When Troy Anderson arrived at Japan’s professional Go academy, where the world’s top players are schooled in the 4,000-year-old Asian game of stones, he thought he would have “this Kung Fu experience. I figured I would have to shave my head, wear a robe and take a vow of silence.”
What Anderson, a 6-foot-7 former offensive tackle for Stanford, did not expect was a school full of Nintendo-playing 9-year-olds who, despite his years of study, beat him at every game.
Legend says Go was invented by a Chinese emperor to help him teach his son to think strategically. A few millennia later, its primary home is Japan, where students at the Nihon Ki-In spend years perfecting their ability to capture territory on the game board, using black or white stones placed on a grid of 361 squares.
Anderson came to Go when a torn rotator cuff kept him cooped up in Soto his sophomore year. By his senior year, he had joined Stanford’s Go Club, sold his car to pay for lessons with the top amateur player in the United States (then working as a waiter at Su Hong in Menlo Park) and advanced to the rank of 5-dan, the Go equivalent of a fifth-degree black belt in karate. Another teacher told Anderson that he was good enough to enroll at the Nihon Ki-In, a rare honor for a Westerner. After earning his BA in anthropology and coterming in linguistics, he packed his bags for Tokyo.
Anderson, who now manages online development for the Fannie Mae Foundation in Bethesda, Md., earned an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in 1998. He combined his diverse interests in writing The Way of Go: 8 Ancient Strategy Secrets for Business and Life. Published in August by Free Press, the book is “a taxonomy of strategy. The way you’re introduced to Go’s proverbs and principles is like the way you see stars when you’re a young kid . . . you don’t realize they’re organized in constellations. This book is an attempt to put constellations around all these strategies that seem disconnected.”
Anderson organizes chapters into yin-and-yang pairs of strategies (such as reverse/forward and owe/save) with anecdotes that illustrate Go’s everyday utility. The ’80s cola wars, for example, can be viewed in terms of global/local strategy—should a wise executive spend money lining up Michael Jackson for an ad campaign or securing a monopoly on football stadium vending machines?
Anderson had some experience cataloguing similar patterns while at Stanford. A member of the Coquille tribe from the Pacific Northwest, he wrote a grammar of its lost language, Miluk, for his master’s thesis. He had a tape recording made by an anthropology fieldworker. When he played it for his grandmother, she recognized the voice—“That’s my mother!”—and Andersen learned that his great-grandmother was one of Miluk’s last speakers.
- CHANEY RANKIN, '00
