Corporate Strategy, Operational Excellence and the Value of Playing Bridge: An Interview with Ben Thompson

Ben has more than 25 years’ experience in strategy, growth and high-performance operating models in both consulting and executive roles. He has experience across a wide variety of industries, including information technology, financial services, private equity, healthcare, gambling, manufacturing, mining, engineering, logistics and education. He has lived and worked in Australia and the United States, with experience across South-East Asia and New Zealand.

Originally a mathematician, his early corporate roles were in software, creating the market-leading parking management system and becoming head of development at a dot com specialising in contact centre systems. After graduating top of his class with an MBA from Melbourne Business School, he joined the Boston Consulting Group. He then joined Tabcorp, where he was head of strategy, before heading back to consulting. He was previously a Senior Partner at Partners in Performance, an Australian-based boutique strategy and operations consulting firm that was acquired by Accenture. Ben is currently a Partner at GNG Partners in their Melbourne office.

He is a keen bridge player, holding the title of International Master, and is 1st Vice President (deputy chair) of the World Bridge Federation.

Q1. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your current interests.

Your intro covered me pretty well! I’m very Australian for a non-indigenous Australian (7 of my 8 great-grandparents were Australian) but I was born in Southern California; by the seaside in La Jolla – a beautiful name (an unusual spelling for “The Jewel” in Spanish) for a beautiful part of the world, and part of the reason I decided to teach myself Spanish as my New Year’s challenge a few years ago.

I love orchestral and chamber music, and Broadway musicals – I reckon my wife and I average a show every couple of weeks. My very favourite piece of music is the 2^nd movement of Beethoven’s 7^th Symphony – gut-wrenchingly emotional.

My latest side mini-project is recreating lost or destroyed art (it’s a team effort – I identify the tragically lost piece, and someone with actual artistic skill does the recreation). I got into it when I read about one of van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings being destroyed in a bombing raid in Japan in WW2. Van Gogh is the world’s favourite artist (fun fact, the one artist children and adults agree is amazing is van Gogh) so I decided it needed to be recreated. I even had the two-tone orange frame recreated, as close as we could get to Vincent’s original intention. I have it hanging in my office, opposite the entrance, and I start every workday with a smile.

Q2. You have a background in mathematics and your father was a maths professor. What drew you to maths and how has it informed the way you approach problems or view the world?

First of all, I’m super-impressed that you spelled maths like an Aussie for me (instead of math)!

I like solving problems and I really like knowing for sure that I have in fact solved one. Maths is great for that. My dad retired early so he could spend more time doing more maths, my mum was a maths teacher, and I come from a very academic family, so I grew up around a lot of people who talked science over dinner like they were discussing the latest with the Kardashians.

And we have some fun family stories about maths. For example, my (great great) uncle George figured out a key theorem in random walks because he kept on bumping into one of his students out for a walk in a park with his fiancée. Uncle George was so embarrassed he raced home and proved that it was actually inevitable he would bump into them again and again – but if they’d been flying instead of walking, it would have been suspect. The maths saying goes “A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever”.

Good problem-solving in maths is rigorous and imaginative at the same time. Once you understand the problem (and that’s actually the most important part), there are lots of ways to solve a problem – brute force, case-by-case, guess (ok make a hypothesis and test it), analogy, etc. But mostly they start with imagining where you want to get to, and working your way backwards. That idea of starting at the end is very useful in bridge, in business, in science, in the arts – and in life.

Q3. For those unfamiliar with the consulting world, please describe the type of work you do. In what types of situations will you be brought in and what kinds of problems will you be engaged to address?

My daughter used to ask me that question once a year. I would explain, and she would wander away shaking her head, wondering how we had enough money to eat. So, if what I say next doesn’t sound like a real job, you’re in good company.

Basically, I get to solve complex organizational problems every day, in areas like strategy, operational excellence, pricing, transformation, competitive positioning … a lot of problems! They’re often complex because there’s a difficult analytical element together with some complicated human and organizational dynamics.

These problems can sound deceptively simple, like “what should I charge for a chocolate ice cream?”

But analytically, that can involve quite advanced mathematical modelling of what competitors might do, and the impact my pricing might have on my OTHER products, and how price, competition, and market share might evolve over time.

And then on the human dimension, the person in charge of the strawberry yoghurt division is going to be very unhappy if in search of the greater corporate good, I grow our chocolate ice cream business like crazy but take a solid cut out of the yoghurt business. The politics of this sort of problem can be deeply buried and extremely hard to navigate.

The price you and I pay for our dessert is a way more complicated problem than it sounds!

So consulting is not just maths, and it’s not just people. It’s both, and it’s about surfacing the underlying problem, being clear on what’s clear, and helping people work through how to achieve the right outcome for the organization while respecting the people involved and making sure human issues get surfaced and considered.

On any given project, I’ll spend as much time talking with client executives and working through the human considerations as I do on the technical problem. At the end of the day, how you communicate the solution is more important than the solution itself (there are many ways to bake a cake; my favourite is almond honey cake just in case anyone feels a baking urge coming on) and how you communicate includes how you involve people as you go.

Q4. Consulting has become a dirty word in some circles, and in parts of Asia there isn’t a culture of working with, or paying for, management or strategy consultants. In your view, where does this negative reputation come from, and how do you advise clients to get the most out of utilizing external consultants?

There are a lot of different sorts of consultants, and with a huge range of skill, knowledge and … sadly … integrity. You see this in every kind of professional services – lawyers, bankers, doctors, accountants, photographers, you name it. Some require a professional qualification, some don’t, but in my experience there’s no profession that is inherently more or less virtuous than any other. People are people – we all make mistakes, and some people regardless of any other characteristic lack ethics.

In any professional service, trust is paramount. It’s really hard for the layperson to tell if the advice or service they’re receiving is actually excellent. It’s kind of like buying a used car – it’s hard to tell if it’s a lemon until you’ve already bought it and driven it away. If the wheel falls off and you crash into a tree, you can be pretty confident it was a lemon, but even then you might just have been unlucky.

The unfortunate outcome for good consultants (both good at providing good advice, and good at being a good person) – and good people in any professional service – is that we all get tarred with the lemon brush. People tend to remember the bad far more than the good – which is a good survival trait when you’re wondering if the rustling in the bush is a tiger or a tiger moth – but it’s something people who provide professional services all have to live with.

My advice on working with good consultants is to work with them. Sounds trite but let me explain. Be as open as you can on what issues you’re seeing and experiencing, and what you do and don’t know. Help them meet relevant people and find relevant data. Talk about interim findings with them and don’t be afraid to disagree – you know your business better than almost any consultant, and good consultants actively want you to bring your deep knowledge of the organization and the context to the table.

When you’re working with a good consultant, you may find it exhausting. I really do mean exhausting. Consultants have some common characteristics – we tend to be very curious and very determined. We ask a lot of questions, we dig deep, we push hard. We try to respect that you have a day job and good consultants will give you the heads up on this, but it can still be tiring.

There’s a joke about consultants borrowing your watch to tell you the time. It’s even funny! But a good consultant also gives you back a better, cooler watch that is much more reliable, accurate and useful. It might take some effort to use it properly, but a good consultant will do their best to make sure that you do, and will check back in with you to make sure that you are. You don’t have to use all the advice, but at the end of a good project with a good consultant, it should feel like you were an integral part of making the watch better.

Q5. What are some of the common issues you see when working with management teams? Are problems typically of a strategic nature or more often related to operational failings? What are some of the positive and negative qualities or traits you’ve observed in senior managers and how are these linked to success or failure?

There’s understandably a lot of research on the characteristics of successful executives. What I look for is: future orientation, bias for (organised) action, clear communication, effective inclusion, “natural” collaboration, and “no excuses” accountability – which is consistent with the research and my experience.

I think management failures tend to be much more group-based than individual based – that thing about getting the right people on the bus, and the importance of team dynamics. The great executive builds a diverse team and ensures everyone has not just the right to speak, but the obligation to speak.

Some common accidents include

Groupthink – the Bay of Pigs (1961 failed proxy invasion of Cuba) is a classic example, and it was enabled by JFK’s team not feeling able to speak up.

Paralysis by analysis – Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975 – and spent the next two decades trying to decide what to do. The competition launched theirs in 1990; Kodak didn’t launch until 1995 and went bankrupt in 2012.

Fear of failure – Nokia dominated the global mobile phone market, but refused to switch to Android when it was introduced because they feared losing control. Their operating system was inferior, and Nokia lost almost all of its market within a few years of Android’s launch.

In all of these examples, the central issues were known, and the reasoning for taking a more successful action was available, in the room – but failures in leadership team dynamics led to catastrophic outcomes. Unfortunately, entrenched group dysfunction is incredibly hard to get people to recognize, let alone address.

Q6. In an ideal world you would like to get paid on value delivered, but how does pricing in consulting work in practice? If the problem is poorly defined at the onset and you only figure it out during the engagement, how do you structure your projects and quantify the value delivered?

There are many ways to bake the pricing cake! I use daily rates, fixed fees and success fees (various types) individually and in combination on a regular basis. It all depends on the context, and how much I think my team (it’s never just me) can directly influence not just our client’s plan but also the execution and the outcome.

For example, suppose you think you’re spending too much on external goods and services – stuff you use up (like ink for the office printer) rather than stuff that goes into your product/service (like screws holding your product together).

Say you want to get a well-founded estimate of how much and where to look for savings. Most serious consulting firms have or can get relevant data, and many (this is harder) can use that data to construct reasonable benchmarks in your context of what you should be spending on various things (e.g. printing, machine parts, rent) relative to revenue. If that’s all you need, then I’ll charge day rates or a fixed fee.

However, if you also need implementation support – actually getting the potential savings – then I’m willing to consider putting some fees at risk via a success fee. In this case, the success part of the fee would usually be a percentage of savings realized. But success fees have a lot of issues, for example: how much control the consultant really has, agreeing the baseline spend, agreeing the actual savings achieved. Perhaps a surprising issue is saving too much. You don’t want the consultant (or the direct client) to be motivated to save too much (because it may hurt the organisation’s operations) so ideally the client and the consultant would agree a cap on the success fee ahead of time.

Q7. Forecasting is an important part of your job but extremely challenging for reasons including the rapid pace of technology change, geopolitics, business cycles, etc. How do you think about forecasts and how do you manage client expectations? Do you back test your forecasts to try and assess their accuracy?

Forecasting is important – if you’re going to throw a dart at a dartboard, it’s helpful to have some idea where the dartboard is. But more important is understanding the key drivers of change in the context – what they are, how significant they are, and how quickly they act. That understanding will help my client identify key moments and adjust their direction. My forecast will be wrong, but how I developed the forecast will continue to help my client.

Let’s take a physical example. Wind fills the sails and gets the boat moving but it takes a while to get up to full speed because friction (the hull vs the water) holds the boat’s acceleration back. It’s dead easy to build a model allowing for wind at various speeds from the usual direction, and the impact of friction – and this model will be very accurate if the only thing that happens is wind arriving roughly as modelled. But if the wind is shifting around, or from a very different direction, my model may not stack up. If the waves are unusually high, maybe once in a century high, friction is not the only negative force to worry about.

My dad taught me that all models are wrong, but some are useful. In business forecasting, I happily channel my dad. A forecasting model will never be 100% right, but good ones guide you on what to look for, and when to start thinking about new drivers – and give you the opportunity to think about how to react to changes before you have to react. So, I don’t spend much effort on testing forecast numbers, but I do check in with my clients and ask if they’re still using the forecast structure, process, and model.

Q8. What are your thoughts on AI and how has it impacted your work as a consultant? You started a PhD in AI a long time ago so I’m curious to know how your views have changed since those early days.

I think AI and Humans have a fundamental winning flaw in common – most of our processing/thinking is in a complicated approximation engine, so both AI and Humans make all sorts of “dumb” errors. Different errors but still errors. On the other hand, these heuristic approaches mean we both reach reasonable answers reasonably efficiently – and so can identify/take practical action in time to be effective.

A friend of mine did his Masters 30ish years ago on whether the great improvements in AI would come from software (algorithms) or hardware. His conclusion was that horsepower would win, and he has been proven right. The central algorithm underlying most AI is still regression, which was a winner 200ish years ago for Legendre and Gauss because they could quickly calculate reasonable approximations with paper and pencil. I have friends who have expended significant effort exploring vastly different central algorithms with some success, but ultimately enormous computing power running regression under the hood is the dominant AI form today.

But what is the limit of processing power and how far will that take AI? Chinese AI companies today are producing strong engines with much less processing power and cost than the AI first movers, so my guess is the pace of improvement will stay up for quite a while because the required rate of hardware investment growth is being mitigated by sophisticated heuristics on the software side.

In my work as a consultant, AI is an essential but dangerous tool. I can lay out an ask to a junior consultant, discuss the approach, and get a coherent self-checked result. I’ll do QA and we’ll iterate the work, but I can trust that the consultant has got their facts straight, checked their own work, etc. I’ll get a more polished answer from AI, but because it’s currently a big, fast approximation engine lacking judgment we get (unintentionally) well-hidden errors at a solid rate – so my QA load is substantially up, and the number of iterations needed to get a strong result is also substantially up.

For applications where I don’t need a complete, or a completely accurate, answer, AI is great. Where I need bulletproof answers, AI still has a way to go.

Q9. You’ve worked in the start-up space as a founder and employee. What did you learn from these experiences and what do people fail to appreciate about start-up life?

One thing I learned the hard way is that a huge majority of startups fail. Walter Huston in The Treasure of The Sierra Madre gives a great explanation of why gold is expensive – basically, the money the one person who finds gold gets also has to pay for the labour of the 999 people who didn’t. Startups are like prospecting for gold; it’s a huge amount of work with very little reward for potentially a long time. The ones that work generate huge rewards, the ones that fail … don’t.

In the course of various gambling adventures (including startups and poker) I’ve found the most expensive thing you can do is come second. So, my general advice is “don’t come second”. In poker, fold early when the odds are poor. In startups, don’t keep beating yourself up with a loser; either mix up what you do (“pivot”) or call time and do something else. In consulting, don’t bid for projects you’re unlikely to win.

Also, everyone should try a startup once. When they’re young and don’t have much to lose. Nothing teaches you better than failure (that you carefully process afterwards). So, if you’re ambitious or just curious, give yourself that opportunity and that experience and that learning. Who knows, you might turn out to be the next Steve Jobs and have to learn how to deal with being a billionaire instead.

Q10. A sector you’ve analyzed is electric vehicles (EV). How has the global shift to EVs, and the dominant position of Chinese automakers and battery companies, impacted Australia and what is the approach you feel industry and the government should be taking? As a nation without domestic automakers, how Australia responds is a useful analogue for countries around the world who need to balance the benefits to consumers with the potential negative impact on existing industries.

That’s a big question!

The start and end of the Australian car manufacturing industry are both fundamentally about cost.

Ford established its first Australian plant in 1925, when high transport costs (and times) made it much better to manufacture onshore. The 3 multinationals with local manufacturing operations (Ford, Toyota and General Motors) closed their plants in 2016-17 – because transport costs had become relatively low, local costs had become relatively high, the local plants were subscale, and government support had been substantially wound back.

The government support had been in place for decades, to protect local jobs (both directly and indirectly in supply industries). Economically, that was problematic but the substantial job losses if the majors exited rapidly would have been painful and there was an argument that vehicle manufacture was a strategic, sovereign capability that Australia should retain.

As I mentioned above, forecasting a number is a mug’s game (that’s Australian slang for an activity that’s unlikely to be successful). However, the core logic of how and why the industry was created, then artificially extended, then closed applies just as well in thinking about the shift to EVs and also increasing automation today.

The global shift to EVs, somewhat accelerated by recent conflicts and their impact on oil prices, is certainly evident in Australia. At the start of 2026, about 12% of Australian new car sales were EVs. 6 months later it had doubled. Plug-in hybrid share jumped from 7% to 10%.

Obviously running costs, and concern about future running costs were significant drivers. Another is that China has a very competitive EV manufacturing environment, which has brought many very attractively priced EVs to the Australian market. And Australian charger networks are moving beyond “enough” to “everywhere”.

Unlike 20 years ago, Australia has no car manufacturing industry to protect, so the Australian market has shown a pretty pure response to several big tailwinds driving a shift to new, cheaper technology (with other benefits). Once that equation has shifted, it rarely shifts back. This is good for the Australian economy, and good strategically for Australia (and China, which has more like 65% EV share of new cars) because we are rapidly becoming much less reliant on imported fuel.

But let’s return to sovereign capability for a moment. Car manufacture is not a huge concern on this front because cars last a long time, and they’re reasonably repairable. But EVs are also computers which now produce a lot of data. So, the real sovereign concern is privacy (for citizen data) and potentially confidentiality (for certain national data). That’s primarily about the data being onshore only with (mostly) guaranteed availability, and protected by national laws, oversight mechanisms and technology from undesirable access by our own citizens, our own government – and the rest of the world. In my view, all governments should be paddling hard to build tough policies and enforcement regimes that keep data in-country, and well protected.

And let me reiterate by going back to cost. Automation has been part of making onshore manufacture cost-competitive again, including by eliminating wage cost differentials and production quality as issues. Other contributing factors include favourable legislation (e.g. subsidies), unfavourable regulation (e.g. tariffs), supply chain issues (e.g. ocean freight cost and schedule uncertainty).

An interesting large-economy example is Intel re-shoring semiconductor manufacturing in the USA (with the benefit of US government direct investment and CHIPS Act grants) and focusing its EU efforts on expanding capacity in Ireland (using Irish government incentives and various EU Chips Act benefits) as the EU works to ensure it has onshore capability in critical areas.

Automation also makes some customization achievable cost-effectively. This makes at least some onshore manufacture cost-competitive, and is especially relevant in smaller economies where the need to customise for local laws and/or conditions can justify somewhat higher production costs.

One in-train example in Australia is the demonstration lithium processing plant at Pilgangoora. It ticks a lot of boxes – niche application, highly automated, uses renewable energy and of sovereign interest. Many countries are trying to have onshore mining and production of critical minerals and rare earth minerals for various reasons. The Australian government is consciously supporting this, with several processing facilities operational, several more coming online this year, and many more at various stages of development.

Sovereign capability is important, but it has to be cost-sensible to really stack up.

Q11. Closely linked to EVs is the energy sector, which is also facing disruption from Chinese providers, especially in solar and wind, which are the fastest growing renewables sectors in Australia. What are the industrial, policy and climate issues at play and who will be the winners and losers in the coming years?

Also a big question!

Australia has taken a fairly modular approach to building renewable energy infrastructure. Sometimes it’s been reactive, but it’s working. I think it’s the right approach because you can do something now and get some improvement at a digestible cost … and over time you magically get a big cumulative improvement that is remarkably resilient.

A dose of reality first though – coal-fired power plants have produced the majority of our electricity historically, and today it’s still the single biggest source (about 42%). It’s declining fairly rapidly, bearing in mind you can’t just switch a big coal plant off.

The fastest rising source of generation over the last 5 years has been solar PV, particularly rooftop solar. 43% of Australian homes now have rooftop solar, and on some days for a few hours at a time (despite being only about 13% of total generation), rooftop solar meets all electricity demand in several major cities. Surprisingly, that’s actually dangerous! An oversupply of solar electricity into the grid can destabilise it, and lead to blackouts.

The rapid rise of rooftop solar was driven partly by opportunity (we have a lot of sun) and partly by government subsidy (recognizing the long-run benefit of encouraging modular infrastructure that could be up and running quickly, rather than the gigantic problematic decade-long projects that have been the preferred mode in the past).

The Australian government recognized the grid stability issue and introduced another subsidy program last year to encourage home batteries. The effect has been extraordinary. In 12 months from the middle of 2025, Australia installed more home batteries than the entire installed home battery fleet in the USA (with 12x our population). Wholesale electricity prices are down nearly 50% and smoother across the day. And the pressure on grid stability has abated.

Even so, it’s worth remembering that we and the world still have a long way to go to “fully” renewable electricity. And 100% renewable may not be ideal anyway – the cost of the “last mile” can be huge, and some diverse energy sources can help mitigate risks. For example, batteries discharge quickly so during extended supply problems you need an alternative as backup.

Overall, I think the discussion points about renewable vs fossil energy have changed dramatically in the last few years. The climate issues really really matter, but renewables now clearly win on cost (globally). Batteries substantially solve for when the sun shines and the wind blows. So just like in the car manufacturing story, the cost equation has shifted and it’s very unlikely to shift back. And that’s actually all you need. Fossil-based energy production has a big installed base to run down, but new investment will predominantly go to renewables.

At some point, the sovereign capability question will rise to the surface on manufacturing solar panels (where China completely dominates at the moment) and wind towers (where China has a small majority of the market) but these are long-lived modular assets so from a governmental point of view, I expect the felt urgency will be low for quite a while.

Q12. Shifting gears, you’re a long-time bridge player and continue to play in tournaments around the world. Please give a quick explanation of the rules and tell us how you got into the game.

My brother and I got into bridge because our mum told us to. Ordered might be closer. I think I was 20 and Dave was 18. Our excellent plan for the summer was beer, beaches, cricket and hopefully female company. Mum thought at least 3 of those were terrible ideas (she liked cricket) so bridge it was. We spent the rest of the summer playing bridge, still both play, and still play together fairly regularly.

One of the challenges in bridge is that it takes more explanation today than it did when Harold Stirling Vanderbilt invented it on a cruise 100 years ago. At that time everyone played card games, and would have been familiar with most if not all of the key concepts in bridge. That’s not so true today.

Ok, I’ve been dodging the rules explanation but here we go. I have a bookcase filled with books on bridge, and … relax. I’m shooting for a very high-level, fast run through of key features rather than a summary of all the expert knowledge sitting on my bookcase!

Bridge is a trick-taking card game for 4 players in 2 partnerships with a trump suit and an auction phase. I’ll explain what all that means.

The partnership idea is that you and I work together as partners to defeat the other partnership. In a regular deck of 52 cards there are 4 suits, with the 13 cards in each suit running (in bridge) from a low of 2 to a high of Ace. A trick is 4 cards – one card from each player, played clockwise around the table, with the highest card winning BUT everyone has to play a card of the same suit as the 1^st card on the trick if they can (“follow suit”) AND only trumps or cards in the same suit as the 1^st card can win the trick. Any trump beats any other card. The auction phase is where the 2 partnerships have a structured argument (like a haiku poetry slam but less elegant) to decide what the trump suit is and how many tricks each side has to take to win that hand (a complete run through from dealing the cards to the last trick being won is called a hand).

Q13. What do you like about bridge and how do you feel it is relevant to your work, and also to your life in general?

Bridge is a hidden information game – I can’t see any of your cards until you play them. Chess is a perfect information game – you know where every piece is all the time. The hidden information part of bridge is carefully balanced and makes it incredibly rich.

I love bridge because it’s technical and social – you need to have a grip on the odds, but you also need to work with your partner and against the other partnership. It’s co-operative and competitive at the same time. It’s mathematical and psychological at the same time.

I’m still learning new things in bridge, and I don’t expect that to stop because the way people play the game is always changing; there are always new ideas to confront and deal with.

Bridge has a surprising number of ideas that are transferable to business, consulting and even life. I talked earlier about the idea of solving problems by starting at the end and working back. That is very important in bridge – you solve a lot of hands that way. But you also solve hands by breaking the problem down into pieces, and then proceeding by solving the pieces you know how to solve – which is also how you solve some maths problems.

Both of those ideas (“start at the end and work back” and “solve the pieces you can solve”) apply equally well in business and in consulting.

The idea that bridge is co-operative and competitive at the same time also transfers. In bridge, sometimes you even have to compete with your partner to get the right result for your partnership. That’s usually when you have a clearer picture of the hidden information than your partner – co-operation doesn’t mean total agreement or blind obedience.

Amongst reasonably experienced players, most hands end in a negotiated agreement about the result – and similarly even tough competitors in business can be very reasonable and even quite collegial about matters where the end result is clear.

I have several important life lessons from bridge

– Everyone has a solid error rate (definitely including me). Even in world championship finals, I see great bridge, but also very simple errors. And these are very smart people who work hard at bridge and play almost every day. Now think about other fields of human endeavour, and allow for lack of interest, lack of experience, lack of practice, etc. Actually, maybe better not to think about it. I try to be understanding and positive when errors happen around me, and I try to be forgiving of myself when I’m the numpty.

– Kipling famously called success and failure imposters. Bridge pushes us to deal gracefully with both those imposters, including undeserved success and unlucky failure. That’s especially valuable for young players, and a great life skill.

To massively oversimplify – balance, collaboration and sound problem – solving are strong drivers of success in bridge, business and life.

Q14. Bridge is a very popular game in China and Deng Xiaoping was an avid player. How is bridge taught and played in China and what has been your experience participating in tournaments in the country?

China is a stellar example of how to teach bridge and its many lessons to children. Deng Xiaoping by all accounts was a very good bridge player. I have several friends who played against him, and several other members of the Politburo of the time. I am sure that Deng Xiaoping’s and his colleagues’ deeply strategic mindset – thinking long-term into the future and then figuring out how to get there – both helped them as bridge players, and was helped by their bridge playing.

The Chinese Contract Bridge Association (CCBA) is actually part of the Chinese government, under the All-China Sports Federation. Li Tieying (李铁映), when he was Minister in charge of the State Education Commission in the early 1990s, and recognizing the benefits of bridge to young people both educationally and socially, was instrumental in establishing bridge education in schools. Today, bridge is taught in many schools, and the CCBA supports programs on university campuses too.

Over the years, the CCBA has discovered and applied several important principles in teaching children.

– One is that children (and their parents) need to feel a sense of achievement and progression. So, the CCBA’s school program has a 12 level ranking system based on achieving understanding rather than performance. For example, the first 3 levels are effectively tests where the student demonstrates their understanding of bridge principles on simplified hands.

– Another is that playing cards and taking tricks is way more accessible and way more fun than listening to a boring lecture. The beginner lessons aim to get the kids playing cards “immediately” (less than 5 minutes, preferably faster). This works for adults too!

What has been the outcome? In 2017, I was playing in the World Championships in Lyon, France and walking to the venue one morning when I heard a huge babble of excited voices. That was 3 busloads of Chinese schoolchildren waving the Chinese flag and getting ready to play in the Youth categories. Everyone stopped and smiled. This year, the Youth World Championship was in Hefei, China – and China could have supplied enough good players to fill every seat in the tournament.

China broke through for its first world medal in 1996 (a silver in the Women’s world championship) and now sits 5^th on the overall medal tally. It shows us all the power of continual improvement, focus, and taking the long view.

Q15. Please share any favorite books, publications, blogs, podcasts or other resources that readers could use to improve their understanding of business transformation, corporate strategy, technology, mathematics, bridge or other related topics.

The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I return to it every few years and it’s great every time. Most recently, I lingered on a beautifully drawn moment that shows us our greatest triumphs are often unknown and unappreciated. My take – glory is a mirage; focus on doing what you do as well as you can, and everything else will be what it will be.

Co-opetition by Brandenburger and Nalebuff. I rarely read business books – almost all of them are basically one slide expanded out to book size. I used to skim the ones people kept talking about to extract the slide; now I just ask AI to summarise. But this one hits on an interesting topic with a lot more depth than usual.

The Bridge Bum by Alan Sontag. I read this classic bridge book as a kid, before I knew how to play bridge. I was fascinated by the human story, and how he approached both human and technical problems. I met him years later and he is exactly as full-on and flat-out as he comes across as in the book.

How to Solve It by George Polya (yes, uncle George). As a maths book, it sold like a popular novel. In my completely unbiased opinion, there is no better book on problem-solving.

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