/market fit and faulty business model) are fatal flaws, half of the execution failures might have been avoided. Defending, advancing, and gaining material and positional advantage is what the mid-game is all about. Or in other words, successful execution.

Why is it so hard for business to jump to the next level and survive the opening game? There are three primary reasons:

1. Timing. The founders have a hard time delineating the time when the opening phase is complete. Working in the trenches day to day, to survive, and build something shields them from the objectivity of testing where the business stands and what is needed to move things forward.
2. Skills. The skills that moved the founders through a successful opening are not the same required for a successful mid-game. Founders may have a hard time letting go of the practices and thought processes that worked well for them at the start.
3. Motivation. The founding team may not be motivated (or understand the need) to adopt a new set of operating principles in their business. This may be further complicated by adherence to a formulaic and outdated performance management system that minimizes human instinct and talent (too much focus on the deck of cards and not enough on the magician). Some founders understand these principles academically but lack a systematic way to implement them into a running business.

7 Signs Your Company Might Be in the Mid-Game

While there are no hard and fast rules for when an organization reaches the mid-game, there are some signs to look for:

Sign 1: The end is clearer than the next step. You have a plan for your “endgame” and you scoff at the notion of your company being a “lifestyle business.” But some of your initial assumptions are coming under assault and the way forward isn’t so clear. 

Sign 2: Stable but stuck. You have revenue running and people are busy; the lean days are over. You may even be taking some distributions and bonuses, but you have an interest in raising money for growth and/or you just closed your “A” or “B” round of funding.

Sign 3: “Do it all” thinking. You fear if you don’t do most things yourself, your company will perform worse than it has to this point. You catch yourself saying, “It’s easier for me to do it than train someone else.”

Sign 4: Aversion to new challenges and risks. You are feeling as if you can no longer control all the aspects of your business and fear changing what is “working” in trying to respond. After all, it took blood, sweat, and tears to get here and you are finally making money, so why risk it now? 

Sign 5: Burn out. You are feeling frazzled and stressed; you are busier now than when you first started and it is negatively impacting your life. You can’t imagine adding one more thing to your plate like planning, training, reporting, or goal setting. There are simply too many urgencies to deal with at the moment.

Sign 6: Too many hats for too few heads. Your founding team can’t do all the work anymore and you are hiring outside “experts” to fill the gap. But they often have preferences for different systems, processes, and planning and now you have to get everyone on the same page.

Sign 7: Culture matters. You are starting to make the connection between culture and productivity but how to plan and build it beyond the working styles of the founders is a bit of a mystery. With so much to do it is tempting to put building a meaningful culture on the back shelf and hope everything just works itself out. 

The unsettling requirement of the middle is that it takes a little “magic” to win. However, even the most astonishing magical feats come down to a combination of tools, processes, and human skill. Your book-like scripts won’t serve you here, neither will a machine-like march to inevitability. The middle is chaotic, ever-changing, open-ended, and ripe with both pitfalls and opportunities. As in chess, it is in the middle where the game is ultimately won or lost. 

Blaast is a Performing Engineering company combining humanness and tech to help companies implement proven mid-game strategies to grow and mature companies for a successful endgame win.

If you’ve ever studied chess, you quickly discover that there is a game within the game. Three in fact! The Opening, The Mid-Game, and the Endgame. These strategic phases—and how the astute player moves through them—correlates with the path organizations take to face new challenges and grow. Rudolf Spielmann, an Austrian-Jewish chess player and chess writer, identified how to play each of the games: “Play the opening like a book, the middle game like a magician, and the endgame like a machine.” 

The Opening (Play Like a Book)

We structure books in predictable ways following grammatical, layout, and language rules. In chess, the first phase of the game amounts to specific moves (words), sequences (paragraphs), or groups of moves (pages). Most chess openings involve 10 or so structured openings and have names like “The Berlin Defense,” “The Sicilian Defense,” and “The Queen’s Gambit.” Many Grand Masters use just a half dozen or so openings when they play despite the millions of possible opening moves. The goals at this stage are to develop pieces, protect the king, and control the center. 

Organizations in the start-up phase follow predetermined “moves” as well. They include organizing the company, creating a product or service, and testing the market for viability. Like in chess, successful start-ups advance in a book-like way: focused, structured, linear, rule-governed, and narrow in concern. Here the goal of the organization is to not only exist but to survive.

The Mid-Game (Play Like a Magician)

In chess, the mid-game happens between the opening and the endgame. It’s not always easy to determine when the game enters this phase, but the player’s focus is now on defending, attacking, and gaining material and positional advantage. The mid-game is also the most challenging, the most unscripted, and the most forgiving if you stumble or stall early. 

A similar transition happens in business. Moving from surviving to thriving is no easy task as organizations struggle to gain traction and momentum. They are typically investing “in” the business with new hires, processes, and the expansion of sales and marketing. The magician metaphor makes sense as the mid-game requires systems, structures, and tools combined with human instinct, emotion, and charisma. The unscripted challenge of the middle forces the right blend of pieces on the board integrated with human intuition and talent. 

The Endgame (Play Like a Machine)

The endgame in chess is the final phase and moves of the game. Here the machine metaphor works as computers (the ultimate chess machine) have already solved all possible endgames with up to seven pieces on the board. The endgame is about a few, predictable, and repeatable moves that inch step by step toward victory. 

The successful endgame of a business might be a sale to a private equity firm, a sale or merger with a strategic partner, or successful public offering. They follow rigorous scientific and analytical plans that in part, calculate the evaluations founders would be happy to exit with. Here the book has been closed, the magician has left the stage, and the economic calculus and final moves can be handled with machine-like precision. 

Winning at the Mid-Game

To win at chess—as in business—requires recognizing the three definitive “games within the game” and responding with different talent, strategies, and execution methods. Playing the wrong game will lead to failure (or at the very least stalled performance). As the great world chess champion Alexander Alekhine remarked: “To win against me, you must beat me three times: in the opening, the middle game and the endgame.” The marketplace requires you to beat it three ways as well.

Surviving the mid-game is fraught with peril, however. Roughly 3 out of 4 businesses never transition. Half of business startups fail by year five and only 30% are still in existence by year ten. Of the roughly 5.68 million U.S. businesses that employ people, roughly 75% of them stay at 10 employees or fewer, generating only a million dollars or less in annual revenue. 

According to CB Insights, roughly 25% of startups fail because they had a product/market fit problem. Another 25% fail because of business model issues. The remaining 50% of startups fail for execution reasons (“having the wrong team” is cited as the top cause). Even if one assumes the first two categories (product/market fit and faulty business model) are fatal flaws, half of the execution failures might have been avoided. Defending, advancing, and gaining material and positional advantage is what the mid-game is all about. Or in other words, successful execution.

Why is it so hard for business to jump to the next level and survive the opening game? There are three primary reasons:

1. Timing. The founders have a hard time delineating the time when the opening phase is complete. Working in the trenches day to day, to survive, and build something shields them from the objectivity of testing where the business stands and what is needed to move things forward.
2. Skills. The skills that moved the founders through a successful opening are not the same required for a successful mid-game. Founders may have a hard time letting go of the practices and thought processes that worked well for them at the start.
3. Motivation. The founding team may not be motivated (or understand the need) to adopt a new set of operating principles in their business. This may be further complicated by adherence to a formulaic and outdated performance management system that minimizes human instinct and talent (too much focus on the deck of cards and not enough on the magician). Some founders understand these principles academically but lack a systematic way to implement them into a running business.

7 Signs Your Company Might Be in the Mid-Game

While there are no hard and fast rules for when an organization reaches the mid-game, there are some signs to look for:

Sign 1: The end is clearer than the next step. You have a plan for your “endgame” and you scoff at the notion of your company being a “lifestyle business.” But some of your initial assumptions are coming under assault and the way forward isn’t so clear. 

Sign 2: Stable but stuck. You have revenue running and people are busy; the lean days are over. You may even be taking some distributions and bonuses, but you have an interest in raising money for growth and/or you just closed your “A” or “B” round of funding.

Sign 3: “Do it all” thinking. You fear if you don’t do most things yourself, your company will perform worse than it has to this point. You catch yourself saying, “It’s easier for me to do it than train someone else.”

Sign 4: Aversion to new challenges and risks. You are feeling as if you can no longer control all the aspects of your business and fear changing what is “working” in trying to respond. After all, it took blood, sweat, and tears to get here and you are finally making money, so why risk it now? 

Sign 5: Burn out. You are feeling frazzled and stressed; you are busier now than when you first started and it is negatively impacting your life. You can’t imagine adding one more thing to your plate like planning, training, reporting, or goal setting. There are simply too many urgencies to deal with at the moment.

Sign 6: Too many hats for too few heads. Your founding team can’t do all the work anymore and you are hiring outside “experts” to fill the gap. But they often have preferences for different systems, processes, and planning and now you have to get everyone on the same page.

Sign 7: Culture matters. You are starting to make the connection between culture and productivity but how to plan and build it beyond the working styles of the founders is a bit of a mystery. With so much to do it is tempting to put building a meaningful culture on the back shelf and hope everything just works itself out. 

The unsettling requirement of the middle is that it takes a little “magic” to win. However, even the most astonishing magical feats come down to a combination of tools, processes, and human skill. Your book-like scripts won’t serve you here, neither will a machine-like march to inevitability. The middle is chaotic, ever-changing, open-ended, and ripe with both pitfalls and opportunities. As in chess, it is in the middle where the game is ultimately won or lost. 

Blaast is a Performing Engineering company combining humanness and tech to help companies implement proven mid-game strategies to grow and mature companies for a successful endgame win.